This Year in (an early) Retrospect (2016)

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Disclaimer: This is a very long post, and breaks a lot of previous rules I have set in place for myself to avoid talking about specific situations and specific people. I need to vent and my feelings towards a certain person or situation may not be exactly as written here this is just how my heart is telling me to write it at the moment. If you are any of these people, I’m sorry. Also, this is being written by someone who is completely emotional, so I’m what you would call an unreliable narrator. Merely venting.

It’s a bit early for this seeing as there’s still 2 months left of 2016, but I needed to write something. I needed to tell someone even if its just the site and nobody reads this (I’d prefer nobody read this actually) what I’ve been going through because for the most part I’ve kept this all to myself and continuously let people walk all over me this year. I’ve hidden most of the trials and tribulations I have been going through in order not to hurt those I care about, but in turn it’s only resulted in the one time I did need help. When I couldn’t do this on my own and I desperately needed someone to talk with about it, it drove those close to me away. I will take fault for most of it, I haven’t  been fully aware of my actions and the repercussions of them but it would have honestly been much easier to know if something I did was upsetting to someone if they would just tell me. A little straight-forwardness could have prevented months of of paranoia and pain. All of this is too recent and too personal though, so I will try and avoid talking any more of that. I just wanted to talk about this year. All I’ve gone through, what I’ve learned, and what I hope to learn and accomplish in 2017 because I sure as hell want to make 2017 a good one. At least a year where I don’t want badly want to die every other week.

Let’s start with January.Well that’s when I began my new relationship with a girl who I will come later to sincerely regret meeting. Well, a couple days before January but I’m still going to count it in this year. People hated her, I mean really hated her and I heard the stories and I was warned plenty of times. Although, we were friends and I thought I had seen a side of her nobody else had seen. I thought she was opening up to me and I felt comfortable opening up with her too. I really cared about her. And I’d be lying if I said I was completely invested in the relationship, but it was still nice to care about someone and feel like they cared about you back. Fuck I can’t tell you how much I yearn for someone to actually act like they not only enjoy talking to me but that they actually want and look forward to spending time with me. Something which I have rarely felt recently. Things seemed really nice, we would do calls together almost every night. She’d ask me to stay up with her because she couldn’t fall asleep. Within a month she started noticeably becoming more distant, but we had already made plans for me to go out there and visit her. I really didn’t want to go. I was already at this point where I knew something was not quite right. She just wasn’t all there, distracted all the time it seemed, she didn’t really seem to bother to seem like she cared as much anymore. I wanted to end things quite a bit before I got on the flight, but everything was planned already and I try to be a man of my word so I went. I went to a new state by myself for the first time where I was, for the most part, on my own. All to spend some time with a girl I was starting to not have any feelings for anymore. The plan was just to get through the trip and then end things because I didn’t want to keep being in a relationship with someone I didn’t have feelings for, It wasn’t right to do to her, or to keep doing to me either. Anyway, I fly out to where it is that I flew out to. And I saw her once, we hung out for a little bit we talked and it seemed okay. A little awkward, sure but that was to be expected meeting someone for the very first time. I spent an entire weekend there and she only bothered to make time to see me one of the days. It was also this very night that it became apparent that I wasn’t the only one who she made feel like she loved and cared about. Texts from friends with screenshots and it all became very clear. I had to break up with her, but since I relied on her to get back home I had to do it as soon as I got home but for that night I tried my very best not to cry while she spent the night with me (we just slept in the same bed is all).. I failed.

