journal app entry — Saturday, July 19th 2025
This might delve into the cruelty cycle and I’m not sure how I feel about that theory lately, so I will try to avoid it. But what I’m about to say is cruel.
Two nights ago as I was driving home from his house, I cried, and I felt part of my soul crumple within me — as easily as the thin paper of a receipt would, all see-through and bent over itself and ink ready to seep out or fade in the sunlight; a dated list of things I needed and what they cost me.
I have this need somewhere in me to be mistreated, to put myself down for someone else’s benefit. It started in elementary school when I got a secret thrill of pleasure from being the one to get up and grab papers for everyone at my table in G&T math class. Now, I’ve found that when I’m in a relationship, one where I’m not inherently lesser or greater than my opposite, I channel this urge to degrade myself into supposedly safe, healthy, imaginary habits — the consensually violent sex characteristic of an uneven power dynamic, with demeaning, unromantic language. 50 shades of adolescent psychology.
I remember back in eighth grade, too, I would play Connect 4 with this guy over text and I’d intentionally lose because it felt better to me to seductively tell him to beat me than it would’ve to win every time, the way I probably would’ve without that urge.
Was I just bored? Am I so afraid of being bored, of being in a “reckless driving” relationship where I want to leave but I’m held in place by their worship and my guilt, that I embarrass and disgust myself to the point of hating my body and my sexuality? Could that be possible?
I know that isn’t the whole issue. I don’t think I would’ve come up with this lurid outlet if I didn’t grow up in an unstable home, entrenched in the patriarchy, hearing voices from all around that my value increases with my beauty (read: youthfulness & sex appeal) and decreases with my autonomy.
Sure, I read books with female protagonists who were brave, ambitious, and had a variety of hair (if not skin) colors. I wanted to be seen as intelligent, I wanted to be known for my maturity, and oh, how I wanted to be loved. It wasn’t tragic at first, no, I did feel loved, at least liked, by a lot of people around me…the nicer few of my teachers, the blond boy from fourth grade, my grandparents, and one of my three older siblings at a time. But I read between the lines of those YA books. Between the lines of magazine pages I saw at the orthodontist and asked my mother why the model looked like a child.
Between the lines of news articles, class instructions, Sunday parables, and my parents’ conversations. They told me it would be nice if I could be smart, ambitious, confident, and successful. Very nice. But wouldn’t I rather be favored by my peers, my elders, the men in my life? They would be waiting for me to fail at the whole “I don’t need a man” thing, to laugh and point at the new generation’s spinster and her broken pride. So wouldn’t it be safer if I never asserted myself to begin with? Wouldn’t it be better if I knew my place from the start, so each misogynistic put-down I absorbed wasn’t an unexpected slight, but was simultaneously a reminder of my intrinsic inferiority and a pat on my soft but spiny back for being a good, good girl…?
[Pause, and bear with me.]
I was the one who told him he could be rough. He said he wasn’t sure if he should, if it was okay. I told him I wanted it.
But two nights ago, I went to his house under the pretense of talking about how he kissed another girl who has a boyfriend, a girl I’ve met twice and stalked online many more times. A girl I’ve been insecure about for over a year, whom I’ve marked in my notes app as the archetype of a person I shouldn’t trust: light brown hair, glasses, off-shoulder sweatshirt. You wouldn’t trust her either if you saw her. Glasses on at prom, and again under that pavilion the following June. Smoking weed, wearing sweats, with that line across her neck that probably means she has bad posture. Of course she wouldn’t care that she was walking around barefoot on dirty cement. Of course she wouldn’t care that most people don’t wear glasses to prom. She knew she was hot. It was part of her appeal — the whole unkempt and easy to sexualize thing, but still nobody’s bitch. Maybe her boyfriend’s bitch…but not enough to stop her from kissing another him, my him.
Letting him kiss her.
I don’t need to picture it happening either way.
I came over because I wouldn’t let him text me his shitty explanation for it all, but I got to his house and he had none. I pet his dog, sitting on the floor, and he touched my hair from up on the chair behind me and remarked on how long it was.
We went to his room, sat on his bed, he tried to put me on his lap, or in his arms, or laying on top of him or under him and I said what the hell are you doing? What are we doing? and I asked him questions about her and he misinterpreted all of them and gave meaningless answers, through and through.
He was aimless. He was lost. I wanted to save him, but what value did he see in me? Your lover is no impetus for change if you do not really love her.
I was ambitious. This he knew. I was loving. This he knew. I would give him anything, do anything for him. This he knew. This he had taken advantage of in the past — without knowing. He knew enough to get what he wanted, but never enough to have intention. He knew no malice (nor aforethought of any kind), he knew no passion.
I knew both, and I knew them better every day I thought of him more than I thought of myself, even as those days filled me with apathy more than anything. I was a dying star, expanding in every direction, and he was a black hole that didn’t ask to have me there, and wouldn’t understand why he was apologizing for sucking the life out of me, but he’d throw me a few nice words every now and then about how beautifully I shined.
