With thanks to the supporting actors and actresses

You should know that I’m crazy. Really certified crazy. My thought patterns make perfect logical sense to me most of the time, but it won’t make sense to you. When one of those moments come around don’t push yourself to the end of your chair, toss food at the screen or yell about my stupidity. Actually go ahead and do all of that because I would never stop myself doing that to you. But hey, I’m many manners of crazy.

Right now I don’t really understand why anyone needs friends. I mean I have friends, i make them and lose them, often in swift succession. But right now it feels like the only reason I have them is just to have someone confirm my place in the world and justify my right to be in public. Does anyone else feel like they shouldn’t be in public alone unless they’re on the way to meet someone? You can’t go to the museum, or the cinema, or shopping alone... except if you’re a mother for some reason. Why do I need that armour? Why do I dance down a street pointing at the person walking next to me as if to say “Look look, this person accepted me therefore I’m normal.”

Around the same time that I was watching Gossip Girl (I totally read the books first) I became a centre of buzzing eager manipulation and control. School was a war and my friends were mercenaries and not soldiers. And Gods the drama you can painstakingly brush layer by layer onto the canvas of your life when you have half a mind to! I could have described every colour and texture and why it was placed there in agonising detail because it all just seemed so important, so vital. I’ve learned that the motives of the people around me were ones I decided were inside them. The lack of loyalty and extent of manipulation inside them was all a reflection of me. It turns out that no one else was smart enough to give a damn. Somehow finding that out freed me from giving them such a damn in turn.

I think I’ve always tried to use friends to replace my lack of a sister. But when was it decided that I needed one? I feel like it didn’t start until people kept asking me if I felt lonely being alone. And believe me I’ve felt that cavernous, echoing gap inside me and I have curled into a ball and locked my hands and mouth tight for fear that I would scream and claw to fill in it in. Whoever gave me the fucking memo that made me recognise loneliness, I would like to return it to you. Thank you for giving the hopeless inevitably failing desire to try to find someone who understands me and inspires me and somehow grounds me all at once. It is impossible, and in trying to do so everyone I know is eventually a disappointment.

I’m beginning to think friendships are based on a need for attention. As I said before it may be that another person’s acceptance justifies your place in the world. Or someone’s need for your existence gives you a reason to live. All human beings, I won’t believe that it’s just me, are inconsistent. When we have what we want we no longer need it. And so for me life is an endless cycle. My need to find someone and my hatred of them once I do. And then returns the gap inside me that I endlessly suck the life from the other people to fill. 

This song is on replay

Poeple talk to strangers, they tell strangers intimate things they would never tell their loved ones. Loving someone makes you vulnerable, it creates an expectation of kindness and understanding. And most often the parts of you that need most understanding are the ones that you don’t understand or accept for yourself. You need more from them than you need from yourself and more often than not they only know about you what they are willing to learn.

So let me tell you stranger, what I wouldn’t tell them tonight.

Being in this house, with my family, is the lonliest I ever feel. It’s like being slapped in the face, stabbed in the chest and lashed in the back with how alone and different and strange I feel. All I’ve been taught is that friends come and go and family is eternal. But I learnt the truth, friend come and go and family are never there. In this house I am exactly the same as I was in student digs but it’s worse because all you ever fucking hear is how this is my eternal life.

I will marry my father, become my mother and my kids will torture me exactly how I did my own parents.

Why in all that is in every universe and every dimension would I want that? I may as well not exist to my father. I don’t think we’ve ever had an unnecessary or impractical conversation. The man provides the money and even that I receive through the mother. We can go months without talking and it’s not like either of us are any less off by it. Who’s daddy’s little girl?

My older brother is just the most fucked up thing. I can’t even begin to explain it accept to say it’s confusing, and torturous and frankly he is the one person in my life apart who I wish I’d never met.

I obsessively care about my little one, mostly in reaction to the older one I think. I have to watch him become my older one and it kills me a little more every day.

And cliché of clichés, the mother. My mother gets more crazy religious every day. My only choice in life is have her mind or have my own. That’s not a decision, I tried being what she wanted and it tears me up. I ripped myself apart trying to be hers. I still blame my mother for that which should not be talked about and my biggest fear in life is that what happened to me could happen to a daughter of mine and my being too blind to see it. Or that my daughter could hate me as much as I hate her. She chose her religion over me.

These people cause me the most hatred and fear in my life, I’m happier without them. Having a family is the most enduring pain in my life. I don’t see how having my husband or kids is going to suddenly be better.

Yet somehow having this conversation instead of making things clearer makes me want to end all this here.

That elusive, expressive, all-knowing voice

The “v” key on my keyboard is broken. This whole thing is going to be a bitch to write.

To be an avid bookworm is based on the premise that there is a never ending well of knowledge to draw from. And every book has a perfect and distinctive voice. Whenever I read I am drowned in a beautiful timbre, a soothing eloquent murmur. “This is my soul. And now you will see beyond your little island, across the sea into my soul on the far shore.”

Yet, at the close of every book, once I have been buffeted in a whirlwind of emotion and I’m finally left in my worn lonely single bed I wonder why I am not the same.

My “voice” is crazy, easily distracted and lazy as all fuck. And it’s most predominant characteristic is that it is just as confused as I am. If allowed to verbalise, instead of being restrained by endless editing, my voice would be a cyclic repetitive refrain of anger and fear that would occasionally stumble into a loop of paranoia.

All I can do is hope that I’m not completely crazy and that somewhere, in what is essentially word vomit, is a single pure bright thread of sense.

To describe me in a single word is to say: confused, contrary, crazy, contradictory, impulsive, manipulative, angry, paranoid, sensitive, really fucking sensitive, shameless, suffocating in shame, socially awkward, great at chit chat, defective obsessive possessive compulsive, like 30% bi and who knows what else because I certainly don’t.

My major life events were giving my mother heart attack during labour, what should not voiced allowed, that which I am ashamed to discuss aloud, being sent to and removed from boarding school, running away from home and the subsequent debauchery and somehow, despite stumbling catastrophically over and again, getting into a surprisingly brilliant uni.

Many would argue otherwise, but we are eternally influenced by our surroundings. They have taught me that I must always have a gang of more than one, that I must be as classy as a white girl and as ballsy as a black girl and as smart as an asian one well as as unassuming, tumour eyed, skeleton skinny and eternally legged as an anime character. I must simultaneously reject advances from EvERYONE  and get freaky every night. Never be publically drunk and get wasted every night and turn up to uni hungover and also never be unprofessional. Be a feminist but also be a Muslim feminist. Be an evolutionist and scientist but obviously the one true religion, Islam, makes complete and perfect scientific sense. Islam is an old repressive sexist religion and in comparison Western/Eastern/socialist society has all the shit worked out. All the people who share blood with me must automatically be my best friends and also the people I’m most likely to murder. And at twelve, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty one, thirty, thirty five, forty, sixty, ninety, one hundred and eleven I must have, and never will have, all the answers.

So tell me; how the fuck can anyone survive this, let alone force anyone else to endure this with their “voice”?