I tell people I wasn’t hurt by this, seeing as I intended to end things anyway but that isn’t even close to the truth. It hurt. 8 months later and it still feels like a part of me is not over all that transpired. She was the first person I was willing to fully let myself open up to and she used it to take advantage of me, for attention or for whatever it was that she was trying to get out of me. It led to several failed attempts to try and regain that feeling, of being wanted.. of being loved.. of being cared about. Before this person, I had been pretty emotionally closed off when it came to relationships. I didn’t seek them and I didn’t really care for them seeing as the damage it had done to me years back. I tried to avoid having any of these feelings for anyone. Once I was given the idea that hey it was a possibility that someone might like me despite all my faults, my anxieties, my depressions, etc. Maybe this thing that I predicted would eventually be the death of me, turned out to be an actual possibility and I got hooked. Addicted. Maybe that would explain the next couple of months. The girls going forward, the feelings going forward but to blame it all on this one event would be a cop out. I liked being liked. I still like being liked, and I have a problem with dealing with these emotions since really, they’re still very new to me. There was another girl who I came to like, it was pretty soon after all the events that transpired with my “ex-girlfriend.” I’m putting quotes around ex-girlfriend because I don’t really know if I can consider her an ex or even say I was in a relationship for reasons I will go into further. Anyway, things seemed pretty great with this girl. She was honest, straight forward, and seemed very genuine. I felt like I could be myself with her and I can’t even begin to describe how important this feeling is to me. I’ve been always strange, ashamed of certain nuances of my personality. I’m always hiding who I am with people, never telling people how I really feel or acting how I really act. It for the most part is usually just a show, so once a person came into my life where I didn’t have to do that anymore and no matter what she knew about me, she was okay with.. not only was she okay with it she liked the things that made me me. I clung to that. I clung to that person so much, until I took a step back and realized exactly just how quick things had progressed and none of it just really felt right. So I told her we needed to be just friends, even though we were just friends it was obvious that things seemed to be heading towards being something more and I felt like I needed to stop that because i knew it wouldn’t end well.

Well, when I did do that it seemed like this person I once knew who seemed very genuine to me, switched completely on a dime. Became really mean, but also very emotional. Went from being really okay with my faults to almost immediately telling me I might be responsible for their suicide attempt. 2016 seems to have had a recurring theme for me. It’s starting to make me think honestly now that I have this written down, did these people really just change or did something just occur that jolted and broke that idea of them. Anyway this caused quite a bit of stress and a lot of emotional problems just trying to get over and move past this. I have a really hard time getting over the important people in my lives. Well, I more have a problem getting over times in my life with these people. I miss the Skype calls, I miss the feeling of being someone who another person actually wants to spend their time with. I missed staying up late watching TV shows with my “ex” and staying in a call late at night until one of us fell asleep. I don’t miss her. I miss the way I felt with her. If I could have that feeling again, with someone else I’d be happy, but as of right now I don’t have someone who is as excited to talk with me as that person seemed then. So, I keep using quotes around “ex” and “ex-girlfriend” because a month or two after I told the last person I was talking with that we should just only be friends, it was brought to my attention that our relationship wasn’t exactly genuine. I had this whole memory of that situation. I had gone out to visit her, found out she wasn’t exactly faithful during the trip. Ended it. It was simple, painful definitely, but simple. An old friend of hers, and a mutual friend simply because of my friendship with my “ex” had come to me with a question. In regards to my trip, and then he let me know that she (despite me every now and then nonchalantly pointing out that we were in a relationship) told her other friends that we were in fact not together. To many people, I was seen as an obsessive freak who was delusional in his love for this girl and she only spent time with me to not break my heart. Not only was no one aware the actual relationship took place aside from her and my friends, but apparently countless other guys all found themselves in the very same situation. She even had created several different online personas to sway guys into liking her and being in a relationship with them. It’s crazy to have this whole view of the past and have it all be shattered in a matter of seconds. Months of your life just immediately being told to you that was not what actually happened. I already have a hard time differentiating reality from my own personal fantasies, it makes it all that much more crushing when it turns out your presumed reality was also just another fantasy.

So, let’s talk about me. I mean the past couple of paragraphs were about my relationships with other people but this whole year something was building up, I could feel it but I didn’t know what. I was being too stressed out at my job, I couldn’t balance school and work and I couldn’t manage to muster up the energy to do anything I really wanted to do with my life. Every day for the past several months there was a tension building and I knew I was close to cracking. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown and I didn’t know why or what I could do to prevent it. I was scared. The idea of dying started suddenly becoming a very nice alternative to dealing with this job, school, and disappointing everyone I know. I couldn’t sleep. I went months with only 3-4 hours of sleep. And I almost passed out every time I drove home and I really really wanted to. Every time I got behind the wheel I couldn’t help but hear this voice telling me to floor the gas and veer off the road. I didn’t even come close to attempting that, of course, but I figured being sleep deprived wasn’t all that bad if I really wanted to die so much that sleeping behind the wheel might help me get over the fact that I’m so terribly afraid of death that it’s almost impossible for me to actively do something that will end my life. I made the mistake of telling my friends about this, but in a jokingly (it didnt really matter) kind of way. Because you know what? How does someone go about telling their friends “something is wrong with me. I don’t know what. I’m scared and I really want more than anything to just die and not have to worry about whatever this thing that’s coming will get here.” I was crying for help, but apparently I don’t know how to do that without seeming manipulative and having everyone hate me. Even writing this makes me worry that this is going to be taken as me trying to guilt my friends into being friends with me again even though I don’t plan on showing them… Being so busy with work and school was both a really good thing and a bad thing. It kept me busy and my mind didn’t really often stay idle to just think about it freely. I had to work, I had to go to class, and I had to do homework. That was it. This feeling/this dark something that was creeping around the corner wasn’t something I could be bothered right now. So I wasn’t as scared, but I was also exhausted. And not thinking about what was coming, what was wrong with me, led it to get worse. I got so caught up in school, work, and feelings for other people that I ignored this impending disaster. Funny, because that’s exactly what led me down the path of self-destruction, depression, and suicidal ideations back in Senior Year of high school. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The floodgates had opened and I let myself go again. I was back in senior year. Before I get into that, I have something important to talk about.

