Don't do drugs kids

So I've been talking about weed with people irl since I got out of school for break. I had smoked w Em a handful of times. At the best, it makes intimacy really intense. Beyond that though, I usually find it to be relatively boring, it makes me feel kinda slow and dumb, not necessarily in a bad way, but I don't particularly like myself when I'm like that. At the worst, like the last time I smoked with her, I got too high, and felt a deep sadness for about 30 minutes and just was crying for no reason. I was feeling kinda eh about weed in general, and like I wanted to distance myself from it, especially based on my own moral compass. But also I felt bad for feeling that way because Em really likes to smoke and it's something I wanted to be able to share with her. Over break though, I reflected + talked to my therapist about it, and began to kinda get over the moral part. I kinda thought of it more like alcohol, something I would do with her every once in a while as something fun. Getting back to school was great. I was so happy to see her after break, I didn't stop smiling for hours. On sunday evening, she asked if I wanted to smoke w her and a friend, and I said yes, thinking it would be fun. I guess I smoked too much again or maybe I just reacted badly to this type of weed but it was worse than any negative experience I'd ever had smoking before. I felt very intense, specific emotions with no basis. I felt as though I had lost a loved one. I felt a deep discomfort within my body. I saw her face distort into something unrecognizable. Each of these waves of emotion came and went like a rollercoaster, but the worst was the fear. I felt extreme terror, like something awful was coming for me. I just remember sobbing loudly, while Em had no idea what to do and just tried to talk me out of it. The fact that I could have been made to feel such extreme emotions for no reason really freaked me out afterwards, and made me question my own emotional reality. I feel bad because it was so scary and upsetting. I feel bad for making Em worry so much about me, and feel that fear of not knowing what to do. I feel bad because I was so ready to have smoking be a nice, fun thing for us to do together but now the thought of smoking again makes me so scared. I feel bad because I haven't really been myself since and I'm a tiny bit scared that after that night, something broke inside me and I'm going to be depressed/anxious/terrified forever.

Fragments from the train to Boston

“tomorrow is gonna be one of those mornings where you’re just walking around like ‘you have no fucking idea’”.

I want to go everywhere with her
Hold her hand kiss her neck claw at her back bite her lip
I want to melt into her, be enveloped in her arms, become as close as humanly possible

I have this habit of telling my significant others they’d be hot as a different gender and it always makes them kinda uncomfy lol whoops

Sometimes I think I’m gay, but by the time I try the label on myself, it feels so wrong and sad and limited so I know it’s wrong

Em said that’s the same way she knows she’s cis, despite not feeling comfortable with conventional femininity/gender roles, and questioning in the past. For her, femininity is uncomfortable, but claiming they/he feels more wrong. I guess in some ways it’s easier to know what you’re not.

T said if you’re questioning/unsure about your gender it’s probably ok to identify as not cis, since cis people typically don’t spend ages agonizing about what gender they are. This makes sense to me, but I’m cis so Idk I’m not trying to speak out of knowledge/personal experience. I guess I’m just trying to get a better understanding.

Gender is fucked anyway tho I know that much at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She told me about how she told her doctor she was in a dark place and thought she needed help during her equivalent of junior year. He told her it’s normal for young women to feel bad during their time of the month, and to practice breathing exercises. She thought it was funny cuz coming out and saying it, she already felt like she was attention-seeking and like her emotions weren’t valid and he confirmed those fears in the worst possible way. Isn’t it cool how it’s so hard to be a teenage girl and then on top of that no one takes you seriously?

I went to see Fun Home with her on Broadway. I saw the actress who played Alison Bechdel on the way out, stared blankly at her. She said “hey”. I said “.......HEY!” and ran off. I didn't even ask for a picture or an autograph. Em and I laughed for ages

Sunday night I ate indian food and watched kpop videos for over an hour with A and M. Then Em and I watched anime and ate ice cream for the rest of the night.

I smoke weed with her, something I never saw myself doing. I don’t think I’d have any desire to do it without her, but I don’t dislike it as much as the first two times I smoked, or as much as I thought of myself disliking it, which has caused some cognitive dissonance. When it’s not good, it’s like I thought it would be, boring/mildly uncomfortable in the way it makes me feel like not myself. At it’s worst it made me feel like my heart was breaking. But when it’s good it just amplifies my feelings of love. I feel warm and comfortable all over, just so happy. She looks so beautiful and I can’t look directly at her, like staring at the sun. Touching her and being touched feels soft and electric, it goes on and on and on. Honestly, it feels like that already though, it's just to a whole other degree when we're high. There's a part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it so much.

