Britney

My latest hobby has been picking apart my faults like a vulture with a dead body. I have forgotten how to write about myself; I pick apart each sentence as it leaves my pen. I can feel myself doing it right now. I hope this is temporary.

I am overpowered by a feeling of weakness. At the beginning of the school year, I had the desire to be more aggressive. I saw others expressing a loud and sweaty kind of anger, and I thought they commanded respect. I don’t think I am or ever have been someone who could be called aggressive, and that makes me feel even weaker.

I am not someone who is accepted instantly or easily into many groups, and I don’t know if that will ever change, either. I only feel completely at home with my girlfriend or with my best friend, and I am incredibly happy to have them in my life, but I also feel like an anomaly because I can’t say the same about my family or the people in my grade at school or just about any other group that I technically belong to.

I am happy sometimes, but there’s something blocking me from just being HAPPY, with no footnotes or parenthetical statements attached indicating that something is wrong.

A Sylvia Plath quote comes to mind: “Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.” Am I the one keeping me from being happy? Am I my own prison? I feel like whenever I talk about my feelings, I sound whiny and/or confusing (because I am confused). It’s taken me an hour to write this, and when I look at what I’ve written it feels like it came from a strange, dark place. I would start over, but I know the same thing would come out, if not this week then next. I know that these thoughts are a waste of time, but the alternative, to just suppress them, is even worse.

It’s summer, and that means that things should be different—better—but this pit of negative feelings is kind of weighing me down. Maybe it’ll get better soon. ♦