The following is an unedited journal entry from about seven months after I ended the longest relationship I’ve ever been in – my love affair with alcohol.
If you are not a person who re-entered the world with a sober mind after abusing a substance for a significant period of time – you may not relate. Or, maybe you will, I don’t know your life. It is hard to explain the experience and even though an explanation is not required (nor ever fully completed), I feel a peek inside the confused, raw, easily wounded mind can’t hurt.
If you do relate, then this is something I’m putting out just to say hey, you’re not alone and how you feel is how you feel and that is acceptable.
April 28, 2017
It can be difficult to hang out with other people sometimes.
They have their own memories, their own version of life.
It doesn’t always align with your reality.
You begin questioning your own memories.
How you felt.
Was it validated?
Were you wrong?
Does it matter?
Why do I feel the need to justify my own feelings and experiences to everyone when I’m drunk – or in general.
I guess maybe today when I was questioned, it really got me. Got me thinking.
I was asked why I was trying to be so weird – essentially.
Like, I’m posing as a weirdo.
Someone was judging the fuck out of someone else and I called them out. I said weird isn’t bad. The response was, “why are you always trying to defend the weird”.
Which translated in my mind as this:
They aren’t your people
You are not a member of that club
you don’t know me
no one does
It made me feel like a wannabe
It made me feel how I’ve always felt and have been trying to escape from for my whole life.
At some point
I just stopped – I halted myself.
My insecurity grew so much it overgrew.
It snuffed out my person – it crushed me under a pile.
I’m coming out now, and I’m sad to have missed so much.
I can’t even articulate what I’m going through or how I feel.
It’s all in my head ‘cause when I talk out loud it’s not the same.
I feel that gaze.
I hear that judgement.
—
I stopped learning because I was afraid I was doing it wrong
—
I looked at everyone else before I moved because they all did it better.
Now, I’m trying to do it myself first, without the validation of others.
It’s so hard because people are not afraid of the same things you are. So, they say things out loud – or maybe they feel the same, and when they hear themselves they are just as frustrated with what they’ve said as you can be.
I wish we could all wear our moon on our sleeve.
I wish we could all see each other raw.
—
People who can articulate the raw –
those are the artists.
those are the gems
those are the ones who get it
I still feel like this a lot of the time, but I have a much better sense of recognizing that I’m the only person who has the power to make me feel judged. I may be a couple decades late, but I also have gotten to a place of fully embracing my weird and not being resentful about never fitting into a category. No matter how much we preach about doing away with conformity and “cliques be damned”, there will always be those who lump together. However, the thought that everyone else is in some kind of club that I don’t know about is my own mind creating an illusion. Just like everything else. There is no category for me, I am my own version of weird and I’m good with it.
I may no longer get too far into my head about why I can’t find my place, as I have created my own, but I will always defend the weirdos. To me, weird is the highest compliment, so keep ‘em coming.
-roxii
roxii 
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