I haven't been happy for a long time.

I hate that this is true, and I wish I could say this without fear of being told I'm just overreacting or "being a baby".

I usually get along with my father, but I can't show any emotion aside from neutrality around him or else he gets annoyed.

Because I'm just being a typical emotional woman, irrational and weak, obviously. I'm not allowed to be legitimately angry or sad because that's just childish, right, dad?

I do hate getting angry though, because I always end up crying. If I didn't have the awful habit of bursting into tears, I would enjoy being angry a lot more. I wish I could swallow my weak, tearful instincts and be cold and calm. I wish I could look someone in the eye and tell them exactly what I think of them and their bullshit without the threat of tears. My father ceases to take me seriously when I'm crying, and that upsets me even more. Because when am I more serious than when I'm crying? I'm not begging for sympathy or attention. I want to be listened to, and he doesn't listen to me.

He doesn't care.

My mother tries to be understanding but I know she can't really do anything else. She knows, too. I'm just her pathetic, 23-year old daughter who hasn't accomplished anything beyond college graduation in the last year and who has no clue what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

I'm a lazy, stupid, confused waste of flesh that walked out of a job after just a month because I was too sensitive and too inexperienced to handle it.

My father loves reminding me of my inexperience.

I want to get as far away from my family as possible. They make me feel 1 inch tall. Not as successful and brilliant as others my age. I'm sick of being the baby.

I'm depressed. The thing I want most in the world is privacy. A place of my own that is all my own, where no one else can trespass and where I can live how I like, all alone, until I die.

Life is like a board full of holes cut into different shapes, and I don't fit into any of them. I don't feel like I belong. Not anywhere, and not with anyone. It's an awful feeling to have because when you try to tell someone, they don't understand. They think you're just being silly.

It's a lonely, frustrating feeling. I can't relate with other people. Being surrounded by people you can't understand and relate with is terrible because it means you're constantly being reminded of your own strangeness, and the fact that you don't "fit".

I don't know what to do.

Guns and Paranoia

I had a discussion with someone about a week ago about gun ownership and 2nd amendment rights. They believe that gun ownership and concealed carry contribute to "fear of guns" and widespread paranoia. That the presence of armed citizens somehow creates a hostile environment of suspicion and impulsive actions.

I disagree with this entirely. What does contribute to a fear of guns, widespread paranoia, hostile environments and impulsive actions is the complaints from anti-gun alarmists. Instead of encouraging the education of individuals in gun use, its history, and other related topics, they try to eradicate it altogether because it's apparently too dangerous and too scary of a subject. Guns are bad, they are dangerous, and they are unpredictable, they say. I probably don't have to add that these are people who have likely never touched a gun in their lives.

Fear of the unknown. That's what it's about. We fear that which we do not understand, and fear of firearms is exactly the same thing for these people. Instead of seeing how an innocent person could use a gun to protect themselves and prevent a crime from happening, they say "someone could have gotten hurt or even killed". It doesn't matter that the person just saved their own life without having to fire a shot.

But the media reports stories of shootings in a manner that suggests they happen everywhere all the time, and do not provide sufficient facts and details. They select pieces of events and fabricate a story in order to spread fear and paranoia that gun violence is rampant, and a product of mere gun ownership (legal or otherwise), as if simply having a gun in your possession makes you want to go out and kill someone. As if guns either have a free will of their own or somehow manipulate a person's mind and turn them into monsters.

Responsible, well-trained gun owners would probably tell you that they wouldn't want to fire their weapon unless they truly felt they had to. Only under the most perilous circumstances would they choose to use excessive force to deter a criminal. If it means killing that person in order to save themselves, then so be it. The criminal has paid their price.

No, I do not believe that a community teeming with gun owners is liable to turn into one big high noon showdown. If anything, it will be a community where a man respects his neighbor and the neighbor respects him, and where crime decreases as criminals run out of vulnerable targets.

Update

A lot has happened since my last post, but I'm still stuck in a rut of confusion and apprehension. So maybe not much has happened after all?

I walked out of my job because of a person I couldn't work with and since then I've been working on a portfolio and trying (re: failing) to get my life organized and set on the right track.


Why am I holding myself back from accomplishing things? Why am I so lazy?

Does this all sound familiar and annoying? Because it sure does to me.

Every day goes by so fast and I'm left wondering, at the end of the day, what my life is going to amount to. So far it hasn't amounted to much.

There has to be some reason why I'm preventing my own life from happening.