peroxide princess, shine with shark teeth (it's a sign, what if we peaked early?)

song+ Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet -Fall Out Boy -Folie a Deux
book+ nothing
quest+ sleep
upper+ new recipes to play with
downer+ insomnia-spawned self-loathing
attire+ summer pajamas and a hoodie
drink+ water

so sometimes in the middle of a fit of insomnia i find myself lying in bed stubbornly not-asleep and all my brain can do is replay every questionable choice i've ever made and obsess over the millions of ways my life could be different if i'd acted differently. nothing good ever comes of this, because i'm well aware i can't change the past, and even if i could i definitely wouldn't. it would suck if trying to not-experience something bad kept me from something better. mostly all it does is leave me wanting to contact people i haven't seen since i was in my early teens and see how their lives went after we lost contact. i have yet to actually manage to find any of these people, even when i remember full names, i'm apparently terrible enough at facebook that i never find them by searching? mostly i don't remember their names, i just remember how much i hate it when people drop out of my life with no warning and feel terrible for doing it to these people.

sometimes this thought spiral focuses on a particular person, tonight it did and i can't do anything about it, because i can't find him and we haven't had any contact since i was 14 and that's entirely my fault. literally, he called and i pretended to be one of my sisters (i was purposefully super vague on which one), lied saying that i wasn't home, and willfully didn't write down his number since phones freak me out and i knew i'd never manage to call back. in my (very minimal) defense, i was in a terrible place mentally as it was mere hours after coming home from being raped the first time, but he was a good person, and even in a terrible mental state i knew he deserved better. it took me weeks to realize i could have asked for an e-mail or something so i could avoid the phone and still remain in contact with him, but it was too late then. the worst part messing with my brain back then was that not hearing from my first-ever boyfriend in weeks was one of the buttons pushed by my rapist that got me to spend time with him, giving him the chance to assault me. i recall vividly, his logic was "well if he moved away and you haven't spoken in almost a month, it's probably safe to say he's not your boyfriend anymore, so you have no reason not to give me a fair shot." in hindsight i see the manipulation and emotional abuse, but i didn't then. my frustration with my past self is more that i KNEW this guy (the first boyfriend) regularly lost my phone number, i also knew he always found a way to get it again, so i probably should have expected a gap in contact after they moved away, and he did get it again when his parents ran into dad at work and asked for contact info. unfortunately, by then my already-faltering self-esteem had been ground to dust and i felt awful for not holding out longer. i'm pretty certain that my inability to call back led him to the conclusion that i just wasn't up for anything long-distance, so he stopped trying. this doesn't even touch on how the emotional baggage and guilt laid the foundation for the mountain of rape issues (physical and emotional, i still don't like being touched unexpectedly) and set me up for a year of further emotional abuse at the hands of my next relationship, the crazy ex-girlfriend.

i feel like i should clarify, i don't blame anyone but my rapist for what happened to me. i can express frustration with events surrounding that time without taking blame on myself. sometimes i look back on events (this one and others more benign) and say things like " i know if i'd done x instead of y, z wouldn't have happened" and people reply that i shouldn't blame myself. i don't. it is absolutely not my fault, that doesn't keep me from overthinking and going to dark places when my brain can't shut off though. i've NEVER blamed myself for what i went though, even when other people vocally have, i know firsthand rape is never the victim's fault. rape isn't about sex, it's about power.