screamingunderneathpt.3: It's been 18 years.
posted 2026-09-12 03:25:09
I spent the better part of 12AM-3AM trying to remember what password I would have used at age 17 or age 16 or 14.
Once I admitted defeat, and embraced that 18 years of memorized passwords and secrets is too thick a barrier, I started flipping through my older entries.
It felt a bit like picking through a thicket of wild blackberries after peak season; looking under leaves for berries that aren't too soft from the humidity or too eaten by bugs. Looking for...searching for, wondering and being entertained at my brain before so much happened to it.
It's funny seeing what I thought of the world, it seems like it was mostly ruminating over crushes and processing the early stages of mental illnesses that I had no words for yet, chasing after weed and alcohol and escape and sex. My current partner laughed at some of my teenage recollections a few weeks ago, he called me a bad kid. I laughed at his wonder at my delinquency. But looking back, yeah I really was a bad kid.
I'm 36 in a few weeks now, I wonder what teenage me would think of that. I'm sure she didn't expect to make it to this age and could not imagine a world this far away.
But if she did imagine herself in her mid 30's I think she would've imagined us living in a studio apartment in NYC making a full living as an artist and writer with a lover who was obsessed with me and I them.
Instead I live in a home not far away from where I wrote those entries between 2006-2008 and before on the old hatelife. With a wild garden (teenage me would've liked the garden) I do make a living as an artist but certainly not a thriving one by any measure. I stopped writing fiction entirely after events in 2010-she wouldn't like that fact at all, that in a few short years her well for writing would be shut off entirely and filled back in with concrete.
Though I do have a lover obsessed with me, like all things, it's complicated. I'm sure teenage me would be disappointed I wasn't married by now, and honestly, as I reckon with selling the wedding dress I purchased for a wedding that never happened, 35 year old me is pretty disappointed about that too.
I was chuffed to see how much had not changed about me either.
In 2008 I wrote:
All in all:
I'm still a vegan
I still have poor jugement skills
I still make the same mistakes
I still failed math
I still graduated
I still smoke
I'm still as silly as yesterday
I'm still as twisted up as to what religion I'll subscribe to as before.
Dancer in the Dark was still the only movie that made me cry.
Radiohead is still awesome.
I still don't like cucumbers.
I'm still blind as a bat
~~~~~~
I am still a vegan, it's year 24 or something like that.
I didn't ever develop good judgement skills.
I do indeed still make the same mistakes, something about neural pathways or something
I eventually passed my math classes.
I did indeed graduate.
I stopped smoking, only about 9ish months ago.
I'm still as silly but in a different genre.
I feel less conflicted about religion, I've lived the bulk of my life at this point as a Muslim woman, though the more I learn about early human religions the more I'm willing to entertain religion writ large is just a series of stories we keep telling to one another and mistranslating.
Dancer in the Dark is still the only movie to have moved me to tears. I can't think of another movie that's made me sob outright.
I stopped listening to Radiohead these past 2 years but they are intwined in nearly all my previous playlists like a tumorous growth.
I actually do love cucumbers now, not sure what all that was about.
And yes, still blind as a bat.
I still knit and up until a month ago I still had my turtle. When I was looking back at my entries I was heartened to see the small mentions here and there about my precious cold blooded pet. He died exactly a month ago at the age of approximately 22.
Last night I had a dream that he was sick and I had him under heating lamps, but he suddenly started to thrash and pieces of his shell came sloughing off of him.
I tried to help pull some of his scutes off but he was in agony so I thought to rinse him off in the sink. But as the water ran over him, his shell started to dissolve. I held him in my hands and started running for help. I held him and ran through the darkness of night looking for my partner to help me, looking for more light to assess my beloved. He began to shrink and shrink until he was just a tiny marble in my hand. I started to cry and asked "why do I have to do this again? why is this happening? he already died."
The dream was a little on the nose for how I spent the months of July and August. Seeing my boy decline day after day and not respond to antibiotics, trip after trip to the vet for help for imaging for fluids. Sleepless nights watching him sleep under heat lamps and checking that he was still alive and still fighting. Trying different meds, trying to get him to eat. At the end he couldn't swim anymore so I held him in my hand and guided him through shallow warm water. There was nothing I could do to save him, like the dream, he just dissolved in my hands- of course, not literally mind you. But he did waste away before my eyes. In June he was about 350 grams, when he died he was 264.
But all this time he was here, so many houses and moves, 2 states, after becoming estranged from my family, he was my constant companion.
I still haven't the heart to break down his tank, empty and sanitize it. Everyday I say that I need to do it today but I still haven't managed it.
Maybe today.
Cryo: body = dead
posted 2026-09-01 17:25:58
I seriously need to relax on this binge drinking / drug taking bullshit, being bedridden the whole next day, not able to eat or move is getting more awful.
sobriety has been a increasing thought and honestly I know I need to go down that journey If I ever want to truly heal. I just don't know myself without being a party boy twink. im known to be crazy, messy and a good time girl. I know im so much more beneath all this facade, but it's my only escape from feeling like a 24/7 corpse with chronic dissociation.
today felt even more crazy after I fainted and collapsed from a fucking vaccine, it was way more scary than any near OD ive had, because I thought I genuinely died. waking up to two nurses holding me with no vision and my heart pounding, not knowing anything was terrifying.
yes, I should of eaten before but holy fuck this was another attack on my nervous system failing. it took me 15 mins of lying down topless with a wet towel on my head to feel normal.
tbh dying in a gay clinic with the cutest mammy nurses around me would of been bliss. those few seconds of passing out genuinely felt fine though, like did I technically die then since there was such low oxygen to my brain.
waking up was the horrific part, head spinning and feeling like I was newborn baby trying to breath for the first time, not able to comprehend life itself. it made me feel even less real, with genuine terror of not knowing if I was alive or dying.