Things I bought since turning 20: ~100$ worth of food, skin cream+essence, powder, calvin klein underwear, a book of shakespearean insults for my brother, a star map, a glass dildo, almond milk, mini wheats, rum, old spice deodorant, Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

"There’s a place I want to take you...
...I’ll go anywhere you want me to"

Update as of 2016: Em def isn't cis! Still incredible uncomfortable with traditional femininity, would prefer more masculine features, but not currently interested in changing pronouns/coming out/pursuing hormone therapy

Lol fuck my rapist for making me tell him I loved him after he raped me now I can't fucking say it when I mean it 5 fucking years later

"What are you thinking right now?"
"I hope I don't get pregnant"
"Don't you have anything to say?"
"Like what?"
"How about I love you?"
------------------------------
"Bye Loki"
"I love you too"
"No, I said "bye Loki""
"oh."
------------------------------
"I love you"
"Yeah."
------------------------------
"I liked your card because I could tell you really love me. I don't wanna say it now because I'm drunk and it wouldn't mean anything but for now, let's just say I really like you"
"I really fucking like you too"
------------------------------
"Bye, travel safe............"
"Yeah. See you soon."
FUCK

Lol

I spent so much time over this summer thinking abt Em. I obsessively replayed moments between us, the good and the bad. I was constantly worrying abt what we were, what we would be. I thought abt her so much and kinda exhausted myself w this obsession. That, plus the 3+ months that have past puts me in a place of relative ambivalence which is interesting? I used to get really excited with the thought of seeing her when I got back to school but now I don't really feel anything. I think this is a good thing, like I found my chill/got over myself. Or maybe I...stopped liking her? I mean better that I've been living my life than obsessing over her, right? Seeing her again should be interesting in any case. Maybe it'll all come rushing back. What'll I do if it doesn't?

Don't Gatsby it.

It’s too soon to make generalizations, since there’s only been the two, but it seems like with girls, I do this thing where I get into *something* with her, but lack of communication skills (on her side? Mine?) leaves our relationship super nebulous. I don’t know what “we” are. More troubling, I don’t actually know anything about her and I end up projecting all sorts of stuff onto her to fill in the blanks Gatsby style, so she can’t ever live up to the idea of her I’ve created in my head. I saw this post on Tumblr today, which is what started me thinking about this; it said “absence and lack of communication makes the heart idealize a person and subconsciously twist one’s perception of them into something greater than they really are”. And I’m doing that, I think. With S, the more time I spent w her, the more I saw her as a flawed person as opposed to some ideal other. I realized she wasn’t gonna be right for me. But my relationship w Em is still active and new, which is why there’s so much danger. I think about her so much, but talk to her so little there’s no way I’m not fucking up the distinction between who she is and who I think she is. Like I have this plan, when I get back, I’m gonna hang out w her for a while, then a few days into it, I’m gonna ask her if she wants to go out w me officially, be my gf and all that. But I’m so scared I’m gonna come back and it’s not going to be there anymore. Or that I’ll come back and realize it never was there. Like, I feel pretty confident that she likes me, but the fact is, she never said it. She never said anything really about herself or how she felt, besides the one time she mentioned we didn’t have much time left to be together before summer and one time when she said I was awesome after I made her cum super hard. And like, I’m scared I twisted those and other moments into way more than they are. Like yeah, she kept hanging out w me, even when we weren't doing anything but talking, and she stuck w me after the karaoke incident (lol) but what if she really was just in it for the sex and the company? Idk, like I’ve made up this idea of her being more reserved and quiet, nervous about expressing emotions. That could be true, but also she could just not be at the same place I am in our relationship. Anyway, her not saying much about her feelings contrasts with me, constantly spitting out whatever’s on my mind, just talking and talking, about nothing but also about every feeling that passes through my brain. So when we’ve been texting, it’s always I have a ton to say, which she responds to with less, then we have nothing to say, and the convo ends. Idk how to make it right. Well I do, I know it involves fucking making an effort to communicate, but god-it’s so fucking scary.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This school year started and ended the same way-with a kiss goodbye. The first was B, and it had come off of a nearly year-long relationship with an expiration date. The last was a girl named E and it came off of a little over a month of hookups that grew to be something more. With B, the expiration date gave everything the month leading up to me going away a sense of heaviness. And our lack of a clean break led to some unpleasantness after I left. With E, it's kind of snuck up on me, just cuz of how close to the end of the year we ended up getting together. (Fun fact, she's the same girl I mentioned seeing making out with another girl at a party in an earlier post) I'm excited to go home and see my family and friends. I can't believe how fast this year has gone and I'm glad to be done with freshman year. It also hasn't quite hit me how long I'm gonna be home for. I'm going to miss my friends here, going to miss the things I like about BMC. I'm really going to miss E. And our relationship is so new and so undefined, I'm not sure where we're going to be in three months. It's gonna be esp hard since she's international. But man, I'm really glad we got to spend the past few weeks together. She's really special and we're gonna try to keep in touch over the summer so idk here's hoping I guess.
Back home I'm gonna get a job (I have interviews ^.^) and try and keep busy. It'll be interesting to hang out with people from high school at parties, but I'm still looking forward to the things already planned as well as any kinda get-togethers that are gonna come up. I'm so excited to spend time with my sister again, and see becky and cassidy. I'm really excited to see you guys. We should get together, go to the beach, party it up. Idk tho it's definitely a weird limbo to be in. 3 months. I'm staying optimistic though, It's going to be a great summer!

