What I know

   I say that I feel things. Maybe more strongly than other's, but maybe much less. I don't know. People don't talk about feelings a lot. We prefer to focus on whats "real" and feelings, no matter what we think, are not "real".
   I think our "emotions" are the only reality we have. We can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the outside world, but unless someone else notices the same thing, we have no idea if it's real or not. The only thing that we know for sure is real is what goes on inside our own heads, a reality constructed by our brains in a feeble attempt to make sense of what's around us. In that sense, how can what we feel be unreal, fake, a sham?
  I can make myself feel what I believe other people to be feeling, which is an inaccurate science at best. I don't think, or feel, what other people think and feel when they see something. This is true for everyone else, but I'm reminded of it constantly. The reason is that most people, regardless of their other traits, love people.
  I don't.
  I've hated people for as long as I can remember. I hate people in the same way a social person hates math, that overwhelming, deep terror of some strange code you could never hope to decipher, for a language you have no hope of understanding. In spite of this I do, occasionally, enjoy being with people. Sometimes you're with someone and you feel happy, because you know your sharing some part of the other persons inner world. You know you like them and they like you, so for a while you can share emotions, even if you never talk about them. Other times, you find yourself alone in a room, people everywhere, but there's no one you can talk to. These are the times when you remember that no one likes you, because you push them away so you never have to talk to them. Regardless of who you are, or of whether or not you chose to do this, it still hurts.
   I spend as much time as possible in my bedroom. When I'm alone, I don't have to think about anyone else, about whoever I'm accidentally annoying with behaviors I can't seem to shake. I can read about other people, and pretend that they're my lifelong friends, even though we'll never meet in person. I can think what I want and say what I want, without any repercussions to our (nonexistent) relationship. If they do something that makes me angry, I can end the relationship easily.
   I'm well aware of the health consequences of choosing to live like this. I don't want sympathy, since I can't blame my not having any friends on anyone but myself. I choose to live like this because I hate anything that involves people, not because I have some horrible illness that keeps me housebound.
  Don't use me as an argument against welfare. I don't have a job, but my mother pays my living expenses. If I needed too, I could work. I haven't sought out government assistance, and I have no plans of doing so. People who apply for welfare need it, if they wanted to scam someone, they'd go to their employer or a grocery store. Or they would commit identity theft. To deny someone help that you can easily give is the scummiest thing you can do, and people are well within their rights to hate you for it.
   Well, today's post got a little heavy, Think of it as my making up for missing a post two days ago. 

