loose stuffing

lack of individualism, stuffed animals, and forgiveness

There’s a time— usually about every two to three weeks at least, for me— where there is a soul-deep dissatisfaction with everything. Nothing helps. Not watching movies, not writing, not reading or scrolling through social media or talking to a friend or sewing or drawing or listening to music. It’s like your entire being is a message in a bottle, completely stopped. Any way for this strange, violent energy to be expelled has been eliminated, and so there you are. Or at least here I am, sitting on my bed, doing absolutely fuck all besides brimming with discontent.

It’s my least favorite feeling in the world. It’s a snarling, dirty tangle in my chest, and as far as my emotions go, I prefer them tidy and clean cut. It’s so easy to box whatever I’m feeling into something easy— sadness or joy or nostalgia or whatever it could be squeezes into a neat label, like it’s wine tasting. Apathy, mixed with mild annoyance and a hint of fondness. Pairs great with siblings and the family members I can stand.

Running theory on that (because I have a running theory on everything) is that I am an individual person, which is strangely terrifying.

Cutting out all my middle school friends might have left me with a grand total of 1.5 friends, which has stayed relatively consistent throughout my life, but I tell myself it was worth it constantly. I’m a good enough liar that I believe it.

I can pretend it’s not there. I can go about my day and look at the tree outside my window and appreciate it and eat food that loves me and sleep when I feel tired and leave the house to buy a single orange because I want oranges, but that does not stop the fact that I do all of this because I only like myself as a gear in the world. I’ve said it before— fingers on the hands of God, an unescapable mycelium of organisms interacting with other organisms. We’re all a gear in the machine of a habitat. And I cannot accept myself as an individual outside of that mycelium.

Running theory: because I’ve been writing so long, everything I see and ingest is a metaphor for the greater narrative of the world. A spider on the back of my hand is a representation of my sentimentality. I dye my hair again, a manifestation of my desire for change and inability to have it, neatly made so I can wear it and everyone can see it like a neon sign: THIS GIRL CAN’T HANDLE THE IDEA OF STAYING STILL! Of course, my seeing in metaphors is a metaphor for a desperate, painful desire for more than the life I have right now. It’s also because seeing things for how they are hurts me. Sure, it could be a prayer to the rituals of the everday situations. Mostly, though, it’s just a glazed teapot.

Another thing that I‘ve noticed— I use the idea of ‘you’, the reader, as a device. I did it in the first paragraph. Go and read it again, if you don’t remember it. You can see it in everything else I’ve posted. I describe a feeling that I know to be at least somewhat relatable (the clean cut feelings, again) using ‘you’ to put you in my shoes, and then I draw you into wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. Almost every metaphor I use, and that’s a lot of metaphors, have the word ‘you’ in them, because I can’t handle the idea of just being a singular person.

And I know that I’m not. I know I have my family and 1.5 friends and my mutuals and my classmates. I know that almost everything I do is relatable even if it’s strange, just because I’m a human and we’re all connected in ways that we can’t even imagine. But part of that truth is that I am a person, with the free will to make my own choices, on a rock, in outer space. I have to make my own decisions, of which there are many, because I cannot continue to live without choosing to. And that’s more terrifying than anything I could conjure up, more terrifying than the horror story that I won a contest with, more terrifying than the scariest movie ever. You have to choose to live.

What happens when you don’t want to chose? That’s a choice in itself. And survival, most of the time, branches off of the main path of doing fuck all— I can sit here on my laptop for eternity, or I can get up and make myself dinner. Main path versus survival path. Once again, life requires action, and my parents make my meals because I’m a partially disabled child that lives at home and they’re both feeding everyone else in the house and taking care of me, because that’s what parents are supposed to do. So the food gets brought to me, and I don’t have to stop sitting on my laptop, and I don’t have to choose to do anything that’s completely out of my way.

One day, I’m going to have to choose over and over again. It’s getting sooner. I can feel the metaphorical breath of change on my neck. Of course the breath is metaphorical, because the future doesn’t exist as a tangible being. I do, though. And when I put my hand by my face, I can feel my breath.

I’m no saint. I’m no martyr. I’m not going to be sacrificed, I’m not going to be part of the 27 club and a reminder to the future generations, I cannot transcend my physical body because I am a fucking body. That’s it. I’m a body with thoughts that come from a body part.

So why these thoughts. Why now. Well, running fucking theory: I have nowhere left to run, no other story to throw myself into. I need to be critical of something, and when there’s nothing else to do, I self-flagellate.

No saint. No god. No martyr. It’s not the flagellation of Christ, it’s a teenage girl ripping into herself in front of an audience, because she won’t call herself out on her own bullshit. You won’t either, reader, because you don’t know me that well, but you’ll read this anyways, either because you’re my friend or because I posted the link and you clicked on it, or maybe because you also self-flagellate and you’re just like me, in the sense that you’re so fucking lonely sometimes that you’re desperate for connection in any way you can get it, including relatability. Including watching me self-flagellate. Hey, our welts match, so glad we connected! What a fucking reward system. I twist the knife in, you say, hey, I also twist to the left, are we both right handed? Oh my gosh, that’s so fun!

I said “at least I’m not doing this alone”, but that’s a lie. I am doing this alone. I could choose not to post this. I have a normal journal that nobody will ever see which I could be writing this in. And I am alone, right now. There’s nobody in this room but me. I’d love to say that my laptop and stuffed animals counted, but they don’t. Is this where I’ve gotten to, hoping that inanimate objects are alive so I can spend time with something that’s not either dead or was never alive?

