April, 1995

I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t keep hitting myself, beating my head against the bedroom wall, wanting to kill myself but totally unable. I always thought I’d just commit suicide when things got bad enough. Why not? I was never going to have a good life anyway.

But after years of threats and gestures, I lost credibility with myself. I don’t even have the guts for suicide, something else to hate myself for.

Suicide won’t solve anything. The only people who’d care are the ones I don’t want to hurt, like my brother. Everyone else, the ones that helped drive me to it, they’re not going to change their opinion.

Killing myself would just confirm that I was crazy. Nobody would blame themselves for my death, which is a shame. Even the funeral fantasy has gotten old.

So now that I’m pretty sure I’m not going to kill myself, I have to find a way to live.

I’m afraid of hurting myself. Every time I sit on my bed beating my head on the wall behind me, I worry that I’m going to give myself brain damage. But I don’t know what else to do. When the urge to beat myself rises, my body feels like it can’t be stopped. Even when I don’t want to do it, it happens, and that’s scary. I’m out of control.

I’m supposed to make an appointment with the shrink Gerry recommended, and I really want to get help, but I also feel like nobody’s going to be able to help me, and I can’t take another failure right now.

Last month I went to a shrink who told me I should wear a rubber band around my wrist and snap it each time I felt like sucking my thumb. Yeah, that’s going to cure my lifelong thumbsucking habit, a rubber band. How fucking stupid can you be.

I know the thumb sucking is related to the abuse, but understanding that doesn’t make it go away. I can’t erase the past, so how can I erase the legacy of the past? I’m going to be sucking my thumb forever, living in shame, never be able to have kids or a normal life.

Jackson told Ava about my thumb. She read a poem last week that had some line about “the clucking sounds of her comfort,” or something, and I knew that was me. Humiliated again.

Obviously she’s been jealous of me since the beginning, way before things happened with Jackson. But me being with Jackson made it a lot worse. It doesn’t matter that they were never really together, she was in love with him and I knew it.

She’s like, Oh, I’m happy for you guys, nothing has to change, and in some ways it didn’t. We’d still hang out all the time at readings and in the neighborhood. But this whole year she’s just been waiting, sabotaging us from the sideline.

I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier. She’s been a horrible person since we met. She was so insistent. Hi, I’m Ava, and we are going to be friends. Seriously, that’s what she said the first time we met at the reading at Fez.

Everything in my life sucks and hurts and sucks some more. I can’t even think about my mother without wanting to scream. If it weren’t for my brother I would never see her again, but I can’t do that to him. He’s the only person I truly love in the world outside of my cats.

So I’m stuck with her at least for a few more years, and there’s no way I can take it any more, seeing them every Saturday, her calling all the time.

The job is bullshit. I should have known from interning there how fucked that place is. The only good thing is that a) they sometimes publish my stuff, and b) they pay me. Other than that, it’s a shitshow.

I’m going to be 26 in August, and I’m going to still be a thumbsucking, fit-throwing, pothead psycho who can never have a normal life and who nobody will ever love. I’m so miserable and full of self-hate, and I can’t even kill myself. Something has to change.

Surprisingly, I feel somewhat better for getting all that down.

(To read the girl bomb diaries in chronological order, click here.)