I read between the lines of my own journal entries to search for his intentions. I turn every stone to find clues about his allegiances, peel bark off every tree for a secret trail marker or a hidden sign. I tried as hard as a girl can try. I lost my virginity and my dignity as collateral, risked my life to chance winning his love.
I didn’t win.
Nobody won.
Every other girl is just another girl who could be the love of anyone’s life but will probably end up divorced in her forties, talking shit about her daughter’s friends because she never grew up.
Every other guy is just another guy who might be handsomer, taller, and more willing to give his attention and loyalty to a girl like me, or a girl like any other. And every guy is a guy I won’t look twice at because my soul is crumpled inside my body; I am a receipt for all the love I gave away in return for ephemeral, hollow comforts.
I told him this winter, and this spring, and this summer that he could do whatever he wanted with me. I told him how I was truly incapable of saying no to him.
Two nights ago I said no to him. A few different times. He would say “okay”, or with his voice or his eyes he would ask why? I don’t think I kept explaining after the first two or three times.
And he’d try again. And I’d resist. Or I wouldn’t. I’ve lost sight of myself and lost track of the score between us.
I nearly fainted, when we were on his bed and again a few times in the basement, from the heat or the breathing or the emotions or my need to be taken care of. He went and got me a cold seltzer. We shared it and I lay in his arms in my bra and underwear and he called it a European vacation.
It was nice for a little while. I forgot what I came there to do, and what I came there promising myself I wouldn’t do.
And he tried again. And I resisted. Or I didn’t.
He told me it was late. I had to go, he had to go to bed. I got sad.
The moment at once was clear and I knew, I knew, he didn’t care what happened to me.
I have known for a while that he doesn’t care. Not to the degree that I do. Not to the degree that I need. Not to the degree that someone must to stay in a relationship.
I know it now. 43 hours later. I knew it the first time we broke up. I knew it Christmas Eve. I know. I know. I know.
I don’t listen.
I texted him last night, Lizzy McAlpine lyrics that for a moment he seemed to think meant I was suicidal. The last two texts I sent him were,
i wish i could be sure whether it means something that we keep coming back to each other or if it’s just habit
and
i don’t think we’re right for each other and i think you know that but i still don’t want to accept it
half an hour apart. The latter at 11:11.
He hasn’t responded. Last night were those texts, two nights ago was the moment.
Today a 60-year-old sleeping man sitting next to me mistook me for his wife and rubbed my leg, put his hand on my back.
Yesterday I spent hours in the garage mounting tile samples on display boards, watching Season 13 of Law and Order: SVU. I also went to the doctor for my physical. I lied about having sex. I lied to God. I lied to myself. I ran inside, early on in the day, to lock myself in my room and figure out whether I’d been raped. I hadn’t.
It felt like I had.
I knew it as it happened and I knew it as I ran back to the basement door to give him a hug and I knew it as I drove away crying.
I don’t know whether I care about any of the things that bring me a little joy, the things that get me through the present until I can revere it in retrospect. But I know I have to care about them. About the things that will make me happy this week, like hanging out with Katherine and having food made for me, and talking to old people whose house I’m fixing, and sitting in the sunshine and swimming in the lake. About the classes I’ll take at Colgate and the friends I’ll make and the snow that will melt on my tongue.
The truth of existing weighs heavy on my shoulders.
I don’t want to write about him anymore, but I might have to.
It’s a force of nature, my habit of harming myself in one way or another, and I’m in too deep to understand anyone’s motives right now, let alone my own.
I need help. I need someone, something, soon. But I don’t know what it would be or what it would do for me.
I need myself. I miss myself. I hate that saying that makes me feel like a bad person.
I don’t want to hate life anymore. I couldn’t hate life any more.
I am deciding to be grateful that for some godforsaken reason, I am still here right now, sitting in the back of this old Christian man’s F-250, remembering how I hesitated to shower yesterday because my mind was wrapped around the idea of preserving evidence.
My mind has always been wrapped around the idea of preserving evidence.
But still, I will try. I will try to read between the lines of this receipt that I am, and lower my brows and close my eyes in disgust while I tell myself that these horrible thoughts are not the truest part of my mind.
These horrible feelings are not the truest part of my heart.
These horrible things are not the truest part of my life.
There is probably a reason to live, like fighting for women’s rights or maybe taking care of my body.
I do not believe that right now, but I will at some point.
(I was going to say that I know I will at some point, but then I didn’t want to because it would mean that in the moment I feel sure once again, I’ll think back to this and how dirty I am now and it would ruin the purity of that hypothetical future hope, and it will be gone once again. So I will leave things uncertain. As I am about my grievances. I hate to associate what happened in the car today. With anything about my first love. I added a period so they would be in separate sentences. The contamination is still weighing on me.)
—
I hate everything and I hate everyone and there is a chance I will feel better after dinner.
The Dilemma Of It All 