Hey all, I had a bunch of coffee and a lot of thoughts so I’m just gonna drop them here. Not tryna be eloquent, my thoughts are all over the place, and there's no real point to any of them, but putting it all down is rlly therapeutic to me. That’s what this space is for, right?

-I wish I had more queer friends here. It’s a desire I can’t even really explain/justify. In some ways it doesn’t make sense to choose friends based on the only shared quality being the people you find attractive/sleep with. It makes sense of course, in a situation where you feel marginalized for being a queer person, although here I’m not really experiencing that. That’s actually another interesting thing I’ve been thinking about recently. In high school I assumed that I wasn’t experiencing discrimination at all based on my sexual orientation. And of course, I wasn’t. And I knew about microaggressions but they didn’t apply to me, you know? But idk my queerness was definitely invisible. It’s not something I ever hid but it also never came up. Was that an issue that I was assumed to be straight by people I had known all my life? And that brings me to the more pressing issue of family. I remember talking to Z about this over winter break. My dad doesn’t know I’m bi. Or my brother. My cousins should know by now but I’ve never told them, they never asked, and I think they still (hilariously) assume I’m straight. What Z and I were talking about is the way that sexual orientation is so linked to sexuality and how that’s something that you don’t really discuss, straight or otherwise, with close family members. Anyway I guessed I’d just not make a big deal out of it and if/when I ended up dating a girl I’d bring it up at some point. It wasn’t a priority to bring up because I had been single or with a boyfriend. Now though, I’m stuck. I was briefly in a “relationship” with a girl I’d been crushing on for ages, but it ended quickly and didn’t amount to anything. I’m currently “seeing” a new girl right now, and it has the potential to be something more, but again it’s not really real. So these relationships are happening, but since they’re not actually “real”, they’re not something I feel the need to discuss with those close to me. I don’t even really talk about them with the friends. I’m just in this weird kinda place where in some ways, there’s nothing to talk about, but I think it might be nice to have someone who has had experience w girls who I can talk to. Idk though. Like this school is amazing. It’s so queer, and the more time I spend here, the more people I realize aren’t straight. And that has the potential to be comforting to me but at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m “not queer enough” to fit in with them. And I love the friends I have here, they’re great, but it feels like sometimes they get uncomfortable when I talk about girls. One “doesn’t want to know the details”, one assumes I’m interested in getting with a queer mutual friend just cuz I ask about her, one asks me if my attraction is 50/50. It’s nothing outright, this whole situation just seems to have all these undercurrents I can’t name or place that make me feel uncomfortable. It’s a really gross, nebulous feeling that creeps up around the edges whenever my sexuality comes up. And maybe it’s not even that I’m bi, maybe it’s just the fact that college relationships are weird and the ones I’ve had hardly count as relationships.

-On the topic of college relationships, what’s with this desire to be “chill” about everything all the time? Like commitment is such an abstract concept and no one wants to talk about their feelings. Miss Palmero would have a lot to say on this subject.

-I gave my number to a guy after a concert I went to on monday when he found me on twitter and asked if I was “the gorgeous girl standing in front of him”. Of course, that was flattering and pretty smooth, so I’ve been texting him, half cuz he seemed pretty cool, half because I like the attention/flattery. The convos have been hilarious (he’s an english/philosophy double-major who thinks he’s going to be the next James Joyce) and I’ve been telling everyone about them as a not-so-subtle brag. His flirting attempts that are comments on my appearance have got me thinking though. When I was 15, my pubescent self-esteem was so low that I got caught up with the first person to show interest in me. That led, as you know by now, to trauma that wasn’t my fault of course, but that could’ve potentially been thwarted had I not depended so much on some stranger to define my self-worth. In the years since, my self esteem has reached new highs. Which leaves me intrigued when this rando tells me I’m gorgeous and asks me if all the girls at my school are as pretty as me, saying “I’m just being honest”. Of course, the compliments themselves are a bit of an ego boost, but the way he says them gives me the sense that he thinks he is doing me some kind of favor, telling me something I’ve never heard before. The whole “you don’t know you’re beautiful” kinda bullshit. Cuz I do, you know? Makes me think of that post abt girls on the internet responding “I know” to people messaging them telling they’re attractive who then react negatively w something like “lol ur not all that bitch”. Idk none of this is revolutionary stuff, just interesting to think about. I guess I'm just glad to be in a place where I'm not reliant on people like him to make me feel worthwhile and attractive. Cuz then there's this whole sense of obligation to this person. They find u attractive so you better get on that cuz no one else will. Idk. Loving yourself is so important. I always try to tell my sister she's beautiful so when some guy tells her that it's not the first time she's hearing it. And that she doesn't owe anyone anything. Ever.