Is it too much to ask for a day where it doesn't feel like my life is falling to pieces? I'm stressed, more so than I have been in years, and I am not coping very well at all. What is getting me the most right now is the stupid MMI exam that worker's comp does at the 2 year mark. I thought it'd be coming in November not in a couple of weeks. This one doctor visit could change absolutely everything. It is the difference between me keeping and losing my job; the difference between my neck getting fixed and staying permanently screwed to all hell. And the differnce between doing work that I can manage with it and going back to full time, being miserable, because they release me to full work. That is the one I am stressing over so hard. I spent a good 6 months after I hurt my neck under the impression it was muscle soreness and that all I needed to do was toughen up. And those 6 months working at Walmart are the worst I've had there by a LONG margin. Lifting heavy crap, checking out people for hours and hours constantly twisting. Every single day during that period I swore to myself that as soon as Christmas rolled around and I'd gotten my holiday pay and bonus I'd be quitting. But that November I just could not take a second more of it. So I went back to the doctor. They put me back on restrictions, and work become marginally less miserable. Come last March, my MRI results come in. I'd been working full hours on two herniated discs. So they bumped me down to 4 hours a night. And since then work has been tolerable, hell, sometimes even downright enjoyable. All because my neck didn't hurt so badly that I wanted to scream. And come two weeks time, all that can be thrown away. I just don't know how I'd handle it if all my effort staying at a crap job, saving money, my health insurance, and taking classes online were to go out from under me.

I have that to worry about and my 21st is coming up. It seems so completely unreal to me. To be fair just about everything seems unreal at this point. Where have the years gone? It feels like I blinked and the last 15 years of my life went by in a single instant. It's like a massive cosmic joke at my expense. Despite how hellish it was, I MISS high school. I had a purpose then. I was going to prove everybody wrong. The only thing keeping me going was that thought. The positive side of me says it was hope for something better. But if I am to be truly honest with myself it boiled down simply to spite. Plain and simple spite. Yeah I was depressed, but I didn't let it stop me from making top grades. Sure I'd wished I was dead, but that would prove their suspicions right about me and I just couldn't have that. I had people tell me, people I loved and trusted, they didn't think I'd make it to 18; because I'd either off myself, or die accidentally because of SI. So I knuckled under, and I told myself, "I'll show them". And I graduated near the tippy top of my class (3rd), and the future looked so so bright. Then it all came crashing down then. Uni fell through. I was stuck in the same crap town, with the same crap people, when everyone else went on to bigger and better things without me. Turns out people were right about me all along. Born white trash, stay white trash. I took the job at Walmart thinking, "I'll be here 6 months, a year tops so I can save for school." A month in I hurt my neck, and get stuck there too. Doing a job I hated, knowing full well that if my cards had been dealt differently in a few years time I could have been a scientist and all I'd ever dreamed of. I started school 3 years late, and only that online. What grad school do you know wants someone with an online degree in biochem?

I'm in a relationship with a great guy. We've been friends for years, we were in marching band together. And unlike every other friend I'd had in high school, we kept in touch. But Greg and I haven't had a "real" conversation in weeks. I know he is regretting moving out of the friend zone. I'm ten pounds of crazy, possesive, and needy in a five pound bag. And I warned him about it upfront. He always caught the B-Side of it in high school. I hid it behind a smile better then. But ever since ringing him, hysterical, to take me to hospital for stitches he doesn't seem to want anything to do with me at all. He says we're fine, that he's just been busy. But I see it for what it is: avoidance. Everything's always been a big joke to him. He takes nothing seriously, not even life changing decisions. I think the jokes stopped for him where I am concerned. Now I am just the crazy girlfriend he'd rather avoid. I want us to be okay, I want us to have something real. Because I am tired of being lonely, and worthless. But everytime I try and bring anything serious up he shrugs it off, gives me an excuse and then we go weeks without so much as a word.

And I never thought that a week shy of 21 I'd still be living at home with my gran, in this craphole excuse of a town. I know I can't afford anything else, and my gran truly thinks she's doing the right thing by me. But I am being suffocated. She pays the rent, I do as she says. I don't think I've ever constituted as a real person to her. When she looks at me, hell when all my family look at me, I'm nothing more than my mother. Her mistakes, her character flaws, her personality, her wild streak. I'm surprised they even know my name. It sucks when you have someone you hold in such high esteem and love not know or even care for that matter anything about who you are as a person. When you see the pain in their eyes when they look at you, because you look so much like her it's uncanny. I'm my own person with my own faults, and personality. And from what my godmother has told me (she was my mums best friend) I am almost nothing like my mother personality-wise. I want them to see me, to LISTEN for a change, and not dismiss me. I don't think that is too much to ask from your family. I'd do it for them. I'd take a bullet for the lot of them in a second. And I know the point of family is to make you miserable but the tiniest bit of effort to let me grow up is all I ask.

I don't want my life to feel like it is unravelling at the seams. That I am barely holding it together. I keep screaming out for someone to help me, and they mime deafness and apathy. I'm really and truly not asking for much here. I'm 95% stubborness, and that usually does the job. It's gotten me through a lot in the past. But it just isn't cutting it anymore it seems. You can only bury so much crap before it starts to bubble out. You fake it. You say today I am going to smile, because I have eveything in the world to be grateful for, and everyone will be fooled. Then the day comes where you can't see the forrest for the trees. And if I'm not there yet, I'm close to it.

And injuring has been many things for me over the years. It's worn many different hats depending on what I'd needed it for. I want it now, so much so I can taste it. Just for a few minutes I want absolute oblivion, and that's a new one for me. I want nothing to matter, for things to be simple again. But I know the oblivion will be short-lived and that makes me want something longer lasting.