“It starts as a little nagging noise inside my skull, reminding me of what I think I know, and what I can never ever really know. And the noise sets to work inside my head, perpetuating its same pattern until it has grown so loud and so great, it is the only thought I can have. The only obsessive, earth-shattering sound of not mattering that I can hear. It's entirely made up of the pain felt by something already hurt too much. It's like the ruins of something destroyed by being hurt, and how awful it is to exist so alone, as ruins.”

“I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.”

“And once it's reached that point, I'm left as alone as I've always known is the safest I could ever be. Except that I have the worst pain I've ever felt, and I feel it all. It's all of mine to feel. The only thing I'm sure is absolutely real. It keeps me company. The same way it would be trapped somewhere with someone that you hate. Wishing they weren't there, but needing them to be there. This is where the old survival skills start coming back, not quite as at my command as they used to be. They tell me to keep my right amount of distance, the only real way to be strong. But then I realize those parts of me that have been pieced together and have come back, to different degrees. Their revival works against survival. I know how to make myself untouchable. But when I tell myself how to, something answers me by telling me it's too late for that.”

“I think it's better to be comfortable in your skin than to be miserable being who you are. Sure, the meth is horrible. It ruins people from the inside out. It's a waiting game --- it's not a matter of if it destroys you, but rather a matter of when it will. I've made it this far. I'm not sending a message that it's "cool" to be on drugs and tell everyone about it. I don't sum myself up as a drug addict and a hooker. That's not what I am. Those are juts things I do, they don't define me. Jobs and addictions do not make us who we are.”

“The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they.”

“And so an awful confusion begins to collect, forming a cloud that sits around an absence of hope. Desperate sensations. Can't breath. Panic. Just trying to catch my breath, but I can't breath. I hurt so much, and I'm so tired that I don't even want to breath the breath I'm gasping for. There is no more. This is the most. It's just pain, channeled in one direction, using you as its host.”

“It’s hardly ever that I am hurt by something in only one dimension.”