But is there… maybe even the tiniest chance that what I did wrong was nothing?

Is it possible that…maybe you recognized yourself as abusive and cut me off to save me from you?

…

Because if that’s the case, then I don’t care. I love you. Your presence in my life would be so much less excruciating than your absence from it.

…

But I’m always wrong, and this probably sounds horribly narcissistic.

With the combined power of three different procedures, I can legitimately remove her from my memory. It seems so surreal, I almost can’t breathe.

The prep work is very painful, but it’s all for the best, I think…

There’s still time to think it over. But I guess it’s probably the best thing for both of us, if nothing I do or say can ever change either of our hearts. She’ll still want me gone. And I’ll still resist, unless I scrub it all out of my head.

So in a convoluted way, I guess we’ll both sort of get what we want.

I wrote this. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I’m beginning my removal of she-who-must-not-be-named from my memory in a few ways I thought would be helpful. To begin, I’ve replaced her face in all of my pictures with AI generated faces. That way it’s a completely different face, without having to rip off a real person’s face.

Secondly, I’ve changed the names of her and her family members for purposes of journaling and blogging, etc. So you’ll hear me refer to Ellie, and sometimes her mom, Marlene, and maybe even her sister, Julia. She may have a daughter named Marla. This will help me forget their names, as well. Names and faces.

I’m also attempting to recall as much as possible about our time together so that I can let it surface and be fresh in my brain for easy removal. Although it’s been extremely painful to do so.

Today, I saw my psychiatrist and she recommended something called EMDR, which is a therapy that uses eye movements to rewrite the parts of your brain that contain the things that are traumatic. Like recording over a cassette tape. Magic. I can’t wait for that. But in the mean time, I’m going to keep working on this. It’ll be helpful.

Today I’m going to touch on our relationship growing up and how it was damaging to me.

I met Ellie on my 11th birthday. We became fast friends, but Ellie’s mom was generally pretty mean. So over time, Ellie grew quite mean, too. She hurt me a lot, but always got away with it because even though Marlene was mean to her, she always defended her, no matter what she did.

My mom was mean also, but she was the opposite of Marlene. She was strict and expected more of me than I could ever be. Where Marlene was defensive of Ellie, my mom assumed I was the root of every problem. So I got in trouble for everything, even if I didn’t do it, or it wasn’t my fault. So I became the “problem child,” always getting up to something. Even if I got in fights simply to protect Ellie, I was wrong. “Troubled.” “Sick.”

There were reasons for all that I did, but they were constantly misunderstood and no one wanted to listen for the moment it would take to gain and understanding. Like the time Laura upset me, so I put all her stuff outside on the porch as a way of saying “get out, don’t come back.” I stuck a few safety pins in her dumb doll, which neither damaged, nor disfigured it in any way. But it apparently signified that I was “crazy” and “a danger to myself.” So the MPs came and wouldn’t let me go.

Ellie called during that time and surprisingly, they let me talk to her. But apparently her mom noticed the security cars and wanted to know “what kind of bullshit I was getting up to this time.” It was disheartening to hear that, and the MPs sensed my weakness and took that opportunity to tackle and handcuff me. By this point, I was sobbing. I felt so alone and defeated. No one was on my side, no one defended me. Laura called security because of some pins in a doll. Ellie called to find out for her mom what I was in trouble for this time. The officers wouldn’t listen to my side of the story and just… I felt more alone than I’d ever felt at the time.

It took all the energy I had left between sobs to feebly ask why everyone hated me. Officer Mustache said “No one hates you,” as insincerely as possible, and at least for him, he would come to show me time and again that he personally hated me. It was him that always seemed to show up to harass me and have me carted off over various things.

Moreover, he spread one-sided bullshit and misinformation about me until everyone on the base knew me as the crazy girl, the delinquent. Some kids torture animals and set buildings on fire and rape other kids and shit. I never did anything even close to those things. I got in fights protecting my best friend. I started cutting myself because I was hurting and no one was ever on my side. I drew pictures of people who hurt me getting fucked up and shit like that, but that was always just a way to relieve stress without actually hurting anyone. Everyone has thoughts like that. Just not everyone has the talent to draw pictures of those thoughts. So I guess, having talent was what made me unstable.

So, by the time I met my first long-term boyfriend, his dad, who was friends with Officer Mustache, had already gotten an earful of trash about me. So he didn’t like me from the beginning, and our relationship ended in shit because of that.