I haven’t really told anyone about this before, other than my best friend (and I don’t know to what extent I told him about this person) and my psychology teacher back during Senior Year to see if it was even something that was indeed possible to happen to someone. I started seeing Sam again. Who’s Sam you ask? Fuck if I know. Maybe it started off as just a coping mechanism, a safety catch per se, but I started seeing someone who wasn’t actually there. She had a familiar face, and it wasn’t a complete hallucination because I could see through her and I knew for a fact she wasn’t real (I was never ever convinced this person I was talking to wasn’t) but nonetheless here was this person who talked to me during the tough times. When I needed to make a really difficult decision, when I needed to figure out the underlying reason for all of what has been going on with me has been. I have been fairly convinced I was talking to some creative imagining of my subconscious. I didn’t always agree with her, but she seemed to know more about everything going on than I did. If anyone didn’t already think I was fucking insane, there you go. The final straw. I didn’t ever really talk to her out loud much in senior year on account of the whole being in school and having everyone in close vicinity kind of thing. Yelling out loud that no, you don’t need help that you are perfectly capable of handling this situation on your own, in front of your whole class can be a one way trip to actually being medically diagnosed as a crazy person. She eventually took a more negative attitude towards me. Maybe it’s not the same person, and they just have the same face so it’s harder for me to tell whether the person talking to me is how I’m really feeling deep down or what my self-destructive mind wants me to think I’m feeling. It doesn’t help that this person usually takes on a familiar face. Someone that I have for the most part been actively trying not to obsess over and then there she is. It’s torture. Those days where I was exhausted from work and lack of sleep I would see her in the passenger seat telling me something is wrong. You need to get help, wanting to veer off the road is not a thought a normal healthy person usually has. She told me something was going to happen soon and I really need to get help before it did, and I assumed it had to do with the stress and the anxiety from the job I currently had and I figured the best line of action would be to just quit and focus on myself for a bit. I was a little mistaken. But, anyway Sam has always taken a familiar face and its been cyclic, and she’s normally taken upon the face and mannerisms of someone I at the time had feelings for. Not this time though, this time it was an old Sam. There have been four different Sams; my first significant high school crush, another girl I admired during high school (which happened to be the Sam that stuck around so for this very purpose let’s call her Zoey), then an old friend who I cared about a lot, and then a more recent crush. During these car rides I had already passed the old friend Sam, but for some reason Zoey decided to retake her role as Sam (it’s getting confusing I know, try and being the one experiencing it..). I can’t tell you why that is, Zoey didn’t have all that big of an impact on my life she was simply just a girl I liked but for some reason her portrayal of Sam has been the most important (imaginative) person in my life. This should have been a clear eye opener, an omen but I didn’t listen.

