"I Would Drop the Mic if I Weren't so Damned OCD"

I am a writer. I am a listener. I long all night for someone to click the light on and read to me since I'm not getting any sleep anyways. Hate and confusions are synonymous to me most days. I have a condition. Sure. But I AM a poet.

I like to read a loud. I'm trying with all my heart to master performance poetry. To read work that is worthy of my self and of my life's education. But I don't really. Not really. I know that I don't. How could I?

Those lights are so bright they make you sweat. I don't know if you've ever stood before an audience before. Your body does crap it normally NEVER does.

But you think you're brave. so, you step way to close too that mike that every one else has been spitting into all night. You grasp it to try and feel a little more comfortable, open your mouth and you begin to read to strangers your inner most thoughts in a way you've practiced a million times.

You want to rip into the things that really piss you off, to make things you feel people in your life over look and thrust it in the audience's face like a cold glass of water.

I want to talk about an isolated, haunted childhood. I want to write song lyrics about the way the word "freak" makes my air way close and my the colors of my childhood memories turn that much more bland. I want to preform poetry on the tips of my toes with my eyes shut and my neck stretched about how the advice of family members that are completely normal is inapplicable to my situation and when they judge me for being exhausted in a way they can't comprehend, I have to hate internally and then still choose to forgive them.

I want to say THAT. For painfully obvious reasons, I don't.

Psychics are a load of crap

I don 't know any other "psychics". I've done so much research it seems as though I'm re-reading the same things more and more as of late. One of which is that 90% of Psychics in "business" are complete charlatans.

I hate that that's true. It makes me resent myself a little bit. I hate that the most.

 If you know what to look for the way that I do, If you can see it in a person as easily as looking in the mirror, than I suppose it doesn't matter. I just resent it none the less.

I was born this way so I value the purity of Existence deep in every one of my bones. Those who drag the word "psychic" to the streets and light it in neon, well, it feels a lot like discrimination based off of stereo typing. Not that anyone will ever see it like that but to me and who knows maybe even others like me, it feel a lot like society would rather have a colorfully dressed charlatan than even try and conceive the idea of children like me existing as normally as anyone else.

Freaks Have Culture

I think I've said this before but no one is out there making a pretty penny off of childrens book or parenting books that revolve around children of my variety. I mean sure there's "Heather Has Two Mommies" and books for little tykes with disabilities. but for me there was nothing. I had the ranting of my Grandmother, the warnings and fearful glances from my mother, but for me there was just a hell of a learning curve.

I'm 18 these days. All grown up most would say. I go to college and everything ( everything except drive that is but shut up, Im working on it). The inner struggle now has a vocabulary and a root that I'm actively aware of. When i was a kid it was just tears and nightmares. There now seems to be a cliff I've been pushing my mother off of lately.

In her mind the struggle is over. It's done, she did it. She freaking raised a kid who was a Medium. Only, it's not. I've been neglected a culture that belongs to me. It's strange to think of someone having a culture that no one else in there family shares. But Psychics are not a new people or practice. There are cards and memorabilia that dates back to the renaissance. They had attire and beliefs and traditions. These days it's an over make uped woman at a carnival thats playing her part in an american tradition. But my point is that even THAT is apart of my culture.

I've been absolutely forbidden to play with ouija boards, so I'm not even going to bother trying to push that, but the other parts of my culture are just waiting around for me to take part in them. I have a culture of freak shows and classic crystal balls (even just for decoration), tarot cards and side show cultures.

All I'm saying is I'm old enough now to realise I don't fit in with normal people because I've got a culture of my own that already exist for me.

Freaks have culture.

rule of thumb, post rigamortis

Yesterday my mother said "You don't know what "hard" is". She was flustered of course and guilt tripping me to death (as is her right) but for the tenth time just that day I visited introverts island. I entered my cave of self hate and expressed emotions as blunt and mundane as cave paintings.

That's just the problem isn't it. The exact reason why these words are being carelessly uploaded to the internet for no one to read. Because there is no book of painting or poem or song that will ever describe how hard my life is. Nothing could ever prepare anyone for the amount of self loathing and self persecution that has occurred just in my 17 years.

The other day my brother and I were half joking about being broke and taking this freak show on the road. Then things got all too real and I could tell for the first time in his life he was examining the challenges of my life. He laughed and said. " Your life sucks." Then he laughed and said "and you're only 17"

I know it's old news but I can't sleep. I stay up at night and watch my mother dream. We share a room and all night long I feel her mind stirring. I am constantly working my ass off to ignore some thing. Some feeling or emotion I'm picking up or just any thing that I probably shouldn't interact with in public. My kitchen is sometime filled with a strong presence that makes me nauseous. When I do dishes late at night I have to call my mother to keep me company because some thing I should be oblivious to is starring at me with pained eyes.

