I Live Like A Serial Killer And I’ve Learned To Accept It

Without the room with the decapitated heads, duck vaginas, and voodoo dolls. I’m a 30-year-old woman-girl-type person, but if you walk into my apartment, you would probably guess either a 16-year-old pot smoking runaway skateboarder or a 45-year-old divorced middle-aged man with a mild coke/drinking problem lived here. I mean it doesn’t smell and I still pay my rent on time but there are just a few things I’ve been neglecting like my dishes in the sink for 2 days, uncapped half drunk bottles of rum and there’s a hole in my sock. Many holes in my socks. I actually own only one pair of socks. You know those people who get socks for Christmas and hate them? I’m not one of them please donate all of them to me.

I’m not really sure how I let this happen but I think it happened when I moved out. I didn’t feel the pressure to psychotically wash my dishes 4 times in a day or sweep my floors until they had a plastic-like shine to them. I didn’t feel like I needed to prestinely keep my room empty and soul-less or have my space look like it came from a catalog. I’m not saying that my place is a pigsty of a place is any better because it isn’t and I should probably do something about, but there’s something to be said about people who have an obsessive need to keep everything in order and constantly under control.

I used to be that person that needed to compartmentalize everything in my life because I thought that it made sense to. I thought it was the only way I would be able to function and stay one step ahead of everyone and everything. I thought that I could keep everything under lock and key and that included my ability to empathize with and love every single person that I let into my world. I didn’t treat them like they actual humans with real feelings and different personalities, but instead I chose to have these grandiose expectations that included how my mother and should parent to how sharp the corners of my bedspread needed to be.

It turns out that control is not all it’s cracked up to be and it’s actually just really exhausting and a symptom of a bigger sickness. For me, it was trying to maneuver and manipulate through my life and the lives of others, to somehow come out on top. That I would do the leaving first instead of letting myself be seen and potentially being left; always had an exit strategy. My self-worth, esteem and identity was stuck in people and I had no idea that every time I made contact with someone, the pieces of me that I was so protective of, were escaping me. People were fucking disposable to me and this was a mask that cracked pretty severely when I realized that my life was like a fucking sterile mental asylum and I was a fucking crazy piece of shit trying to desperately to not get caught.

I wish that I could say I moved on, that I learned something and I had a great epiphany but I didn’t. I snapped and went into a downward spiral of madness that not only unravelled me, and is probably still doing so, but changed me. Fuck all of that white light, I loved and I learned bullshit, it doesn’t exist because life doesn’t provide that type of perfect and controlled narration. It’s messy, you get beat up a million times over and if you’re strong enough to stand the punches, you end your life with a little more knowledge than bruises. I’ve learned that I can’t control anything and that I can’t block myself off from things, because I rob myself of joys in other areas.

Everyone and everything is flawed, nicked, bent and fucked up, including myself and my apartment and that’s not always a formula for the best life, but things could be worse., Eating mac and cheese and not doing the dishes or loving someone perfectly or putting myself out there to only be rejected is not great, but at least I’m fucking authentic and not living behind some curtain. And maybe I should cut back on the booze but that’s another story. FOR ANOTHER TIME. In rehab. Or a 12 step program.

So here I go. Nothing really solved, just accepted and maybe a tiny baby step towards some kind of balance.