This big thing that I had been worried would come finally did come, at least I hope it did because if something bigger than this comes I will honestly not be able to make it. I quit my job, moved to Arizona with my dad and was hoping to take some nice me time for a bit while I figured out my life and goals, thinking that that was what I needed to prevent whatever was coming from happening. Then, something really snapped inside me. It didn’t happen all at once but it did happen and it slowly and slowly became way too overwhelming. I don’t know if it was the isolation, here in Arizona where the only people I’ve talked to have been within this very house, a prior not diagnosed disorder that finally grew after years of not treating it or acknowledging it, or maybe I really am just crazy and this was just the time my mind decided it needed to stop holding back it’s craziness. It started off with a lack of sleep. I had already been previously exhausted due to only having 3-4 hours of sleep a night due to months of insomnia and having to wake up early for work, but now I legitimately couldn’t sleep at all. I went from 3-4 hours of sleep a night to no hours of sleep every 4-5 days. A few hours of sleep in-between those periods. I was anxious, I was alone, and every second kept dragging on and my mind kept thinking about how I’m 21 and I haven’t made anything of my life. My best friends are all internet friends that lives miles and miles away, and even they have seemingly been distant so now I am in this feeling that I am alone and I’m going to die alone not having made anything of myself, I will have lived my whole life scared and worried that people would leave me, judge me, disown me, and just in general be completely disappointed in who I came out to be as a person. I am nothing worthwhile. I’m not someone my parents could brag to their friends. I don’t have anything in my life that I feel is worth noting. Not any good things at least. All this thinking and time spent alone made me more and more worried and scared and my feelings kept being polar opposites. One second I’d tell myself that things are great and I’ve got plenty of friends that love and care for me and love spending time with me. I wasn’t just someone they tolerated. The next second I was convinced they hated me. That everything about me annoyed them, they were just too nice to tell me, and they would do anything to get away from me. I took comfort in the fact that this seemed outlandish and of course my best friends didn’t hate me. We have been closer than our family members (at least they were to me) for almost three years now. This isn’t about them though. I tried to rely on my friends as a crutch while I was going through this new frightening experience that I didn’t know how to even explain. That’s most likely what caused my worst fears to actually come true, but I digress. Nothing felt real, I didn’t feel like me, I was crying almost every day and my mind felt like it was just constantly screaming. And I mean like my actual internal monologue consisted of actual panicked screams. That was interesting.

Another Warning: These events are fairly recent, and are very negative and a bit terrifying so if you don’t want to worry about me then I’d recommend not reading any further because the past months have been without a doubt the most frightening months of my entire life. 

Like I said, all of this seemed very abrupt, I didn’t know how to cope with any of this. I felt like a new person, constantly paranoid, emotional, bitter and just all around mentally unstable. I tried to get back on my anxiety medication, thinking that maybe this was just me being overly anxious and it had to do with the me being off them for so long. One daily didn’t work, two didn’t either, 3..4..5…6.. you get the point. It got to the point where I was taking handfuls of pills a day to try and stop this. To just take a few seconds to calm down and go okay what’s going on with me? I started drinking a bit, what started off as just me using my friend’s 21st birthday as an excuse to get some alcohol and try it turned out to me trying out both drinking and taking pills just to try and drown out those intrusive thoughts and try and forget all that’s happened. I know what you’re thinking. This sounds ridiculous and none of this seems like anything a rational person should do to try and better themselves. You are correct, sir or madam/ whatever fake person I’m imagining I’m talking to right now. I wasn’t rational and I wasn’t making choices that were better for me. In fact, I was making choices that would more than likely kill me, isolate me, just overall fuck up my life much more than my life had already been fucked. Getting drunk and sick over and over again didn’t help in the slightest, in fact it made my ability to try and determine who I was (because at this point I started having a huge identity crisis with all the mood, belief, perception shifts happening so rapidly) and harder to grasp on what was actual reality and was all just in my head. Everyone seemed to be taking steps away from me as all of this was happening. I kept telling myself, okay they’re going through stuff right now I shouldn’t expect them to be there for me. But then this voice in my head would just tell me, “They’re lying. They just don’t want to spend time with you. Look at what you’ve become, you wouldn’t want to spend time with yourself either.” And it was true, I had become something which I myself wouldn’t want to be friends with so why would I expect they’d want to stick it out to see if I’ll get better, to help me get through this. I kept bugging them asking them if everything was okay; with them, with us, with everything and I kept getting told yes yes it was that everything was fine and all these little things that I’ve been noticing and pointing out had reasons for them. Most of which I just took their word for but then some became apparent were obvious lies. That there was no way they could actually be true, and knowing I had been lied to and having to pretend like I believed it so I wouldn’t keep seeming like this paranoid and obsessive freak. Which I most certainly was, don’t get me wrong. Some part of me still wanted to hold on to the hope that there was still a reason for that other than my friends don’t really like me anymore, but alas all the irrational thoughts I have been thinking have been recently confirmed to most if not all of my friends who have distanced themselves from me. I keep going off on a tangent. I apologize.