I protected Ellie from everyone, even Marleen when she stumbled in at 3AM in an angry drunken stupor and started lashing out at Ellie. I’m sure this didn’t earn me any points with Marlene, but I thought at least Ellie appreciated it. I thought she appreciated it when I begged my mom to the point of accepting several punishments just to get permission to let Ellie and Julia spend the night on many of the nights when Marlene was out drinking again. Because she usually was. I even waded through mud on Christmas night to spend it with Ellie who was alone with Julia, not having a Christmas. I thought she appreciated me at all.

But when it was me being ganged up on, Ellie always joined in. It hurt. But I forgave her because I knew she wasn’t as strong as me. There was a reason I always defended her. She couldn’t defend herself, and so I assumed that when she joined those harassing me, it was a way to protect herself from getting hurt with me.

But then in high school, she took up this weird behavior of publicly spurning me in front of her other friends, but then spending every private moment with me to the point that we practically lived together. She was a completely different person at school, and it was very damaging. But that’s just how she remained. After the hurricane drove us apart to distant parts of the country, things got worse, because now she had all the power of hiding behind a computer screen and pressing an unfriend button. Our friendship was reduced to a Facebook status

There were very, very few times when Ellie was truly kind to me… truly humane. And I’m sure you can guess that none of those times were outside closed doors.

One winter, she took some socks out of a gift bag intended for another friend because I didn’t have time to find socks before rushing to her house to be with her. And she didn’t want my feet to freeze.

On my sour-16 when my mom worked and I was still attempting to recover from Laura’s forceful removal from my life, Ellie was the only one who was there. She didn’t have a dollar bill to pin to my shirt, so she brought over a sandwich bag with a dollar’s worth of change inside. She also brought me some beautiful gifts she got when she used to live in Japan. We had a little tea ceremony together.

I loved her so much in spite of the way she treated me. I always loved her, I would’ve walked through hell for her, and maybe that’s why this hurts so much. Partly because she obviously would never do the same, and partly because some dipshitted part of me still loves her. That’s why it’s important for me to forget.

Sometime in our teenage years, we started doing weird role playing shit that another shitty friend taughtt me before disappearing into a cloud of smoke like everyone else. I adopted a male persona named Dante, and with that persona, Ellie really opened her heart up to receive my love. But as I would find out, it wasn’t me she loved. It was who I pretended to be. And soon, she became more demanding, spending more time with him than with me, and phasing me out entirely. I started to resent it.

And I tried to express this to her, but she always took things like this as an attack, and then she’d withhold affection from me. So finally, I realized I couldn’t deal with the only-friends-in-secret routine, or a relationship that required me to be someone else. And I ended up in a relationship with a trans boy named Laura/Arsen. At least we could be friends in public, even if we had to keep our relationship a secret. And she never asked me to be anyone but me.

That relationship was ruined by the military, with Mr. Fucking Mustache leading the angry mob. I never saw her again as she was forcibly removed from my life and forbidden to make contact with me. It was extremely traumatic. She was basically dead at that point. I couldn’t see or talk to her ever again, so yeah. It was on par with her being dead, and just as traumatic.

This is what I was feebly trying on my own with no help to recover from on my sweet sixteen, one of the few times Ellie showed genuine compassion for anything I was going through.

My life was turbulent for a long time. I got sent to Juvie three fucking times for not wanting to attend school while mentally fucked. I wasn’t eating unless it was sesame chicken from Mom & Pop’s, which it only was maybe once. I was sleeping as much as I could to escape the pain I was in. Of course my mom being who she was, never even considered that I had just sustained something excruciatingly traumatic, so it didn’t occur to her that maybe something like therapy might help.

My great grandmother died directly after the juvie fiasco, and I was scared to miss school for the funeral because I didn’t want to be thrown back in a goddamn cage again, because that was extra fucking trauma that I didn’t need on top of what I was already dealing with.

No one but my doctors have ever considered these events as traumatic. Because no one else in my life has ever had any goddamn empathy. Fuck, before I ever made it into psychiatric help, I never considered it myself. Because everyone else would just call me a big baby, or an attention whore, dramatic, whiney, too-sensitive, immature, needy, weak, needing to grow up… etc. I’ve been finding out within the last year just how many of the events in my life are considered traumatic. Things I wouldn’t have even thought of… like not having a steady home growing up, and moving around a lot, even being homeless at times. I was little, so I didn’t know that wasn’t how things were supposed to be. But I’ll delve into my traumas in a different entry. This one’s about Ellie and me.

As I was attempting to recover from losing Laura, getting locked up several times, and then my losing my great-grandma all in a wham-bam period of a couple months, Ellie was attending school and making a bunch of new friends- the new friends she started spurning me for in public. Probably filling them with misinformation about what a piece of shit I was an all this.

