all i'm going to do today is read georges bataille and feel sorry for myself

the idea that things heal is bullshit. i can think about something small and seemingly insignificant that happened years ago and still feel the weight. i have never moved on. i will never be able to willingly detach myself from my life - the only time that detachment has ever happened has been during depressive episodes where i finally wake up and weeks have passed and i can't separate my dreams from reality. it happens with a frequency that astounds me. and it scares me, and i feel like a coward. and i watched secretary a few days ago and i didn't realise that so much of the story involved the pain we inflict on ourselves vs the pain we allow others to inflict on us, a contrast i'd never even considered before. when maggie gyllenhaal turns up at james spader's house after their relationship has been established and she bangs on the glass door and she's crying and she's trying to say something to him but all that comes out is "i want, i want" - i know exactly what she was trying to say, i want you to hurt me. not, i want you to help me or hold me or stay with me. i want you to hurt me, because sometimes that's the only acceptable way. and who is saved, who is healed?

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the
morning outside with the taste of something
true in my mouth

my inner thighs are covered in bruises and bitemarks i had a really good weekend

i just wish someone would want me. is that too much to ask? to be wanted, to be someone's priority

"I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love"

remember being fourteen and slitting my skin to see what would come out of me, i was always disappointed and surprised (relieved?) to see the blood

i hate that for the longest time i confused pain with love. i hate that i live in a society where women are taught that violence represents passion. i hate that it is normal to believe that "the reason we hurt each other so much is because we are deeply in love with each other". i hate that films and books and every single type of media i can think of puts forward this belief that true love means betrayal, and pain, and hurt. that the only way you can know if someone really loves you is if they leave a mark.

for the longest time i thought it was acceptable to be fucked around and hurt so much by one person, because everything in my life had taught me that love is unbalanced and fucked up and confrontational and passionate and angry and unrequited. i hate that i hurt myself for the longest time because i thought that i deserved what you gave me, that it was normal for women to go to bed drunk and weeping because their man had done them wrong. i hate that i romanticised it, that as soon as i was removed from the situation i justified it in my head and tried to make it sound beautiful and poetic and worthwhile. i hate that back then i was so fucked up that i'd rather have you in my life treating me like shit than not at all. i hate that i prioritised your presence over my own, in my own fucking life.

"Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone"

in my recent dreams i am always losing the people i love. i wake up crying and unsettled because i can't stop it from happening. i dreamt that i, along with two of my closest friends, went on a pilgrimage to find three girls who had gone missing in the woods, and when we found their bodies, the girls who had gone missing were us. we buried the bodies and made grave markers out of sweets and coloured paper and leaves. it was a beautiful day. i didn't feel sad at all. we walked out of the woods together, silent, hand in hand, knowing exactly where we were going. and now i can't remember where that was - if it ever existed in the first place, if it ever will

i'm living in the attic room of an old victorian house with a big window in the ceiling and i've discovered that if i climb onto my desk via my bed then i can stick my head and half of my body outside to smoke a cigarette so this evening i've been chainsmoking and listening to nico and missing people, i guess. what happened to me?

oh god i'd forgotten how painful it is to want somebody this badly

i can't sleep. i've been unmedicated for over a week now, through laziness rather than choice, i guess. i always have so much energy for the first week or so, and i want to read everything and speak to everyone i've ever lost contact with or become distant from and i promise myself i'll knit a whole scarf instead of starting a new one every time i'm bored, which results in me having a lot of unfinished things and nothing that is actually complete and useful. there's a very obvious metaphor in there somewhere but my brain is too scrambled to properly fish it out. after this week or so of motivation and ambition and planning! so much planning! i inevitably wake up one morning and come face to face with the reality of being a 20-something with a grab bag of mental health issues, which is that it is awful, and i can't even remember how to brush my teeth, let alone read anything of substance. and i cancel all of the plans i've made, and the scarves never get finished, and i think about suicide in the same instance as entirely trivial, unrelated things, like how to change my nose piercing and whether it will rain or not during the walk to university tomorrow. and then one day i'll either drag myself to the pharmacy or my mother will force me to go and i'll refill my prescription and take my pills, the ones that change my blood cell count and weaken my heart and the ones that give me constant headaches and night sweats, and i won't feel energetic and ambitious and i won't feel disgusting and suicidal and i won't feel much of anything, except occasional disappointment that this is it. and i can't tell if it's better this way, or if it's a different kind of terrible.

and i hate to assume causality (hannah, a girl on my university course who i am a little bit in love with, used this phrase recently and i've been waiting to recycle it ever since) but i think one of the reasons i feel so bad is that i am just lonely. one of my friends, who until recently was just as perpetually-single as i am, has informed me that she's managed to get a real-life boyfriend and i can't be happy for her because i feel so lonely and worthless most of the time and i hate myself because male attention is one of the only things that temporarily relieves those feelings. so i'll keep on having meaningless sex with boys who look like people i genuinely care about but will never let them know because feelings are horrible. and i've been watching a lot of dead like me and i cried at the episode where daisy adair's last thoughts are revealed - why has no one ever loved me? because human beings are inherently narcissistic, and my own self-hatred is stronger than anything anyone else could ever possibly offer me

monday night i drank a bottle of wine with a boy across the hall and he looked so much like someone that i used to be in love with that obviously i had sex with him. he's from middlesbrough and possibly even more introverted than i am. when we go out for a cigarette together he laughs at my pall malls and spits a lot.

last night i drank four bottles of wine with two girls from the third floor, both younger than me, both cancer survivors. after meeting each other one of them said to me, "it's always awkward when you meet a fellow cancer patient in the smoking area". we got drunk and cried together and ordered a lot of fried food from the local takeaway. one of them was from south london, a natural redhead, tall and beautiful and impossibly articulate. i told her that i thought i was in love with her.

in one of my lectures yesterday a girl said to me that upper class people face just as much discrimination and oppression as the working class. i tried to argue with her but ended up saying that i hate rich people and don't care about their lives. after the lecture i cried into a classmates shoulder, the first time i've cried in front of a stranger whilst sober for years.

lying in my bed in a hotel room feeling like no one will ever know me. is it possible to be anything less than extremely selfish in modern society? i feel like technology has taken away the human heart of communication.

the thing about living in a hotel is that i listen to a lot of bob dylan and a lot of leonard cohen and a travelodge on a main street in cambridge doesn't really exude the same kind of romance as the chelsea hotel in 1960's new york

once i was walking through soho to meet a friend and a man sitting on the street yelled, "where did ya get that lovely red hair from, scotland or ireland?" "from a box", i said, and i gave him a cigarette and joined him on the curb and we smoked together. i went home early that night feeling stupid and poor and exceptionally nostalgic. my father is scottish, his father is irish. i'm from the midlands but at that time i was living in london because like all other teenagers i was lost. so many displaced people in one city. it could never feel like home.

current mood status: i feel like drinking bleach

i'm smoking a cigarette with my friend when i notice that we both have identical scars in the same place. thin white line, inside left arm, just below the crook of the elbow. i feel excited and intimidated. we light more cigarettes, talk about our shitty jobs, talk about sex - her with girls, me with boys. all experiences equally animalistic and awkward and depressing. we drink limeade from the bottle. we talk about university, alcohol - "i was drunk for months and i hated everything". now i just steal codeine tablets from a nice lady at work because the level of mess created can always be contained. i was always a sloppy drunk. the sky begins to thunder, and then the rain comes. the lighting strikes just behind us. a constant feeling of disappointment