2004-12-06 - 10:26 p.m.
I finally put my computer back together. My computer: the computer I use at school. The one where everything on it is mine. I was reading through some writing I did. And I was writing in my real life journal. And I was thinking about how I have all these different "journals" I mean different places where a scrap here and a scrap there all added up together probably is the closest representation of me you could get in words. I used to think I had to distribute or scatter the "secrets" or important things I told my friends, so that nobody would have the whole picture. No one would know the whole me. There would always be part of me that was safe. And learning to make myself vulnerable, trying to not scatter but to concentrate myself, to try to achieve real understanding with another person...well, what is that? I want to be known. I want to be understood. I don't think this is unique, but I am not sure where that desire comes from. It's so isolating to think of myself as having an experience that can never be fully realized/felt/understood by anyone else. It also becomes a point of pride. How often I have made a fist and thought,"But no one REALLY understands!" I am not sure whether my first was curled because I was angry at the universe or whether it was some movement of victory. The days go by and the world becomes more intricate, more complex and complicated and unrecognizable, unknowable, completely beyond my grasp of understanding...and I feel like I am becoming simple minded. Maybe I am complex, or maybe I am just an idiot. A bunch of thoughtless reactions programmed by society and completely predictable. I'm leaving the country. I could think of it as leaving my old life behind and starting anew. I don't know if people really start anew. I don't know what change is possible. I don't think I'll ever be a fundamentally different person than the person I've always been. I hardly ever think of myself as having changed, even when I recognize differences in myself. I feel like it all falls under some umbrella label of "Hannah Graves." I don't know what to expect of the future. I don't even know what to hope for anymore. I don't know how to face it. I want to put time behind me but I don't know what I am moving toward. I think I have always thought of online diaries as appeals--maybe cries in the dark--for so many different things. I am not inclined to so publicly cry out very often. I think it's because I am both scared and prideful. And now, I am not sure what it is I am crying for. It could just be that writing where someone might read it is closer to having someone to understand me than writing in my real life journal, which has become my much-resented new best friend. I am glad my dreams have been so vivid lately. They are the most life I am living. They allow windows out of this. They show me that I haven't thought out of everything and am not trapped by a lack of options. I think I do choose comfort rather than progress sometimes. Too often probably. It's not a flattering thing to recognize in myself, but then there hasn't really been a shortage of unflattering things for me to discover and rediscover in myself. The good things in myself I feel like are mostly goals, things I am striving for, best-case scenarios. I may have Graves disease. If I have to a disease, I would hope it would be one that happense to share my name. I am tired of worrying about things that are wrong with me. I forget, in my health, how often I am sick and how much I worry. If I had to guess, I would guess that I don't have thyroid disease. But that sort of guess doesn't mean the possibility stresses me out less. And being sick at a time like this is (as Luke said) a big "screw you" from the universe. I told Georgiana today that I thought the universe was sending me a lot of emphatic messages lately, none of which I entirely knew what to make of. I guess I have ideas. I think the album I am listening to is my favorite of all. I am pretty sure. I had gotten away from listening to it this fall. I listened to it so much this summer. It does make me lonely. It does make me sad. I feel longing and loss. But I feel those things anyhow. In fact, I don't think I can write anymore. I've become crippled again.
