Alright. The radio, or rather blog, silence is coming to an end. I've been out of communication for quite some time now, and there are many, many reasons for that. A couple of months ago I had a breakdown. Complete and utter. I've quit my job as a stripper for the time being at least. I'm probably dropping at least one of the two classes I'm taking this semester. I'm barely working at odd jobs. The simple fact is that I'm emotionally unstable, and I always have been. I've just been very, very good at hiding it and over-functioning. I'm depressed, I think I may have generalized anxiety disorder. It's all mental, I don't believe any of it is purely biological/clinical in nature, and my therapist has never mentioned the possibility of meds, so I don't think the problems can be fixed with medicine.

Instead it takes work. Doing this work feels like it's slowly destroying me and the life I was building. It may destroy a lot before it's done. But, the title of this blog is scars. And, as a poet, regardless of the fact that I haven't written anything since April, I like metaphor. It makes things make more sense to me, helps me to see things more clearly.

And the metaphor of this time in my life is the scar. Tissue healed over a wound, lighter than the flesh around it. I got my first real physical scar when I was nine. Our dog, Buster, bit me one night, the first night I'd ever spent alone in my parents house. Twelve stitches and a tetanus shot, and a lot of trauma. Yet, I fell in love with my scar. It always helped me tell right from left, I could show it off to my guy friends as proof that I'd been through something important. I still have it, though it's much fainter now. I've yet to fall in love with the scars forming on my heart.

And then there are the open wounds, the festering bits of me waiting to spring up and re-infect me with insomnia, and screams, and hair-pulling, and a panic that tells me to run in no particular direction until I just hit walls and crumble. I want those scars. I want to say that I've healed, that I've been through the fire and come out the other side, with only some ash and scar left over. I want to get better, I want to heal, but there are so many deep painful wounds inside of me.

I've always been physically beautiful. Not always sexy, not always desirable, as I learned from stripping, but always beautiful. There have been so many times, though, that I've looked in the mirror and not recognized the well-shaped face in front of me. My eyes have always seemed out of place, with so much pain and terror and disconnection in them. I don't know what calm looks like shimmering back from the mercury pool of a mirror.

I've wished to be plain, or ugly. I've wished to be fat, or clumsy, or have some sort of outer representation of what I feel like on the inside. Instead I'm beautiful. I didn't choose that, I didn't create that, and I often feel like it's some sort of horrible joke that got played on me. I don't care about my physical beauty. When I'm in a bad space I never look in the mirror. Because I don't want to see how pretty I am. It seems like my face is naturally hypocritical at me and at the world. Because when people see the smart, caring, beautiful, cool girl they miss the broken and bleeding mess that's really who I am most of the time.

So I've spent my life pretending. Not lying, really, just making believe that I was really as okay as everyone has wanted me to be. I took on rationality and sense as if it were a weapon against the raging confusion inside of me, but I ignored the confusion that weapon was supposed to fight. I have years of conflict, confusion, and emotional wounds inside of me.

Regardless of the whether my experiences warrant this level of emotion, it's sat inside of me neglected and ignored for so long that now it's like an infected wound oozing out bits of stupidity and irrationality along with a lot of very self-destructive urges. I'm afraid to go to sleep if it's still dark outside. I'm afraid to answer the phone when it rings. I'm afraid to confront the people who have damaged me and demand some sort of recognition that I was hurt. That it wasn't okay to break my trust, that it wasn't acceptable to ignore me.

I know that many people have seen me as a version of the poor little rich girl. I haven't had all that much horrible in my life, really, when compared with other people's lives. True. I haven't had all the pain that the world has to give, but in 25 years I've had more than a fair share. And I have more to come. Life hurts, that's the way it works, but when you ignore the pain, as I have, it doesn't go away, it doesn't get better, it just builds and begs for some sort of release.

And so I will have more scars. Both physical and mental from all this pain that I've lived and ignored and neglected. I have to face it, I have to feel it, but whenever I get close it crashes down on top of me and I become numb, paralyzed, and fearful of any more. And I have isolated myself, now, in a prison of scars and numbness. I wonder, if at the end of this battle, I'll emerge with scars and stories, or just be another broken body waiting to be mourned.