So aside from the constant struggle to pay attention to what matters (not letting any body see just how strange I am) there is also this giant resentful fear of inadequacy. I can't help the man with pained eyes. I don't know how. Not only am I a freak of nature, a giant cosmic hiccup, I'm also bad at it. My best friend watches a TV show where a beautiful, social and happy go lucky woman help people cross over to SOMEWHERE  and ask why I don't do that for these people. How the  hell would I do that?! Do I light a special candle? Do I gather up random and possibly violent dead people into my living room and brew up a nice pot of kiss my ass?

Sorry for the rant but, Mom, I know what hard is. Stop being frustrating and realize your woes and my woes and " the normies" woes are on completely different levels.

make up

I just spent the last thirty minutes in the bathroom. Hang on folks this isn't something weird. I think. Actually it's always weird. Every second of every day since I was born and until I die.

The first ten I spent looking at myself. Doing the usual. Wondering how on earth I can be so freaking different yet still some how look like every body else. No horns. No strange colored eyes. My teeth are all docile. I look absolutely mundane.

Then I find what I always find. A scar. The length of one of my fingers vertically and a few centimeters  from the top, a one inch line across. A cross. Just above my navel. Just below my sternum. One night in one of THOSE dreams, I dreamt that I was being CURED. the only thing they could think of to alieve me of my burden was to excersice it out of me.

But it hurt. And when I woke up, there it was. A burn the shape of the cross marrying my skin.

It was so long ago. Today it is only a fading scar. Still too noticeable for me to wear a two piece but I have hopes. I saw it today. As I have every other day and it looked absolutely hideous. I snatched up some foundation from a glittering make up kit and attacked it. Piling it on like a weighted prayer. I knew I was asking for too much. That hiding the scar that no one but my mother and sister knows about accomplishes absolutely nothing. That the scar is there wether I can see it or not. I will never be "normal".

Still, I spent twenty minutes pretending to be covering a birth mark or a childhood accident. But as I looked again for anything else that set me apart and found nothing left, I found myself even more devastated. I felt like even more of a shameful mutant. Even more of a blemish on my family tree. This abnormal girl. This gentle abomination will always be hiding in plain sight. Why bother trying. I'm doing such a great job at unwanted solitude anyway.

Surreptitious

I like to think that every one that means something to me knows. The reality is: that's not nearly true.

I live my life surreptitiously. Everyone knows the book worm whose quirky and does strange thing, changes subjects smoothly but noticeably. They know the writer and and musician who smile is always a little too wide. But of all these people who I would sit with daily, laughing and whining about high school, only one of them knew i was never paying any attention a single word any one said.

Crowds are hard for me. I feel what everyone is feeling. I can feel a secret about to burst from some one's lips. The dying need to let something go. Everything. If I'm not too careful or focused, I feel everything because the longer and more I intimately I know someone, the harder it is not to steal little pieces of them without their permission. I don't want them believe me. But, Melissa, Melissa stops people from paying too much attention to the way my eyes glaze over from the strain of my dual reality. She answers questions I obviously didn't catch and I rest with my head in her lap, pretending to be annoyingly detached from everyone.

I've had... unpleasant experiences after telling people. Some take it hard, and I regret it instantly because I know we'll never speak again. One was so excited my heart soared, but then she began to obviously see me as a "what" and not a "who" and it became difficult to be near her at all. I wish I could tell people that matter most to me. It's only fair that they bare their souls to me on purpose that i do the same. They will never really know me, but it's a precaution that I have to take.

My writing mentor, a woman i meet with regularly who helps my writing along, she wants me to journal, just to see what usable personal writing prompts I produce. But I can't so that. I can't spill my secrets for her to see in the bright afternoon light of whatever coffee shop she wants to test out. I need her see me as a WHO not a WHAT. And while I don't plan on telling her, I also refuse to make elaborate lies, like writing fake journals, because that may be even worse than all the truth withholding in the first place.

The people I love, the people who I would lay down in traffic for, they don't know me. If they did my raging, loud, energetic circle of friends, would be a lot smaller. I guarantee it.

Death Breathing Mutant

One of my brother's better formed insults.

I'm not sure how it actually started. I'm convinced that I was born this way. My Mom didn't actually notice the signs until I was old enough for anything to actually register as odd for a human being. A baby does weird crap all the time. Miniature humans play by their own rules.

When I was a toddler I would have an obvious reaction to certain things that struck my Nina as odd. Things she couldn't figure out. My Aunt noticed just as much, she even noticed when I started to keep it a secret in second grade.

My mom knew something was up before she knew I was odd. Things had changed in the apartment we were living in. She would chase laughter down the hallways to find all of my siblings were  in commas at night time. The fridge would open nights and Mayo would be spread on the floor. My sisters doll collection sat at the top shelf near the ceiling and just one particular doll would be on the floor every night. My baby monitor would whisper and I would respond. I'd be out of my crib every night playing but exhausted. My only explanation being that "the baby wanted to play".

We moved, eventually; I barely remember that place now. Things are as strange as ever in our current house. As strange and explainable as me. But I mean hey, I got into college and I haven't yet gone crazy so at least i got that going for me.