I ate a lovely vanilla cronut ever and had my fav onigiri as a reward for surviving. I never wanna go back tho fuck that mpox vaccine.
CountYourBlessings:
posted 2026-08-31 15:57:01
I hate when you send someone an meme or video that you know they’ll like based on things they’ve said or done while you’re around them and then they keep sending you similar shit because now they think you like that wack shit.
No!! I know you like that wack shit, I’ve never said I like that wack shit, EVER!!!! the fuck?
topavia 2019: if you can't sit in the suck with me...
posted 2026-08-04 10:17:22
a friend of mine just broke it off with his lady because he went through a rough patch when he had to make the decision to put his mom in a nursing home. he said, "she just couldn't sit in the suck, so i don't want her around in the spoils".
i reluctantly admitted that while i still do not adopt other people's character flaws, age has made me much more accepting of them. my Dad used to say, "if no one died and no one is pregnant, we can figure it out" - i was in high school then, so the pregnancy part was really important. =)
today, at the ripe middle age of 52, i just sort of look at character flaws like ingredients in a recipe. for the life of me, i don't know why there is cream of tartar in most cookie recipes - but it's there for a reason. our flaws are like a pinch of pixie dust that could change the whole darn thing if it wasn't there. right? or maybe i'm just to the point where being inconvenienced is a greater ick than suffering a semi-flawed mate. who knows...
there are so many better things to talk about. S got her masters degree about 3 years ago, she's married now too! and M, oh M... she bought a house all on her own, and she finally stopped dating instagram models and found a quality man with a brain. he asked me if he had my permission to propose to her this fall on her birthday trip. so both of my greatest accomplishments are living amazing lives. we still have family dinners, play board games, call each other every day, and are each others best friends. they are better people than i am. a little kinder, a little sassier, even a touch more quick-witted - if you can imagine that. i freaking knocked it out of the park with those two.
and finally, i went back to NY this weekend to see my mom and for a high school reunion. my mom has always been a challenge. i dread going home because of the toxic situations. but this time was different. she's in a wheelchair now, on oxygen, physically not the greatest. she's got a wasps wit - sharp and stinging. in her prime she was brutal. but this was different. my sisters are alcoholic gambling addicts that really don't even take my mom out of the house because the wheelchair is too cumbersome they say. so i took her out every day, forced her to take a shower, do her hair, put on pressed clothes. i took her shopping, to the cemetary to see my Dad, and to the dive bar down the street. she smiled, she chatted with strangers, she fit right in. the next day we went to a beach restaurant - patio table right next to teh sand. we ate steamer clams and drank micheladas. she watched people, dogs, kites, boats....we chatted about how things had changed and how much she missed road trips and adventures.
it took 52 years, but i had the best weekend with my mom. i haven't forgotten the past, but maybe, her recipe card is just different than mine. at 52, that's okay.
journal mates, i hope life has been everything you needed.
rockbottom:
posted 2026-07-21 09:09:58
The Grand Theft Auto curse is real, I swear.
2001: One of the worst years of my life. GTA 3 is released.
2008: One of the worst years of my life. GTA 4 is released.
2013: One of the worst years of my life. GTA 5 is released.
2026: One of the worst years of my life. GTA 6 to be released.
This millennium, every GTA with a number or Roman numeral after it coincided with an extraordinarily dark period of my life. The chances of that happening are miniscule: around 0.1%. It's making me question whether it can still be explained by mere coincidence after all these recurrences.
Now I'm kinda hoping there's an even bigger delay for GTA 7 than there was for GTA 6. C'mon Rockstar, develop a dozen Red Dead Redemptions or something.
PuzzleCoder: Hummanity Is Lost
posted 2026-06-12 00:06:49
I have cleaned my life up. Quit sticking needles in neck and literally found the reason to life my life in a healthy and productive way. Yet my new job involves me managing 20 people who all expect to be paid the most for doing the least. I have to babysit grown ass people. I understand that we all have things going on in our lifes and want to enjoy the summer but where do you draw the line when it comes to giving a fuck about your job???? the biggest part of the world that I am apart of want everything but will not give up even 2 miniutes of theyre day for the greater group. WTF is this world coming to?? I am working 60 hours a week getting good grades in college, staying sober and helping my employees not lose there jobs by standing up for them when they dont deserve it just cause it's right. what do i get???? fucked in the ass and having to push back pay for dinner and for parking.While they get a day off and I get to go to work sore from a night of getting jsckhammerd on. Metaphorically speaking. No bias just speaking on the term of dry rough sex that I have to pay for and go to work after my "lover" takes pto and goes home..... ahhh I love being the only one who has pride in my work and is really a patient person.