I don't have much of anything worthwhile to say tonight. Maybe I never did. Maybe, like all of us, I only wanted to think that my voice, my perspective, was unique and worthwhile, even though there are so many of us that that can hardly be true...only, none of us want to face it, because otherwise, why bother?

I thought.....I thought things were different. I thought that I had value as a person, as a friend, that my voice meant something, that what I thought mattered. It doesn't. I thought....so many things. I was so wrong. So wrong about so much.

I only write here because I have no other place to scream and cry and struggle. People are tired of it and I am tired of trying to tell them the same old thing in new ways, to voice the pain in a way that will get some kind of a different answer that might help...but there's no help. I write here because I can't talk to you, because I mean so little that you don't ever want to hear the sound of my voice again. When I see you, I wish that I could shrink my presence into nothingness so that my existence would not affront you....that I could hide, hide from this pain, from this world, find a safe place silent and without this not-belonging, this not-welcome, not-fitting in. It hurts beyond words anyway...there are no words.

Things are shattered, and I can't fix them. The pieces don't fit together and I get so tired, so tired...they don't come together in any kind of coherent way....and I don't know why I can't give it up, why I have to try so hard to make sense of it, when it's driving me out of my mind....they all say I have to just accept that it won't make sense, but all my sense of security in life, of trust in other people, of my own ability to read them, to interpret what they say and do and mean, it's all been obliterated. It was all only an illusion. People are so dangerous, and yet we need them, so deadly, and yet we love them, when the ones we love the most possess the strongest venom.