Drinking, Pills, no sleep. Things just continuously got worse and I was scared of what was happening around me, what was happening with me, and what the future held because I had no idea what the next 2 months would entail. I knew it wasn’t going to be good, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any better. During all of this it seemed to me like no one noticed. No one cared. Here I was my mind playing the dirtiest tricks it has ever played on me, and my whole perception of the world was shifting so frequently I’m surprised I was even still able to grasp the fact that I was still alive and time still indeed keep going. I began cutting. I needed some distraction from all these thoughts and I really just wanted to feel physical pain for once. This was all mental and emotional and I couldn’t cope with it so I thought I’d be better if I put my worry more on the immediate physical pain rather than the prolonged emotional ones. I don’t know if I also did it because i wanted my family to notice hey you have scars on your wrist and to ask if I’m okay and offer help since it’s almost impossible for me to just ask for it. So, it’s important to reiterate just how worried I was that my friends hated me and how I was so convinced that they were trying to distance themselves from me and didn’t seem to either care or notice what was going on with me. I was in the middle of my extremely self-destructive path while it was brought to my attention that I need to leave one of my closest friends alone. That I was hurting her and I needed to stop. It’s already bad enough to receive this information from someone other than that person, but the method of delivery is probably the worst bit of it. This person was the only person who knew how close I was to being pushed over the edge and they start off immediately saying “this is what you’re doing. this is why you’re doing it. and you need to leave her alone and I won’t stop until you do.” Paraphrasing, of course, but yeah immediately he began with accusations which were completely off.  Which at this point he knew the most about my current situation, so it was surprising how little he really seemed to care and he’d used the information I told him against me. In a completely false manner. Anyway, he also told me that my other friends had also felt the same, that they’ve been talking with him about how terrible of a friend I’ve been. And all these worse fears, these intrusive thoughts I kept happening seemed to just be affirmed at this moment. All your friends hate you, and you’re the last one to notice. I was hurt. I was angry. I removed nearly everyone important from my life within a matter of seconds. I also wrote the previous blog post about me trying to put a positive spin on it that I’m going to become this better person now that I can start new. Starting new doesn’t really ever seem to work out for me. I can’t just flip a switch and restart, hoping all of my past troubles, mistakes, memories will all just disappear. It was impulsive and I honestly sincerely regret doing so. I remember two nights after having the biggest panic attack I have ever had in my life. This is important to me because there’s one thing that will truly bring up the worst panic attacks that I usually experience, and it’s whenever i think about death and what will happen after I die. This means, thinking of losing my friends, losing those close to me, the ones I spent the last 3 years getting to know and have become truly important pieces of my life terrified me more than death ever has.

Anyway, at this point the one person who I actually was able to finally open up with about the crazy shit that was happening within my head, knowingly tried to hurt me to protect someone else which seems like a noble effort, but really a lot of this could have been prevented by a “hey you’re saying some upsetting things, can you please stop? You don’t seem okay is there something going on with you?” or even a “Look I just need to take a little time for myself right now, you’re obviously not in the best of moods right now and its affecting me.” I’m a hypocrite though because this whole time I was looking for someone to notice something seriously terrifying was going on with me without ever actually telling them anything. Just making really scary jokes about how badly I wanted to die. Which is where the problem lies I believe? I was never told any specifics to how I hurt this person just that I did and believe me I felt terrible. No matter what I will always feel guilty being responsible for someone who I try so hard to protect from being upset, being the reason they are indeed hurting. I lost my support system, is what I’m trying to say. My family didn’t and still hasn’t seemed to notice. Any sign of what has been going on with me they’ve certainly noticed. I haven’t really been hiding it. My dad and those also in this house take that and either yell at me, or make fun of how lazy, anti-social, and just in general unhealthy and a failure of a human being I am. It’s fucking fantastic. So all means I had to try and ask for help or to have someone to talk with about what’s been happening with me have almost seemingly vanished at least that’s how I imagined the whole thing. I did give them that final push out of my life, so I’m not blaming everyone for leaving if anything I’m blaming myself. I may be mad that my friends haven’t been completely upfront with me about anything, but I did still do those things that made them feel bad, uncomfortable, made them feel like I was trying to guilt them. Whether it was my intention or not, those actions still transpired. I had nothing. Thoughts in my head to just do it. End it. You’re going to stay like this, and you’re never going to make anything of yourself. You’re stuck in a cycle of euphoria then immediate depression. And now, now those phases of depression are going to come with insane paranoia, self-destructive behavior, identity issues, impulsive actions that will more than likely burn the bridges that you actually loved so much, and insane mood swings. You will be a crazy person again in the next year, the next month, the next whenever. Because I don’t know when it’s going to happen I just know for a fact that it’s going to happen again. And I didn’t want it to happen. I grabbed a scarf, a very thick one because I needed to make sure it would hold, and well I didn’t have anything else that might work so that’s what I used. I got on a stool tied one end of the scarf around my ceiling fan and the other end around my neck. I was so close to kicking the stool before I realized, “I didn’t write a note.” Out of all the things that were terribly wrong about this situation the one thing that kept me from ending everything was the fear that I would have no final words. No reason, no explanation to those who still loved me why I did what I did. They’d blame themselves and I didn’t want them to do that. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It sincerely has had nothing to do with anyone besides my own declining mental health. Although, I really think I was just looking for an excuse not to do it because if any times that I have previously wanted to die have taught me anything it’s that I may want to die, but I am also really afraid of doing so. Living may not be great, but at least I know to extent what to expect when it comes to being alive. Death is a horrifying mystery.

