Wandering around

So I was playing with the site this morning – much more fun than doing errands and cleaning. There are some things I miss – and I read that “Friends” and “Favorites” are going to be combined… Not sure how I feel about that because to me “favorites” are Diary’s and writers I enjoy reading, and “Friends” are the people I meet that I eventually come to trust. Oh well, we’ll see how it plays out.

Looking through my old diary entries, I found names I was looking for. Memories of past students, stories I wrote about that recently I have been trying to piece together. After 13 years in the same district, I know my life revolves around my work, because my work is people….

~Tested out the save as draft and lived my life for a day. Came back, and everything still works, and I remembered how to log in!~

I hadn’t realized how much I needed this place. I’ve tried other writing sites, and they didn’t ~feel~ right. There were things I needed to get out of my head, and I haven’t been able to because no place was like here. OD was my first online “safe haven,” the first place I wrote as myself, and it felt like a community, like family. Now that it is coming back, writing seems easier. But I don’t know if I want to write about the things in my head, about the shit that has happened.

I used OD as a way to deal with depression, which came back in force in 2016 after the death of my corgi who was for all intents and purposes my service dog. I used OD as a way to deal with loss, and within 2017 I have lost students – former students, but they will always be my kids. Overdoses, sudden death, and murder, possibly a second one who is currently just listed as “missing.” Personally, my heart cannot take the funeral of another one of my kids.

I don’t talk about any of this. Talking to people still scares the ever-loving-shit out of me. My poor boyfriend – who has put up with me for 10 years for some reason, no idea how or why he loves me – he’s a misanthropic nihilist and doesn’t really understand why I care so much, but he supports me through all of it with the patience of a saint, and he doesn’t know how to help me.

I don’t ever want to talk to my family, because dealing with them triggers the damn depression and anxiety. And I am tired. They still think there is nothing wrong, that I am making it up, that there is no way I can have depression. They pretend it away and try to make me fit inside of a box, an outline of who they think I should be based on the person I pretended to be for the first 18 years of my life simply to survive. I really can’t do this shit anymore.

Even writing this much helps. It gets it out of my head – many years ago when I first joined OD, I wrote about thought bleeding out of hands as ink on paper. That must have been sometime in 2004. I will have to go look. But I remember that. I remember a lot. And even though the fog inside of my head, it is a good thing. This is a good thing.