Mental health mother and daughter

   Today I had a psychiatrist appointment, and tomorrow I have an appointment with a new therapist. I'm going to be honest, I hate going to any sort of appointments related to my mental health. I think that therapy is important, everyone should have access to it, and people who can't cope with life should be able to get whatever help they need. The reason I don't like it myself is just that I don't find that conventional medicine is all that effective at helping me deal with my issues.
    I've struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life. On a good day my mood is "meh" but on a bad day I feel like I should just kill myself and get it over with. I can't honestly remember a time when I was "happy",  I just sort of remember times when I wasn't quite as depressed as I am now.
   I remember it getting really bad when I was in about the forth or fifth grade. I specifically remember one day when my mother and I were moving stuff that wasn't going to fit in our new apartment into a storage unit. It was hot as hell, and I was feeling extremely cranky and complaining about how much I didn't want to be there. I'll be honest, I don't even remember what I said at this point, all I remember is that at some point my mother snapped and yelled at me, "Kristen, I'm working." before going back to moving heavy boxes into the storage unit.
  I don't remember people or places very well. What I do remember is emotions. I remember feeling scared, because mother had never yelled at me like that before, upset that I'd made her mad, and worried that she would hurt me if she got angrier at me.
   I wish I could say this was the only time she did something that made me feel that way, but there were several more instances after that where similar things happened. In all those instances, something happened that caused mother to fly off the handle, but I didn't know what happened and what I'd done wrong.
    Things went back to normal after about a year of this, but it was never the same. Before the storage incident, I loved my mother more than anything in the world, and was convinced she would be there to protect me no matter what. Afterwards, I still loved her, but I was always scared that I would do something that would make her mad.
   Something you don't know about mood issues unless you live with someone who has one, you can reach a point where you're so angry you don't care who you hurt or how badly you hurt them. If you're on the other end of that, you have two choices: make it so the can't hurt you or make it so they won't hurt you. I chose the latter. Over the years I fought back in whatever way I could. Knowing that she could get angry at any time, for any reason, it rather made it hard to have any motivation to do anything that would make her happy, when it was better to just save the energy for the next tantrum that would come my way.
  I should make this clear, I'm in no way blameless. If I wanted to, I could have kept our house clean, done my schoolwork without being asked, supported my mother during her down moments, tried to keep an open mind, remembered that even if she gets upset, she's just acting out how she was taught to behave by her parents growing up.
   That's what she expects of me. The reason I don't do it is that honestly, I don't want to. You know how in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Yoda says that fear leads to anger, hate and suffering? That's what's happened to me over time. I don't know if she loves me anymore, or if she even did. I don't know what her hopes were for me, or if I failed her. Quite frankly I don't care. Ever since that day in storage I've tried to ignore her behavior, or justify it, or just put my pain to one side so I can do what I need to do.
   That all stopped a week ago. I don't want to go into details, but mother told me what she was feeling that time, and rather than feeling sorry or upset, it just pissed me off. It was the kind of thing that you don't take out on your child who had nothing to do with it, you get therapy and work to fix it. But instead she made me her scapegoat.
   So I'm done playing the bad guy. As soon as I get a steady income and move out of the house, I'm cutting off all ties with her. Probably the rest of my family to. My cousin's still cool though.

New year, new me (maybe)

   I don't post a lot because I worry about how I'll react if people criticize me. One of the things you hear a lot is people say is that hearing people criticize you is incredibly hard on your ego. I don't know if that holds true for me, since for one thing I avoid any situation in which I might face criticism, and for another I find that my harshest critic is usually myself. But I've been thinking lately that the thing I'd love more than anything in the world is to share, well, myself with the world. Things I don't tell anyone because I'm worried they'll think that I'm crazy, even if I talk to myself all the time without feeling any shame.
   My favorite thing to do in the world is to think. My "real" life is almost non-existent, but my "imaginary" life is grand and full of fun. I don't have a great imagination, but I love imagining things, and I truly don't understand why most people don't. Most of what people call "normal" life mystifies me, but the idea of not spending the majority of your time analyzing or questioning why things are the way they are, or just imagining that your in a fantasy world where all of your problems can be solved with magic, baffles me.
   When I think, I like to create a world where I can be someone important and special. I'd like to think that's what most people want. The world I've created for myself is a place whey I don't have to depend on anyone, and no one is depending on me. It's a world where I can just sit by myself and think about what the "real" world must by like for everyone who chooses to live in it.
    It may seem like a terrible thing, but I don't want to live in the "real" world. I don't blame anyone who wants to live in it, because it really is a beautiful and wonderful place, where even the people who are the most aware of how it works will never have full control. But I can't understand it and I've never felt comfortable when I'm there. One of the things I fully believe is that the world takes all kinds of people. Leaders, followers, people who know everything, people who will never know anything, people who ask all the questions and people who just follow orders. I don't believe in one way of living, or doing things, outside of a few general rules. I don't even like enforcing morals, since there's always a case where enforcing that moral is a terrible idea.
   But regardless of what kind of person you are, you still have to be a kind of person if you wish to exist in another person's world. People can't see another person for who they are, doing that would require they assume their thoughts instead of simply guessing what their general emotions are. For that reason, no matter where you live in, you will be shoved into a mold once you grow old enough to be accepted into general society.
   That's not what I want for myself. It's never what I wanted for myself. I don't want to just be "autistic" or "anxious" or a "nerd". I want to be someone who can be anything, depending on what the situation calls for. I want to be a voice for those who would otherwise not have them. I want to find the others like me that are out there, children raised by mothers who never had a relationship with another person, people from families where everyone has mental health issues, people whose last name may die when they do.
   If I could change the world that the human race has created to be one where anyone can be whoever they want to be, regardless of what they were born as, I would be blessed. In the absence of that, I aim to do more than merely survive. I want to live, and give my decedents enough so that their failures are brought about by their own choices and not the circumstances they were born into. I may not be special, but I at least want to be different.