But behind closed doors, it was all us as we usually had been. And so one night, I explained why I chose Laura. And I confessed that I had always loved Ellie, and that should’ve been obvious as much as I let her jerk me around with her Dr. Jeckyll and Ms. Jackass routine, hurting me but never losing me in spite of it.

But I implored her to consider committing to a legitimate relationship with me as me, and after some pushback and hesitation, she agreed to at least consider it. And so, Ellie thought about it.

I’ve got a very vague memory— so vague I can’t be sure whether or not I dreamt it— of Ellie whispering to me that she wanted to try it. See, we’d been lying in bed all night talking, and it was so early in the morning that I was having a lot of trouble staying awake, even though I fought so hard to.

There is so much I can’t remember. If indeed it wasn’t a dream, then I can’t seem to recall any sort of normal relationship that followed. If there was, it was probably more of the same bullshit in the shadows, never in the light. I remember that I’d started writing little poems in my journal every morning in home room about how she was treating me each day. She hung out with her friends in the morning and treated me like I was invisible.

People started asking me “Why do you hang out with that bitch, Ellie?” And like a big dumb dog, ever loyal, I always stood up for her. I got April to give her another chance, and that was a dumb mistake because they’re still friends, apparently. I tried to get people to see the good in Ellie, but somehow she couldn’t help sharing embarrassing secrets about me, or spreading toxic rumors. People are still asking me now why I want an asshole back in my life.

I don’t have any excuse of justification. I want that hate back. That anger for all she’s done to me; the killer rage that fueled my fire and kept me as far as possible from her. I want to feel empowered without her. Not empty without her. What the hell happened?? What snapped in my brain and flipped that switch back to compassion and love? I can’t escape it no matter how many times she blocks me, or how much it hurt that she betrayed me so many times and never even told me about JJ.

I want to forget her so fucking bad. So… I need to look into EMDR. If I can scrub her out of my brain for good, maybe that will open up more of my brain to bring back some of the memories of Faron that have slipped away.

Why couldn’t it have been her instead? The world has enough sociopaths. It needs more warm-hearted, loving people with good minds, to save the planet and demonstrate what it means to be a good person.

That ratty skank tried to blame my poor baby for ruining our friendship when it was her own goddamn fault. I hope she thinks about this every night instead of sleeping. I hope she remembers that she used an innocent child as a scapegoat and then he fucking died. Let it sink in good and hard, bitch. You did that. How low can you go?

Hell and You- Amigo the Devil

Red Lipstick- Low Cut High Tops

When I was a kid, I was like Pocahontas. I went wherever the wind took me, and followed a path that my internal compass pointed me down. I went where I felt like and did what I wanted. I was a free spirit, in love with the earth. I never wore shoes, and I loved to dig in the dirt and find buried objects that time had forgotten. My home away from home was the forest, and I always loved losing myself in it. If there was a body of water nearby, all the better. A Leo born in the year of the dragon, I have always had a fire inside; a fire that burned with passion and strong will, but would also blaze furiously when anger boiled up.

Water grounded me and offered peace. It calmed my raging fire and kept my flames in check. So I was always happiest when sitting near a lake or a stream, and swimming was one of my favorite treats. Rainy weather cleansed my soul.

As fiery as I was inside, I was rarely angry, and when I was, it was either at myself when I couldn’t do something right, or at someone who hurt a person I loved, even if that someone was me, and so I’ve always struggled with guilt problems.

I can’t seem to unleash the hellfire on anyone (even if I was objectively justified), without feeling a strong wave of guilt afterwards.

This is one way that I’ve always been naive and easily hurt. I forgive too easily. I refrain from showing my pain if I feel that it would upset someone else, and it’s set me up for abuse in many situations.

Unfortunately for me, my disorder has only complicated things for me even more. I have an extremely difficult time being aware of how some of my behaviors are perceived, and I didn’t have very good role models growing up. I watched what I saw others do, and since I was lonely a lot, most of what I saw came from fiction. Movies, books, etc…

I watched my mother get abused. I watched her be promiscuous. I watched my grandmother drowning in depression, while generally being sweet to everyone, and I watched her comfort herself through food and distraction. I watched my grandfather create things constantly, burying himself in his art to a degree of negligence.

I would later learn a lot more about my family and why they were the way they were, but I’ll save that for another day.

When I got in trouble as a kid, I never really understood why the things I did were bad, unless they were dangerous. Danger was the only situation where the negative reactions to my behavior were explained.

