It's 5 a.m. My past is full of nonsense.

Eric had some sort of coughing tantrum about an hour and a half ago, and I've been up since.  The kids will be awake in T-minus 2.46 hours, and I'm sure the mood I'm going to be in could tame a wild bobcat.  Or maybe I am the bobcat.  As it is, I have things to do tomorrow, so being awake right now isn't the best idea, but even with the melatonin I took, I can't stop working my brain.  I'm sure this blog will be scatterbrained.  It's 5 a.m., people.

3:30 a.m. Hackey hack akimbo over there gets up to go to the bathroom and sneeze and cough at 539 decibels behind the bathroom door instead of the 537 dB that it was when he was in the bed.  I suggested cough medicine.  He went back to sleep instead.  I began pondering the Chanel pre-fall collection that Tom and Lorenzo just posted.  I am wondering how Chanel could put out a collection where I wouldn't wear a single piece.  Tragedy on flight 3:30 a.m.

3:45 a.m.  Chanel!  I mean, it's not as shocking as say, Versace had done it, but still.  It's close.  I should definitely be sleeping instead of thinking about clothes.

4:00 a.m.  Oh, dear, the stress of school has hit my noodle.  There's no way in Hades I'm going back to sleep now.  I have a project due on Tuesday that I'm just in the beginning research stages of.  Six pages of paper and a 15-minute presentation.  I just figured out my topic (women and tattoos) 2 days ago.  I have 4 days to do this and do it properly.  Arg!  I wonder if 4 days is long enough to build myself a super-intelligent clone robot instead.  What time is it?

4:05 a.m.  While I'm asking other women about the significance of their tattoos, I begin to think of the significance of my own, which brings back all sorts of painful memories.

4:10 a.m.  Five minutes of my past going through my head, and tears begin to fall.  How could I have been so stupid? *Interjection at 5:17 a.m.  A child has just awoken.  Awesome.*  Anyway, blubbing away about my past, trying not to sniffle and wake up pneumonia-McGee. 

5:00 a.m.  After an hour of suffering in bed, I think I better get up and write it out before my heart explodes onto the bed, and subsequently the cat.  Guess who'd have to clean up THAT mess in the morning?  My first tattoo was the cover of ICP's Carnival of Carnage CD on my lower back when I was barely 18 years old.  It symbolizes the beginning of nearly a decade of extremely poor decision making that nearly destroyed my life.  I'd been making poor decisions in regard to my choice of partners since I started dating at 15, but with the freedom that came with being an adult, those choices escalated to astronomically terrible proportions.  With less than a handful of exceptions, it was abuse after abuse after abuse, and it was abuse I didn't even see.  (Almost) no one was hitting me, so I wasn't living a Lifetime Original Movie, so I didn't classify it as abuse.  There were three that did commit violence, and I walked away from those relationships immediately after one instance, thinking to myself, "Take that, Lifetime.  I'm not stayin to be abused.  I am a strong, intelligent woman.  I KNOW what abuse is, and there's no excuse to throw a boot at my head and get away with it."  All the while taking verbal and emotional abuse from man after man and not even recognizing what was happening.  These men cheated, lied, stole from me, called me names that I hadn't earned, monitored my every move, listened to my phone calls, gave me the third degree if I was at the grocery store longer than they anticipated that I should be, threw away all of my makeup, took my money to pay their bills while I worked 2, 3 or even 4 jobs at a time as they did nothing, broke nearly all of my possessions, hacked into my e-mail and went through my text messages, and one threw a shot glass (missed me, sucker) hard enough to shatter through two panes of glass and destroy the sliding glass door to the balcony.  That was one cold Philadelphia winter.

The longest term of these men was the worst.  Four years on and off of abuse and accusations.  I was making poor life decisions in other areas as well, working in an industry that no one should ever be subjected to, and because of those decisions, he had the ammunition to tear me down.  At this time in my life, I truly believed that I deserved to be tracked like an animal, questioned by every move I made (You're wearing Chapstick! Who are you trying to impress?  This isn't the bread you normally buy!  Who were you with at the grocery store?  You were clearly distracted!).  Girlfriend, that bread was on SALE, and since I was the only one payin for food in that house...you can see where this is going.  I had to pick up a third job so that I could afford the name brand items.  Anyway, at the time, I felt my past (and present at that particular point) justified this treatment.  The insults were deserved, and he was right, I wasn't ever going to find anyone better, no one else was going to want me, not with my past.  Even when I tried to remedy them, he had me convinced that they would haunt me forever (and he may be right about that).  He had me convinced that *I* was the problem in our relationship, and I needed therapy.