Job hunting: as told by Kristen

Preface:

   Last night I had the most distressing nightmare I've had in a while, in which I, while using one of those play games for money websites, downloaded a virus to my surface. I was terrified, especially since this virus was an aggressive one that kept opening up windows and doing whatever it took to keep me from deleting it. It was the kind of dream that you wake up from being really grateful that it was just a dream and you don't have to deal with it anymore.
   So as you read this, keep in mind that I have a surface, and my biggest fear is losing it to my own stupidity.

    Now onto the job search.

Part 1: the anxiety

   The first thing I should mention is that I have an anxiety disorder. What that means is that sometimes my brain will randomly decide that a situation I'm in is horribly dangerous and do everything it can to keep my from doing it, even if I've done it a hundred times with no problem. A good example of this is escalators. I have no problem going up them, but when I was about ten I suddenly lost the ability to go down them. What happened was I suddenly got  scared I would slip while getting on and fall down and break my neck. Ever since then I've been unable to go down escalators, at least in the US (In Britain they give you more time to get on and settle in, clearly I'm not the only one with this problem).
   How it affects me when job hunting is that I'm terrified of going into interviews. I'm decent at social interactions when I'm not overwhelmed with anxiety, but when it hits than that all goes out the window. I also can't do anything that involves customer service for the same reason.
  I've been working on overcoming my anxiety for years now, but there's only so much you can do to avoid the moments your brain randomly decides your in danger for no reason. It doesn't help that I'm not naturally motivated, so overcoming my stupid fear of interviews takes a lot longer than one would reasonably expect it to take.

Part 2: the laziness

    Some people are born ambitious. They work hard, do everything they can, and don't stop until they get what they want. I'm not one of those people.
   Well, sort of. If I don't want to do something, you have to work very hard to make me do it. If I do want to do something, you can't do a lot to stop me.
   Which is to say that I don't really like the idea of working, so I try to avoid it where possible. I hate physical labor, but I'm decent at anything that requires thought (though I'm incapable of writing anything longer than three paragraphs).
   While I don't want to work, I do want a job. Not so much for money (which I mostly spend on notebooks on cheap pens) but because ever since I dropped out of college, I've just been sitting at home bored all day. The natural solution to this would be spending all of my free time in bars or hanging out with friends but, like I said, I really, really hate socializing and large groups in a loud space is my own personal definition of hell.
   So I don't want to work, but I want a chance to meet people. Not to advance myself, but just because even the least social among us gets lonely once in a while.

Conclusion:

   I want to stress that I'm jobless entirely because of choices that I've made. I could have dealt with this a long time ago, but I didn't because my mom felt that it was more important for me to focus on college, (and even then, plenty of people get jobs while in school). I've just been letting my fear of failure hold me back.
   I'm mostly just talking about this as a way making myself believe that this is real, and I guess as a way of pushing myself to find a job that suits my needs and wants. No matter how temporary it turns out to be.

