reclaiming the internet, char style

My new BFF is Rex, the inflatable T-Rex Amanda won at quiz night and gifted to me.

I started blogging at blogger for the wrong reasons. & I'm kind of ashamed of having missed the point entirely. Because what am I if not the loudest champion of honesty & individuality and maintaining integrity? Fuck, that's why I started my love affair with blogs, because you never stop finding awesome things, new things. And the awesome Lindsay Markel, in her podcast, said something that really pushed me into keeping up my blog, into resurrecting this one; that you need to put out into this world what you need from it. I read so many blogs because I got sick of reading the same recycled cliches in magazines, and on the Internet there are so many witty, intelligent, scathingly sarcastic voices writing on a multitude of things that resonate with me, and teach me new things, and if there's one thing you need to know about me is that I am insanely in love with the idea of learning for the rest of my life. Oh, and I lead a weird schizophrenic existence in which I am a geek, a sloth, an insanely productive science student and a hip-hop freak prone to bouts of alcoholism, personalities all usually routinely expressed in the course of a week.

It feels like the fog is lifting. A couple of weeks ago I had a really triggering talk with someone, and a triggering session with an impulsively-booked counsellor right after that, and I felt like shit. But then I was sobbing to Shaunus and he was just like 'Um, but it's over, done with'. Which I think is a point worth mentioning. Look, shit fucks people up. I was fucked over, and that fucked me up. I had massive rage issues (I told aforementioned counselor I wanted to burn my ex with an oven, yikes) & sometimes, still, I have intense fits of self-hate where I cannot understand what I let people do to me. Well, people = one person, but at the end of the day what it comes down to is that I let the parts of me that I like best be subdued because their expression would have meant losing someone I truly thought I loved and wanted in my life.

Um, and then I had some kind of aneurysm, and when I came to I was the recipient of frequent abusive texts from my now ex-boyfriend; a quick browse through them told me that I'd unceremoniously, quietly dumped his ass in the middle of another rant about how I was bringing down all his attempts to be a good Muslim. When the numbness had worn off, I felt relieved. RELIEVED. The best feeling in the world after a break-up is relief, lemme tell ya. It was fucking excellent.

I was sad, yeah, because I'd lost my best friend, my ONLY goddamn friend on account of my extreme relationship-induced hermitry, but at the same time, it was kinda nice to eat bacon and buy bikinis and uh, wear mini-skirts. And t-shirts. And try and recover my friendships with boys. And rediscover who I was, and get to grow again. And throw out that godawful floor-length white skirt I'd received as a 'decent' present. (Actually, it's now part of my mum's temple skirt collection which I ransack when I need to feel godly). It was nice to have my brother and sister 100% supportive, it was nice to just be me again. It had been a while.

If I read my diary from after the break-up, it's kind of nice to see my self-tough-love approach popping up every so often. My room was right above the pool table in the common room last year, and there's a vent that would kindly let me hear my ex while I was trying to sleep at night. Ridiculously poetic, right? It would've been mega-helpful to his reconciliation attempts if I'd been um, even vaguely inclined to take him back. But yeah, on the sad nights, when I was so lonely and so sad and so fucking mad at myself for letting myself be put in that position, I'd force myself to remember, slightly horrified, that I could always, within five seconds, remember a time where I had the boyfriend and had been 10 times more miserable.

What I'm really trying to say is that my self-hate, mostly, stems from the knowledge that I let my intellect enter a stable vegetative state for 2.5 years, and let the tiny Stepford part of my brain run roughshod over my friendships, my life in general. The sadness comes from um, stuff that I don't like talking about on the internet in total gory detail, but suffice to say it sucked, and I had one friend I could talk to about it and she was a whole other island away, and I am so fucking proud that I rebuilt myself from the mess that it had made of me. It still fells me at the most inopportune times, however, and that, when coupled with a bout of the self-hate, kind of makes my suicidal thoughts stronger than background noise. Which happened a couple of weeks ago, and I'm just starting to bounce back, and um, remember the things that make me want to keep living.

people that make me feel good about myself. amazing conversations. being productive. typing fast. bleaching shoes. cleaning. doing laundry. singing. new episodes of glee & house. cover songs. mashups. brilliant hiphop. music videos. skinny jeans from marie. summer heights high. old textbooks. scientific journal articles. green glass bottles. jars. tiny shells.