So, I went to therapy.  They didn't pick up on the autism.  They shoved antidepressants down my throat (how about advising me to leave this jackwagon?), and then anti-anxiety pills, and then sleep aids for the insomnia that the anti-whatsits caused.  It wasn't long before I was addicted to the sleeping pills.  Anything to get me away from the verbal and emotional barrage of insults that I was receiving whenever this man was in my presence.  Soon I was mixing alcohol with Nyquil, Remeron, Lunesta, Unisom and anything the doc or the shelf at Kroger could throw at me.

As it is, I finally left this guy in Tennessee and moved back home to Indy.  As I was deciding to come off all of the pills, I met and began dating a very nice and wonderful man (cheers, Matt), that I wasn't ready for.  I didn't wanna mess up a good thing, so I dropped my pills cold turkey, and then proceeded to royally mess up a good thing.  On our second or third date, we'd gone to see a movie and had a great time and gone back to his house to chat around the kitchen table.  I began to experience withdrawals sitting there.  I got very sick and very confused, and I didn't know where I was.  He and his mother were coworkers of mine at a job I hadn't been at for very long, in an office full of chatty, gossipy women (save for Matt), and I was having a drug withdrawal meltdown in their kitchen.  Matt, of course, had no idea what was going on, as my sleeping pill addiction wasn't exactly something that I was forthcoming about upon our meeting or our first date.  To him, I'm sure it looked as though I was on some sort of hard substance.  Sniffing glue or something.  He had to drive me home.  I tried to jump out of the moving vehicle on 465.  I think I thought we had reached our destination.  It was one of the single most embarrassing moments of my life.  After a few days of hard withdrawal (that ain't pretty.  I didn't even know that my insides could BE that color.) I explained the situation to Matt, and he actually still chose to date me.  Good guy, what did I tell ya?  I messed it up anyway.  I was still too broken from my previous situation and had it in my head that I was inferior.  This man was way too good for me, and he always would be, so I left him.  And I went back to Tennessee to endure another year of emotional barrage from Douchebag Supreme.

There was a night, someone's birthday party.  I wasn't invited because "My friends don't like you" (they had met me once, briefly, as I was coming in from one job to get ready to go to another as they were playing a game in our living room).  Anyway, DB Supreme went out and got trashed enough that his friends had to call me to come get him on their way back from some club.  He had them stop the car so he could vomit and refused to get back in.  The police were there when I arrived (at 4 a.m. on a work day), as he was desecrating some property with several bodily fluids, and I assured them that I would take him home and put him to bed and he wouldn't be any more trouble.  He made a liar out of me.  At the entrance to the apartment building, as I was punching in the gate code, he jumped out of the car and ran into the bushes and laid down there and tried to sleep.  I had to drag him back to the car (where he promptly vomited in my brand new Yaris).  When we got home, I put him into bed, got him a bucket and some water, and was promptly kicked out of the room and forced to sleep on the couch because "you aren't allowed to see me like this."  Eff you, too, buddy, so I went downstairs.  One thing led to another, and it ended with him throwing a steel-toed boot at my head.  His aim was bad, and he missed, but I was all (in my head) "OMG abuse! I'm being abused! Get out! Lifetime says I'm stupid if I stay! I don't wanna be stupid!"

I did leave, and I never looked back, and I'm glad the act of violence occurred.  Had it not, I would likely still be there, not recognizing all of the other behavior as abusive and still feeling as though I deserved everything he was dishing out.  I moved back home for good, and I'd like to say my problems ended there, but they didn't.  I was, after all, still broken, and at this point, still undiagnosed with the REAL problem.  That story, however, is for another day.  There is a happy ending, clearly, as all of this nonsense ends with Hacky McHackerson in there, the love of my life.

6:08 a.m.  I've been typing a long time.  I don't think I can sleep, though, still.  I think I'll go make the Big Man's lunch for the day and get my to-do list made.  Perhaps outline that research paper before the kids get up.