why i changed

it was all getting way too loud for me to function — the inside world, and everything happening around me — and i wanted to turn it down. i wanted to return to when i was smaller, simpler, easier to connect with, and i had no idea how to do this than forcibly burning through my social-emotional walls with astringent alcohol. infallibly, i would black out and do some sort of silent damage to my closest relationships. i would wake up barely remembering what i’d said but knowing i’d spat some form of poison at my closest friends or their other friends. or i’d done something i wanted to do, but i knew would hurt them. or, i shared so much of my trauma with someone else that i felt i had to flee after the conversation despite only seeing compassion in his eyes. it’s hard to explain the recoil and regret from doing things you’d never do in your right mind, when so many people share with you the things they most regret or bond you into keeping a life altering secret together and then share it without telling you.

At the height of all this, i found myself talking with old but shallow friends about my deepest fears and emotions, something i haven’t been able to do in quite a while. we discussed our regrets, fears, and outlooks and one of them said he thought our world was hell, because no one else really cares and the structures around us grind us all down in similar ways, no room for error and a cosmically abstract sense of fortune or torturous failure swirling currents around us that are nearly impossible to escape. i thought then it was still possible for us to just be in a Place, a container, that is not inherently evil, but i don’t know if a Place can be separated from the intent of its dominant users. Democracy as the compromise between monarchy and revolution and all that.

In short fashion after that conversation, i found myself on a kitchen floor talking about my abominable year, my grandmother getting diagnosed with severe dementia, my law school professors misgendering me and my soured friends deadnaming and harassing me, my father having unsuccessful surgery for his cancer, then having my own chest reconstruction surgery, five friends visiting during my convalescence, all of my own closest confidants questioning the decision and making me doubt our relationships if they couldn’t see how deeply i needed the treatment, how the way i was living choked and exhausted me day by day, how the wraps and bandages tore at and burned my skin for months, and it was still better than the other options available. so i recovered slowly, returning to live alone days later. i got my own groceries with the help of kind angels, ran a graduation ceremony and graduated school cum laude, learning this on the stage as no one had notified me of the accomplishment. In the flashing lights a smile broke my lips.

A week after, when i finished reading Solaris, i began studying for the bar exam in earnest, not having taken any bar-tested courses in the last year of school. there were at least 4,000 pages of learning material, completed in under two months. I took few breaks, working for between four and 9 hours a day, taking a break in the height of the heat to the northeast, where i began to fracture my friendship in the wake of a blackout makeout and hushed grins, stolen glances. i nearly perished from inaction in the pond, my broken and numb body shouting that i should not move and could not make it in, but the promise he made to carry me in was far from my mind and i could see an unnerving tinge of blue in my skin after hours in the water. i won a race for him, ignoring the screams from my soft tissue, and then stayed awake until i was pulled into sleep by a soporific riptide, terrified of feeling his hand slip across the bed towards me. I hugged them both and they left me alone in the new city.

Our conversations became sparse as I completed my course of study, leaning further into the material so I could eventually crawl through the sphincter the test represented. He’d call me late, hours after his promises, and drunkenly ramble about his personal agonies, rarely asking about mine, making transphobic insults against republicans and not apologizing, insulting my new home and not apologizing, asking me what was up at 7 on my birthday and laughing.

the pain was never ending, and all encompassing, as my relationships devolved at the hand of my own changes and lack of expression forcing me towards the drink. i stopped replying, afraid in some way after my near death of even interacting with alcohol through my friend, scared to continue making off hand jokes about the thing i believe was a passive suicide attempt by my dream-conscious mind screaming along to sympathy is a knife until it was abruptly stopped and my rational brain spiked back above the surface to, once again, deal with the issue my unruly and stifled heart had created through sloppy desire and unseeing progress.

No one really knows about that, not even me, and the questions i was asked did not help, and the actions i took to cover it up will impact me for years, and i feel strange flips in my stomach whenever someone looks at me with respect in their eyes.

And i know that the temporary liberation my subconscious felt at the onset of alcoholic symptomalogy will and could and were never worth the pain and numbness it enforced on my rational brain, but i have no idea how to integrate that with my wildly pained heart.

So i have continued to seek it out, turning towards the existing pain, but i had to at least stem the new cuts being traced along my skin every day, so i stopped talking with the men who were in love with me and angry about the fact i was and am who i am and was, and i poked the bear a bit with no awareness of what would wake it, and i stopped the flow of screaming voices at work, and now i listen to mitski in controlled doses like electric shock with better control. “once more to see you.” and all that unbridled longing that comes with it, i think it is pointing towards an underlying loneliness which would be natural for me to feel in my castle of one, high and guarded, alone and looking every which way. What kind of apology could reunite me with those people and fix the past, or smooth over the future at least? They would appreciate an explanation, i’m sure, but there isn’t one beyond this, unless i wanted to go a bit deeper and say that every action taken reminded me of one or another traumatic event i’ve just started to re-remember.

Did you know I was fined, by my parents, for saying things of which they didn’t approve? I didn't remember until today.