This "journal" index is not one in the traditional sense.  I have tried over
the years to do regular journaling, to varying degrees of success.  What I've
found is that I can't form the regular habit, the formalization of it all.

For a good while, I thought I was just built incorrectly or poorly, I would
get very frustrated with myself because I would think, "other people are able
to do this easily, what's wrong with me?"  I would endlessly compare myself
to anyone and everyone I'd ever meet, and if I didn't find someone, I would
make someone up in my head and beat myself up over not being like them.

The way things had been so far, I wouldn't even let myself think to myself
because I felt like I was still vocalizing what I was feeling.  In one part,
I was afraid that by recognizing whatever I was thinking, I would be somehow
be making it more real, and a lot of these thoughts were about how much I
wanted to make everything worse for myself.  Being trapped in a really poor
mental state of health for so long makes you think that you're the only
person digging your own hole, and in a way you want to continue digging.
Everything you go through feels painful and all you want is an escape.  You
need it to stop.  But of course, it feels like there's nothing much you can
do in the _physical_ world to alleviate that, because the pain doesn't come
from the physical world.  You fight, and run, and run, and fight, and you're
still hurting.  So you think, "maybe they're right.  Maybe it's not that they
don't understand, but that I really _am_ going through basically nothing, and
I'm digging my own hole by giving myself a pity-party.  That's fucking
disgusting, isn't it?  How selfish can I be?"  And the cycle of self-hatred
doesn't ever stop.  It's got more fuel now.

This thought in your head begins to form, where you really want an escape so
bad you're willing to die for it. Not out of this sense of
self-aggrandizement, it's not like you're thinking you're some Hollywood
Action Movie Star Who Sacrifices Himself For The Fate Of The Universe, no.

It's because literally anything else would be more painful.  It feels like
this is the _only_ option.  You get scared, realizing that if you tell
anyone about this, friend or otherwise, they would do one of three things:
shrug you off, panic and lock you down without providing any real help or
escape, or angrily guilt you and tell you that you don't deserve to feel like
this.  The pressure mounts more and more, and without even realizing it, you
start to make all these little symbols in your world.  Not like monuments,
but like graffiti in inconspicuous places.  The part of you more human than
anything else, that just wants to say "I was here, I existed."  You put off
killing yourself for various reasons, and begin to turn static.  Everything
stops, time no longer moves.  Days pass, months pass, and you can't sleep so
you watch the sun rise, sleep, wake up, watch the sun set, sleep.  It's the
closest you can get to feeling like you never existed in the first place.
You stop eating, because the hunger helps remind you of the final day waiting
around the corner.  You dig your own hole.  It's like you can feel the storm
above your head, in your bones, and you're just waiting for it to flood and
bury you.  And at the very least, maybe by continuing to dig, you'll tire
yourself out and die that way.

It's been really unhealthy, and a recurring thought started propping up in
the various writing I _would_ do over the years, while waiting to die:
"Keeping things up like this without changing, it will kill me.  It _will_
kill me."

Sometime around January 2024, I was thinking to myself that I wish I could
just have somewhere I could post or write.  A place reserved specifically for
letting anything go, regardless of inner convictions.  Maybe if it was a
wholly private space, I wouldn't be as afraid of using it.  I wouldn't feel
like I was opening myself up to other people, and the criticism or pain that
can unfortunately come with.  I put it off like I do with everything else.
I then picked up Laura Jane Grace's autobiography "Tranny", in an effort to
learn more about her.  Friends over the years would write about her, how much
she means to them.  And no doubt, after learning she was a transgender punk,
a part of me wanted to learn about her, since I'd wanted to exist free and
wholly myself as a punk musician.  Something must've clicked while reading
her story, because I came back to that idea of needing a third space, and I'd
realized that _was_ journaling, it _was_ offering myself my own voice.  It
_was_ everything I'd been denying myself for years.

So I began collecting all the various things I'd been writing over the years,
aggregating them together into a "journal".  Entries are accurate to the date
to the best of my memory's ability, if the entry itself never had dates
attached to it.  The only exceptions to this are a period of time near the
end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020.  I think that was the closest I'd come
to killing myself, in a very, very long time.  In a way, back then time had
become so meaningless that even now it feels almost wrong to attribute
dates or places to those thoughts.  Everything blurred together.

I'm not sure if this will stick around forever, but I'm trying my best to
actually give myself the space.  It's helped, as I no longer feel the need as
strongly to die.  It's almost like these days I know the sun still sets and
rises, time passes on permanently, but that doesn't make my existence in it
a meaningless blip.  It's never been about that anyway.  I shouldn't be
focusing on something like that because it simply doesn't compare.  It will
always be difficult for me to not compare myself to things, but the more I
actively become myself, the less harder it feels to simply exist.  I can live
permanently as something else, sure, but I have to justify that performance
by comparison.  I'll never be "one of the boys".