“Don’t you dare run into the street like that again!”

“Why?”

“Because you could get hit by a car and die.”

Logical, okay. I won’t do that again.

But other behaviors I couldn’t understand if they were actually wrong, or if people were just telling me stuff to make me easier to deal with.

“Don’t go outside barefoot?”

“Why?”

“You’ll catch a cold.”

I’d find out later than this was a lie. As was “be good, or Santa won’t bring you any presents,” and many other things that adults tell children to get their way.

Then there were things like “don’t bounce on the bed,” or “stop clicking your tongue,” to which I’d usually get met with answers like “because I said so,” or “just stop.” It could have been useful to know that I was just annoying other people. Maybe not in such blunt terms, but a simple explanation. (Today, when my daughter is doing something that is overwhelming to me, I will ask her to stop. And if she wants to know why, I explain exactly why. Maybe mommy has a headache, or maybe mommy’s overwhelmed by too many sensory stressors. It works better than just telling her that my word is law.)

One of the worst things that has broken me most in my life was somehow causing irreparable damage to a 13-year friendship and being told that if I didn’t know what I did wrong, I wouldn’t understand if it was explained to me. And that was the note it ended on.

I never found out what I did. I spent years thinking and grasping, trying to piece things together to gain an understanding. And several times I thought I’d come to a perfect realization. Each time, that realization broke my heart, and I felt so horrible for the pain I’d inadvertently caused. Each time, I would try to reach out to that person again and offer my realization, hoping that they would tell me I was right, and somehow my coming to my senses would make a difference.

But each time, I was always met with silence, or some passive-aggressive through-the-grapevine game of telephone consisting of “never contact me again.”

Each time, I cried all night and hated myself for failing to figure it out, or failing to acquire that confirmation that would at least give me the closure to move on and heal. Each time I begged and pleaded. Just tell me, and I’ll go away. No questions asked. Just tell me why I’m being punished and I’ll accept the punishment.

But it’s been seven years to the day that I am writing this, and have still not managed to procure an answer.

For a brief part of those years, I managed to convince myself that I was happier without them, and that I hated them. And it was good. I healed a little. I brought life into the world once again with my plants and my daughter. I had a family that was strong, and I was even able to get back on my feet enough to start a job; I even juggled two for a while because I felt strong and independent.

But then the cancer struck my baby boy, and my life came crashing to the ground. The worst pain of my life was watching him die… watching that remarkable brain lose its memory and function.

If I ever needed my friend, it was then. But hating me was always more important. And it was still more important when one of my best high school friends died, and they were the only mutual friend who could have told me. I found out three months late, so I couldn’t attend his funeral. And I’m willing to bet that this was purposeful because they knew I was the kind of friend who would actually show up, and running into me at the funeral of someone we both loved was the worst imaginable fate to them.

I can feel my fire spreading out thinking about it.

Today is their birthday. I thought hard about ruining it somehow, but in the end, I’m still that guilty little girl who can’t cause pain on purpose. Maybe that’s why I haven’t managed to kill myself yet.

Now days, I wear myself out constantly calculating every decision, every word, every facial expression, in an attempt to be understood completely, and to try to avoid hurting feelings. But my face betrays me all the time because it doesn’t do what I think it’s doing. My words are misconstrued because my voice either lacks inflection, or bends the wrong way. And no matter how carefully I think I’ve calculated my actions, I always shoot myself in the foot somehow.

I am mixed up and all wrong. And all I can do, all I have done, is yearn to be a better person, and give it my all. But I can’t restructure my brain. There’s no pill or transplant or lifestyle change that can cure autism. There will always just be things I don’t understand. It doesn’t mean I can’t understand. It just means that I need it spelled out. And I wish, I wish so much that I could make everyone else understand that.

In the end, the best I can come up with to explain the problem with my (former) friend is that what I did was precisely nothing. I think they have their own fire inside, but theirs burns with hatred and jealousy and the desire for control. Something… maybe multiple things about me pissed them off because they couldn’t control them, or they couldn’t be them. And that anger burned and raged and grew until it finally dawned on them that they could hurt me and control that pain by telling me I was bad, but withholding an explanation that could bring me relief. Because there isn’t one, and that’s the point.

So today begins another step in attempting to heal in life: accepting this as the answer, and making extreme efforts to erase that person from my memories and therefore my future.

Wish me luck.

And if you were curious, I still go where my heart leads me. I’ve just fine-tuned my compass and learned to draw maps so that I can always find my way home if one of those paths leads to a dead end.