I used to take my gratitude for granted. My parents provided a safe and nuturing enviroment for me and my two siblings at home growing up. It is now that I can appreciate the lengths that they went to and everything that they were patient with for putting up with my shenanigans.

I am a different person today not because of just one individual woman. I have been shaped and influenced by strong female figures throughout countless instances of my life. But, the last few years have particularly been both a struggle and in some ways, the most transformational period in my journey to becoming a better human being overall.

i was growing more and more each day, still reminded constantly about the past over and over again.

"Why do you put your makeup on every day? It's not like you can go anywhere."

You know... more and more I just realize how tired I am... how pointless things are. Quite honestly I don't understand most people and I am clearly not understood. The idea of waking up and repeating the same thing day in and day out, feels redundant. Giving up your time and your life in order to get food and shelter rather than just building a shelter, and being done with it, and raising/growing just the food you and your family needs... You try to not be alone and end up feeling more and more alone, alienated and different. Even if the shrink says there isn't anything really wrong with you to worry about, someone will always think your crazy... Try to live and have fun or hell even regain a childhood you never got. People tell you to grow up, stop wasting your life, go get a job and waste it toiling away there instead. Often making garbage no one really needs but somebody will buy anyways. When you get there they always want more, do more, be more motivated, always pushing the idea of the grand big paycheck for hard work, that often never comes. When it does, honestly the work to keep it and your age prevent enjoyment. But you go through the motions see the world more and more for what it is, rationalize, realize, you form ideas, write, design things, think things that could be invented. Even how they'd work. It never matters though, you're not a famous author, doors close quick, your ideas get you called a dreamer. Not skills to actually make them, often with no money to learn the skills... keeps them as ideas, makes them daydreams pipe dreams.. You get expected more and more to conform, to be normal to be the same.. to give up little pieces of you and become the machine... No one tells you the machine is complex, that moving from one part or talking to another part, each part has a slight variation to what normal is.. Things that are o.k to say to do to think, to feel. You try to belong, you drift from place to place, trying to find the part where you are normal. Where you don't feel like less for thinking, for having ideas. Where you don't feel you have to either explain every little though or idea like it's a complex blue print in order to be understood, and then ridiculed for it, not being fully understood anyways. Being seen as stupid because you simplify, ask, and clarify to be sure you understand someone else.. Becoming newly labeled as socially retarded by others... You look and you look.. Eventually if you tried at all, you give up, you close yourself off, you become a shut in.. Alone texting through a screen, trying to fill a hole a gap that doesn't belong. But it's been there for a long time.. Something that was never added... Or is there because to much was added and you went through it too fast or maybe you lost it.. Maybe from moving in the first place, or maybe it was falling ill, bad news constantly, ,maybe you tell people and hope they care and bond.. Maybe you do and no one really does... Maybe you don't because you wish, not to worry others, maybe you don't want pity.. Maybe you live years in pain, health getting worse but never showing it, living longer than expected. Doesn't matter it isn't there, and you can see. Eyes open how different you are the world is, how society is actually fucked up and crazy trying to conform to this illusion of normal. Shunning differences, we are told to embrace as children. How normal isn't a real thing and yet we attack anyone and everything that doesn't fit into that little bubble of what we see as normal. We call it sinful, wrong, sickness, illness, smash it with religion, try to smother it with pills. Create anxiety and depression, and turn a profit from it rather than showing acceptance and trying embrace the difference to create the place where that piece can fit.. That different mind that could have been a scientist, a doctor, an actor, had they not been just seen as different. Yet the machine goes on daily, on and on never ceasing, growing , consuming. Molding it's special little parts to replace the old parts, too many parts, more than needed, producing, consuming more than needed, slowly burning the machine out. Creating more and more pieces that don't fit because they just aren't needed now... Spares in case of defects. Turning lives into cogs and sprockets to drive society, to attempt to cheat death as long as long as we can. Avoiding the natural selection, survival of the fittest, the balance to the food chain....Growing older and older going on and on.. Maybe some days the pain is unbearable not just emotionally, mentally, spiritually but physically as well, it never changes. Expected to breed or forbidden to breed, sex sells and love doesn't, color and brightness fade away, dreams become regrets even different, being part of the machine is all there is. Do it or starve, greed, vanity, lust are everywhere you look, everything is just cold. You lose interest in it all..The frivolousness of it all, parts breaking and destroying other parts, as schools get shot up, countries war and bicker, like over sized children. We argue for rights and freedoms that should honestly have been ours are a birthright, yet are no more than lies, equality for every part. No matter the shape, size, color and how it joins... Because we did not rise up, we became the machine men, the great dictator warned us of, became so close together and yet infinitely apart... A slowly breaking, un-fixable machine that runs our lives, is our lives and how confining, controlling, imprisoning and so very utterly pointless it is.

I am a greatful recovering addict, that much I am sure of. This is the most amount of clean time I have had in the last 15 years or so (170 days alcohol 120 days all drugs and counting). I only was able to achieve this by taking my recovery serious, one day at a time. I had a “slip” in the early days of my sobriety but I was able to tell on myself and get back up. Looking back now, I believe it was best to get that mistake out of the way and that I was able to handle it correctly.

My anger.

How it started. When it started. Why it started.

While the whole world embraces itself during these uncertain times, I sense more and more a strong presence around me.

The ups and downs I've faced over 31 years of living. Man the things I've learned and experienced, some people may never believe the things I've been through but they are all so very true. Majority of my childhood is blacked out because it was too painful to relive so I keep it buried deep inside me, I let little glimpses come out for the right people but not too much, just enough to understand me.

Whenever I have an anxiety attack, the first thing I do is to sit at the corner of my dark room and take the time to reflect on the reasons behind it. I question myself, my past and what lead me to this completely messed up state. I look at my past and the image of a terrified and shy kid comes to my mind.

As the world witnesses a total lockdown following the covid-19 pandemic, several people around the globe seems not to be affected at all but the truth is, no one is immune to the effects of the pandemic