Anxiety, part 2

I don't really have anything to talk about today. Actually I do, I'm just really scared to talk about it. I'm an intensely private person, I don't even really talk about my likes and interests to family members. The only person who I talk to about myself is my therapist, which I'm sure he thoroughly enjoys. I have a lot I think about, and a lot of opinions. I wouldn't really consider myself an expert on anything, but I've read a lot, watched a lot, and thought a lot, and I'd like to think that my voice counts for something. I might just be pretending that's true, like I pretend that I'm secretly the one controlling the world with my imagination, and everything that ever happens is my own secret will. But fantasy is all I have, and the only power I have on anyone who isn't me.
    I'd like to think we all have a place in this world, a place that we choose and make for ourselves. I want my place to be one where when I talk, people listen to me, but not because I'm an amazing leader. It's because what I say is true enough to make sense to them, and because I'm telling them things they always knew, but didn't quite have the words to articulate. I want to be a person who can tell other people what the problems they face actually are, and give them ideas on how to fix them. In my own way, I want to remake the world. I want to show people that things aren't set in stone, we can change them and maybe make it so that things are a little better. Maybe someday I'll move mountains without having to lift a finger, simply by showing people a way of doing it they never thought of.
    For now, I'm just some loser living in her mother's home with no job. I have thoughts and feelings, nothing more. I write a lot, but it's nothing if no one sees it before it's too late. That's part of why I'm writing this blog post, even though it doesn't say anything. I'm practicing, so that someday I can say something that's just a little smart.

Anxiety, part 1

    I started this blog two years ago, if the dates on my posts are correct, and posted exactly four times since I did. I have, at least, twenty blank notebooks on my bookshelves and in shoe boxes on my floor, and god knows how many blank and half blank sheets of paper in binders in my closet. Somewhere between ten and fifteen tote bags are crammed in with them, among other assorted knickknacks I've collected and have nowhere else to put. My bedroom floor is covered with blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals that I have no need for and nowhere to put, but can't bring myself to give away. I also have puzzles, art supplies, regular books, a large collection of pens and pencils, various electronics and a large amount of clothes considering I avoid shopping whenever possible.
   I call myself a collector, but the truth is I'm more of a hoarder, just collecting whatever catches my eye regardless of whether or not I have the space for it. I also didn't buy any of it with money I earned, since despite the fact that I'm twenty-four I still haven't held a paying job. I've done volunteer work, but not for longer than a few months. My mom lets me stay with her and pays for my living expenses, and it leads to exactly the amount of resentment you would think it would lead to. I could argue my case and say I have an excuse for living the way I do, but the truth is, save for the fact that I'm a women, I fit the stereotype of a jobless nerd in her mother's basement perfectly.
   It's not that I can't work. There are jobs that, if I could bring myself to apply for them, I could probably get, even if I only have an AA degree despite being in college for six years. I could move out, get my own place, eat all the garbage I want, and die at thirty from untreated diabetes. It's not that I don't want to be independent, though I'm not going to pretend that living with mom isn't without it's perks. It's that I'm scared.
    Everyone has that one subject in school that, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn't understand. For some it's sports, for other's math or language arts, for me, it was people. People just don't make sense to me. How do they know that the person sitting next to them wants to be friends? How do they know that it's OK to sit with that person and not someone else? How do they know which kids will want to make friends with them? I've been told that it's not instinctive, that everyone struggles with socializing and screws up sometimes. But the six year old who watched everyone else playing and wondered why she could never find anyone of her friends to play with is still convinced that socializing is a magical skill that she was born without. And unfortunately, no matter who you are or what kind of job you have, you have to be able to socialize with other people to a certain degree.
    Again, I could probably do it. I've dealt with people enough over the years to be able to grasp the basics of socializing, though I do find it really stressful and exhausting. It's just convincing myself that I can do it and that it won't end in total disaster. Life with an anxiety disorder is all about convincing the scared little kid in you that yes, you can do this, and even if something goes wrong, you can fix it. Honestly, my biggest enemy is myself, most of the world doesn't care about me one way or the other, but I'm convinced that everyone who so much as looks at me thinks I'm repulsive and stupid, an idiot who can't even keep a job for more than a day before she quits. I'm not saying that for sympathy, because I'm not the type of person who needs sympathy. Save the sympathy for people who are so overwhelmed by their anxiety they need your help to take care of them. I'm not one of them, at least not yet, but I've seen them on the bus or at my family reunions. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm lucky enough to be unworthy because of laziness and lack of effort, so help those who didn't have a say in the matter.