I did a notebook inventory and discovered that I lay my eggs in various baskets. I have a notebook for sober ramblings, streams of thought, shopping lists, dreams I'm too meek to follow, opinions I'm too shy to voice. Those are mostly hateful, like wishing death on someone who is prettier and thinner than me.

I've become hateful.

I have a food journal of sorts, where I whine about how I hate my thighs and the urges I get. I've stopped hurting myself in that particular way since January. I still occasionally indulge myself by writing about my vapid body issues when I feel bloated and PMS-y.

I've turned into a whiner.

I briefly lost that journal and freaked out. I knew that if it fell into the wrong hands... I couldn't even face the consequences. I eventually found it in the first place I looked, although I could have sworn it wasn't there before. Its sudden reappearance made me wonder.

I am paranoid as ever.

In that brief time that it was lost, I was lost too. I started a new notebook, composition, didn't even bother to fill in the label. Instead, I scribbled it out with an orange Crayola marker, and then a black pen when that wasn't threatening enough. I filled the first two pages with goal weights and deadlines I gave myself to make weight: October 31, 2008; December 25, 2008; February 28, 2009; April 24, 2009. Ten to twenty pounds less with each date. I don't think I even had that much weight to lose. I chose holidays for the most part, days that had the potential to become dates I never forgot, and even reminisced about. I gave up on that exact schedule, but still continued my ways.

I was never good with plans.

I got sick for a while; my skin was pale yellow and I had angry purple bags under my eyes. My father walked into me eating fake soup, the type that you buy for 50 cents at RiteAid and get cancer from. He told me that I looked sick, and all I could do is stare. I was drowning in my favorite maroon sweater, and pants that were supposed to be form-fitting. I blamed school, waking up at 6 AM every day and getting home at four. Other than my parents, no one else noticed, and if they did, no one questioned me about it. I like to think that no one cared, as is usually the case with kids my age. We're all too consumed in our existences to notice what is going on around us. When my friends would snap out of their sleepy trances of drugs and SAT-prep, balancing rehab and homework, alcohol-fueled weekends and making art in between, they'd make an off-color comment about how "nice" I looked lately. Then they'd go right back to sleeping.

That was about the time I realized that I had no real friends.

I also found the random angst-filled notebooks from what seems like ages ago. The ones with bad poetry, lines desperately fastened to end with words that rhymed. I was four years younger then, an outsider in a foreign country, and I hated the world. Now I'm four years older, and I still do. I'm just less stupid about it. I don't remember the sort of intense, prepubescent pain I was feeling back then, but you'd think it was something unbearable. Thinking my angry ramblings were justified helps me sleep at night. I mean, people are dying, and 12-year-old me is whining over her Halloween costume.