(I can’t handle the idea of a stuffed animal being alive, which is probably why The Velveteen Rabbit wrecks me so badly. They’ve seen every possible side of me and loved me despite it all, and I gave dozens of them away in a fit of self-flagellation when I was 13, wanting to look cool for the people that would never come to my house and definitely not into my bedroom. I changed my duvet cover, I read books that made me look smart and cool and interesting and placed them perfectly onto my bookshelves, and most of the other stuffed animals I couldn’t give away I shoved into the crawlspace behind my closet so they were out of sight. All because I wanted to be easily digestible for the friends that never invited me to their birthday parties, just in case they wanted to try digesting me. Which they never did. And if stuffed animals are alive, then I sold out the truest friends I’ll ever have for something that not only would never happen, but never existed in the first place.

My sibling came down today for my dad’s birthday and asked for a stuffed animal they had given to me. I dug through the crawlspace for fifteen minutes before I remembered how I had donated them, telling myself to grow up and to not be such a baby. I look back at her, this 13 year old, so sure of her maturity, and hope— somewhere in the deepest, most secret and evil place in me— that when I self flagellate, I’m hitting her too. There’s only a single bin of them left— about 20 stuffed animals, aside from the ones on my bed. It made me so sick to think about it that I had to lie on the bathroom floor for fifteen minutes before I could move without crying. When I could get up, I put all of them on my bed. I haven’t felt okay ever since.

Running theory: I never actually grew up, did I.)

So there I am. In my room, alone, in a pile of stuffed animals, too hollowed out to cry and too sad to be able to do anything but cry. As much of a child as I was when I was 13. Impenetrably lonely. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s pathetic, really, and not in some brandable way where I could call myself a failgirl or a loser in a half-sly voice and people will agree in their own half-sly voices, like we’re all in on some big cosmic joke.

I think the joke is us. We’re fucking jokes. Who do we think we are?

I don’t think I’m anyone, which, running theory, is part of the problem. I’ve changed myself a hundred thousand times. I’ve been butch, I’ve been femme, I’ve had short hair and long hair and every color imaginable. I’ve been a coffee drinker and a coffee hater, I’ve been sick and I’ve been perfectly healthy, I’ve lived on a yacht and off of food stamps, I’ve gone unnoticed and I’ve had the literal paparazzi take pictures of me and my friend after a party. I’ve been someone who likes parties. I’ve been extroverted, and I’ve gone through months where I only leave the house once a week, tops. For Christ’s sake, I’ve even been a Marvel fan before. There is nobody I haven’t been. I’ve sanded myself down until there’s only a smooth pebble of ‘self’. Someone who likes the world and what it contains, not one more than the other. Someone who is content.

And then beside that little pebble, latched onto it like a tumor, is this ugly tangle of dissatisfaction that I’m sitting in now. I couldn’t sand it off. I cannot escape human nature, no matter how hard I try to transcend it. I fucking hate it in here, and I don’t completely hate anything on principle, but I do hate this.

It’s so terrible. It’s just so terrible. I’ve done everything I can to be good. I was social, I was pretty, I prayed and when that didn’t work I did drugs and stopped talking to God out loud. I’ve known and I’ve forgotten and I’ve forgiven, and I still can’t catch a break. The only thing I haven’t been is stupid. Do you think God will save you for being stupid? Because I don’t.

Consider this a prayer. Consider this the outstretched hand of someone on a life raft. I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story but I never knew it would just be keeping a diary. I know that it’s just human nature to constantly become and unbecome, but it makes me feel like a ghost. A temporal echo. My ten year old self looks out from my seventeen year old eyes in horror.

I used to want to be a designer, did you know? I had a brand name and everything, and made clothes for dolls out of anything I could find. What happened to her? What happened to my ambition and passion? Desire is a ghost too, and we are haunting the same body. My ten year old self looks at me in the mirror and calls me a coward and my thirteen year old self says she relates and my seven year old self doesn’t even recognize me. There are people that love who I am but I am not one of them, and those people do not know me. The issue isn’t that I don’t know who I am right now, running theory. The issue is that I know exactly who I am, and she’s no good. She’s not good at being someone who wants to choose survival, and she’s not a good gear in the big machine of the world.

I lie to myself again and call it an affirmation: I am content with my place as a gear in the mechanics of the world. I do not feel like I know what the machine is for, or that there is a great evil about to strike the machine that I must warn the other gears about. Running theory, again: I am a paranoid gear that theorizes about everything to try to anticipate an impossible future, something that will never happen.

Running theory that nothing will happen. Running theory that I will be fine. Running theory that the world might be indifferent but the people are not. Running theory that I cannot escape the future. Running theory why am I running. Running theory what is that, behind me? Slowing theory oh. Stopped theory hello again I say to the mirror. Theory that I am looking at myself but different and older in the mirror. Theory that I am not horrified. Theory that I can love her. Theory that maybe it’s okay.

Right. I’m going to be okay. Not theoretically because this is real, you know? This is real. I’ve come to the conclusion that my life is real, which is a horrible and shocking thing to think when you’re really just waiting for Godot instead of living. It’s strange how sometimes you can know things without understanding them, but I’m older and understand now. I understand it now.

I understand you now, I say to the mirror.

The mirror says nothing. It doesn’t need to. I already know.