Apr. 23, 2024
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Being a dog is harder when you are trapped inside of a teenage girl's body. Or maybe it's that being a teenage girl is harder when you are stuck with the brain of a dog. I have trouble figuring out which it is, lately.
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I'm trying to come to terms with the reality of my future. as an adult woman who will always have the brain of a dog and the feelings of a teenage girl. I've given up on dreaming, because dreaming is for naive idiots who only think wishfully and never critically. That's one of the most human-like things about me, actually - I'm a very critical thinker. I know my fate is to become a worthless, uniform cog in the machine. To dress in business casual on every weekday for like sixty years.
I get these visions of my future. I don't want to see them, they just come to me.
When I was still a dreamer and I still believed in myself a little bit, this was the vision I saw when I tried to think about my future:
I am lying in a ditch in the California sand dunes, dying of alcohol poisoning. It is raining. I am alone and very far from any roads or people or sounds. There are bottles next to me, a good few, and none are broken. I am naked. And very alone. My clothes are sopping wet from the rain somewhere nearby. I am either twenty three or twenty seven years old. This vision comes to me in the third person, as a bird's eye view, moving away slowly like a drone camera flying upwards.
This was my future vision when I still thought I could follow my dream, somehow. When I was stupid. Now my future vision is kind of slightly better I guess. I'm an accountant forever. And I guess life is okay when I don't think about the fact that I'm wasting every second of it, but I never escape the intense, acute awareness of my own mortality and insignificance that I discovered in early childhood. And I never find love. And I don't have any friends. And I was always too pussycat to kill myself.
I wish I didn't have future visions, because then maybe I could hope for something.
But I don't have a shred of hope in my body. I'm fuelled only by despair and hopelessness. it's clear to me, as it has been for many years now, that I was doomed from the start.
I comfort myself by thinking that everyone feels this way. Everyone realizes at some point that they're doomed. Everyone normal. Not rich kids or social media influencers or idiots (or people who grew up around real trees, maybe), but normal people. I think some people take a lot longer to realize it than I did. Some people get decades deep into a life they hate before they realize it, and maybe those are the most tragic cases. But regardless of when the epiphany comes, I think at some point everyone realizes that things never get better.
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This blog entry probably reads as pretty glum. And sucky and self-pitying. But actually it's supposed to be a good one where I'm being happy. Because I like to think I'm happy that I've given up. But for some reason, despite what I like to think, sitting here and writing about it is making me choke up. It's making tears well up behind my dark, sunken eyelids.
I don't get it. It's a good thing for me to give up, because I'm finally approaching my life with a realistic lens. The perspective where I accept that I'm completely normal and will never amount to anything. It's supposed to feel good. I wonder if I'm a narcissist?
I don't understand why I can't be happy about this. Physically. Logically I am at peace and I am very glad to be done with the silly, childish part of life where I didn't shut out my mother when she told me I could be anything I wanted. Logically everything is easier now. But why, then, is my throat so tight as I put this all into text? Why has my vision blurred through my tears?
Nobody becomes the adult that they wanted to be when they were a kid. Nobody does. Very few people do. Usually the rich ones.
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I wonder if I feel this way because I live in the desert. There's nothing here. There's nothing around me and there never has been. Except for a hot, burning sun. And the blistering pavement that comes along with it. And I truly feel like there is nothing in this world for me. Nowhere for me to go, no open doors, and no sliver of shining hope. I've always been jealous of the people that grew up around trees. Real trees. I've always been the most jealous of people who have a creek in their backyard. Maybe I would be okay if I grew up with a creek in my backyard. But I grew up with cacti and hot, tan walls and no friends who ever understood me. The tears are falling down my cheeks now and I can't help it.
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Do you ever see those videos on the internet where they edit sad animals to sad music? Like that one short clip of the grey tabby kitten with its paws holding its head and tears rolling out of its eyes, squeezed shut as dark, straight lines. I cry every time I see that kind of thing. I can deal with just the sad animal or just the sad music, but I can't do both at the same time. It's too much. I'm fragile. I never learned how to deal with human emotions and I am so fragile.
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In less than four weeks I will go to summer camp. And I will work there for the whole summer and I will spend lots of time with my most favorite people.
I sometimes like to think I love things, but I can say with the most intense honesty that I truly love camp. It is the one thing for me. Ever since I first went to summer camp as a nine-year-old puppy, I have thought about it forever ever since. All of my most cherished memories of childhood are from camp. I became a teenager for the first time at sixteen and three quarters years old because I made some good friends at camp, and in the past year they have shown me amazing things, like how to have fun and how to feel loved. I matured a lot and became responsible at camp because I was responsible for the health and happiness of several young children. I feel a strong sense of direction there. I want to give all the kids the amazing experience that I got as a child! I want to help them create important memories and I want to inspire them like my first counselor inspired me.
Leo, who I knew as Laurel when I was nine and they were my counselor, had blue hair and a guitar. They would sing to us after lights out. They took us on a night hike to some boulders where we climbed around with our flashlights in our elbows and let the slugs crawl over our legs when we shut off all the lights to look at the stars. They bought a recorder from the Dollar Tree on their night off and they told us that it was the best investment that they had made in their entire life, and mind us, they were a grown-up who had invested in real estate.
It wasn't until years later, after completing the CIT program, that my twin and I truly embarked on a hunt for this individual through the internet. It was hard because of the name change. But eventually we found them and it made me feel funny to discover that they were sixteen, a CIT, when I was nine and they were my counselor. And they were also gay. It made me feel funny because I was a sixteen year old gay blue-haired CIT and I can't convey to you the immense impact that my first counselor had on my childhood and my life. It's just so funny feeling. It's so cyclical. I know for sure that they had no idea about the way that they affected me. And I can't help but wonder if I've already touched a child's heart just like that? Or if I'll ever be able to?
In my mind Leo was the most amazing camp counselor ever. But they were just a teenage wannabe trying their best. Like me.
It just makes me want to do my best for these kids.
The lifespan of a counselor is short. And we're mostly really young. I don't feel the sense of purpose and like .... love for life that I feel at camp in any other aspect of my life. I don't know what I'll do after I age out of this summer job. But whatever. I'm trying to end on a genuinely happy note and tell you all that I'm genuinely looking forward to this summer and it makes me feel actually happy to think about camp and my friends.
I am a wild creature and I was born to run around in the woods!!!!
