The First Day – Desperation

I'm so tired and frustrated. I'm broke and I don't like what I've become. It all began when I was a child. Something happened to me. I don't know what, or why, or when; but I sank. Dark clouds began to form on the horizon. And as I sailed through those troubled waters, the clouds became more dense and compact and streaks of lightning flashed bright and menacing in the distance. Until, eventually, this incredible storm was right over my head, hovering, and there it has stayed for years and years. A storm called indifference.
I can feel change coming. I can almost taste it. I would like to be happy again. I would like to believe in something.
I've become so pathetic! Why don't I have the things I want? Why can't I do the things I want to do? I'm so weak... I can't quit smoking cigarettes; I can't even stop myself from spending money that I don't have! I fuck myself over time and time again, yet I never learn. I never stop. It's compulsive, like there is some disease festering within me.
At age nine, I quit doing anything. I began to fail every class I disliked in school. By age eleven I failed every class irregardless of whether I was interested. By age fifteen I was overweight, suffered from severe depression, and started to skip classes habitually. At age seventeen I dropped out of school and started smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
I cannot pinpoint what exactly evoked this indifference, maybe it was everything. A lot of things happened when I was nine. My family decided to move away from our home town of Freeburge, IL, to Sioux Falls, SD. Soon afterwards my parents would get divorced. Which was followed by my mom being institutionalized for a series of months for the first time; which would happen five or six more times over the next few years. She suffered from severe manic depression. My father moved into a small apartment a mile or so away after the divorce. Over the next few years my mother would become an alcoholic. I would live with my four siblings and my bipolar-alcoholic mother until I was sixteen...

... Growing up at the Birnstiehl house was abnormal.

And now, here I am. Alone, weak, and stagnant. I want to flow... I want to become healthy, responsible, intelligent, and, most of all, I don't want to be scared to change. It's time to stop fucking myself over all the time.