Friends Only

[daniel_marlow]

Should be sleeping instead of spamming with my phone (and don't worry, I'll go to my weigh-in even though I haven't slept in a day and a half) but there's the threat of nightmares and my brain already feels wired and gross.

I keep wondering how much of me...the parts that people like...is all just because of what happened to me when I was a kid. I guess I'm nice and I try to be understanding because I know what pain is and I want to try to make other people experience as little pain as possible. But what if I didn't know? Would I care? Does that make those parts less real because they only came about through experience? Does that mean this new Danny who will form through all this bullshit will be less real or more real or- or is it all just pointless?

I got hit in the face tonight, by some girl who just flipped out with no warning. She didn't mean to hit me, I was just in her way, between her and the door she felt she needed to get to. She's okay now, but when she hit me I felt like I needed to do anything I could for her to avoid getting hit again. I found myself following her until one of the nurses snapped me out of it. The girl hit me and somehow that made me hers? And just...that is so messed up. I am so messed up.

So yeah. Wired and gross. But hey, I have something to ramble about in therapy tomorrow. Which I will be going to. Because I am a good boy who follows rules and doesn't get transferred anywhere or a tube shoved in his face.

Comments

[lightningseed.insanejournal.com]

Oh Danny, you don't even know how often I think about this.

If I'd followed the trajectory I was on when I was eleven? Youngest girl in a house full of boys (one missing sister), Las Vegas, not rich, over-excited, hungry for any scrap of attention I got, total belief in a happy ending. If the thing happened that forced me to London, who would I be?

Or twelve and just in London, totally repressing all parental betrayal as hard as I possibly could by being as bright and sunny as possible. I started keeping a journal back then Danny and I am not the same person. Not at all. If I'd never met the Sisterhood, who would I be?

Or thirteen when I met the Sisterhood and thought I had found people who got me, thought I found people who I could do important things with, exciting, clever, vital girls. If Gloria hadn't... who would I be then?

We are the bits left over after the world has had its way with us. I don't think there's any way we can be anything else. And we can speculate on the other versions of us, the ones that didn't survive life in the same way we survived it, but we can never ever be them, so they are not real, not at all.

You can speculate about a Danny who doesn't care about people as much as you care, but he isn't real. He's had an easier life than you, probably, but that life never existed. He doesn't exist.

There's only you, as you are, right now. Empathy, kindness and messed up habits of survival. That's what real.

At least, that's how I see it. That's what makes sense to me, when ideas are rolling around in my head, after dark.