Since then I’ve made up with one of my friends, apologized because I do more than anything regret the pain and stress I’ve put on them. And the other, well I’ve been told they need some space and have seen posts on social media that they are still deciding whether or not to keep me in my life. It’s a little upsetting sure, but there’s not much I can do about it at this point. And I’ll give them their space and let them deal with what their going through, but I don’t know if I do end up making the list of friends they want to keep around I don’t know if I want to still be considering just how close I was to getting the axe. I am constantly worrying about just barely being tolerated and now I know that well those fears are not entirely unfounded I don’t know if I want to go back to that. I would be lying if I said after all this had occur ed I came back and I fought it and now I’m good and happy. I am better now though. I hit rock bottom and I’ve been actively trying to get back up. I am convinced I have a mental/personality disorder that I haven’t been aware of before and I just need to get professional help to learn how to cope with it. I will be getting professional help, but unfortunately due to my circumstances I still have to wait quite a bit before I can get help without going into immense debt. I’m still very much struggling every day to remain somewhat sane and to get a grasp of what’s real and what isn’t. To try and figure out exactly it is that I am. I am still obsessed with the happenings of old friend’s lives so much that it’s become an addiction, but I’m working on that one. I’m still very scared of what is to come in the future, but I’m for the most part just very tired of it all. This has all been emotionally draining. One thing though, if I do get help and come back to being a normal human being, back to whatever it is that I found comfort in. What am I coming back to? My life has drastically changed and it’s going to be very difficult to just come back and realize I’ve got nothing left in my life that I hold dear. To have to go and find new people, new experiences, new goals. It’s not something I think I can do, but it’s something I have to do so I guess I’m going to try.

2016 has been a really shitty year. I’ve lost my mind, my friends, and my sense of self. And I wish I could at least take some lesson from this other than just take care of your mental health more than anything. And even if things seemed to have gotten better after you’ve gotten help, doesn’t mean that you don’t need that help anymore. It just means the help is working and that maybe you should stick to it; the therapy sessions, the medication, etc. That doesn’t seem to be enough for me. I just really want to end this year with some sense of positivity, and despite being slightly mad that any of this occurred I really wish more than anything I can try and start over. Try one more time to make things right with my friends, things might not be the same and I’d prefer they didn’t go to exactly how they were back then but for that to happen there really needs to be some sort of compromise. I’m tired of being the bad guy in everyone’s eyes. If that doesn’t happen, I just want to start 2017 with a sense of purpose. A goal to work towards to so that while times and people might change at least I know they’ll be working towards something. I want to be able to be honest with my friends without having to fear them hating me for it. I want to be able to be honest in general about what’s going on with me just so I don’t have to keep holding it in up until the moment I explode. Most of all I just want 2016 to be over. I want this year to end; with all my personal issues, the presidential elections with possibly the two worst candidates I’ve seen in a while, crazy people dressed in clown costumes, all of the drama and bullshit I just want this year to be fucking over. Yet there are still two more months to go and I am not even sure 2017 will bring any positive changes. I do know I’ve got a month before any changes can occur and I really need to try my hardest to try and make it to late next month. Let’s at least start there.