Home is where the heart is?

I was happy to report that after the first few weeks of college my OCD and depression which I struggled with all through out high school were gone. I am sad to report that within just two weeks of being home they are back. I don't want to blame my cousins, my aunt and uncle, my grandfather, my parents, my girlfriend, my old friends. I don't want to blame any of them. But then what is it? What is about this place that has me feeling small and broken because I spilled some water? Why am I hiding in my room feeling so alone and lost instead of getting a towel and cleaning it up? I know why. It was my mom's new floor. In her shiny new kitchen. And she yelled when the water spilled and it hurt my ears and I couldn't think and I didn't close the pourer fast enough. And she asked why and I didn't have a reason. And she yelled and she told me to use a different water jug and my ears rang and all the words just seemed to say that I was a disappointment.

My family is supremely excellent at making me feel not good enough. They make me feel small. They tease me about my inability to do athletics. My inability to cook. How much I sleep. How I'm too nerdy. And it all weighs on me. I laugh it off. But it feels like they don't like me and it hurts. It hurts because I try so hard to love them all as much as I can. Because I try so hard for them to like me. And yet I am the running joke. And none of them even know that it hurts. They should, they should get it, my mental illness didn't just spring up out of nowhere, it's genetic and I know they've struggled too but no one will talk to me about it and they manage to make me feel so damn alone and that kills me. It makes me start adding numbers. It makes the lights too bright. It makes me bite myself to make sure I still exist because they treat me like nothing.

All these feelings because I spilled some effing water.

In college I would have just cleaned it up. People would have laughed, jokes would have been made. But I would have dealt with it. Here I can't do that. And I can't figure out why.

Normal

After a semester at mac I can pretty confidently say that normal is a social construct. But it still seems real to me. It is a wish that I have, a wish to be normal. At college I forget that queer is unusual. I manage to forget that the username "lesbro" is awkward to share, and then when I try to tell it to my cousin I find that I just don't have the words.

People say I look good with short hair. But, honestly, I want long hair again in part so I seem normal. I look fine with short hair, but I also look gay. I am gay, but I want to blend into the straight crowd. I want to be unique and normal.

Normal isn't possible when I had a fling with a girl on my cousin's basketball team. Normal isn't possible when one of the guys who sexually assaulted me asked out my friend and I don't know if I know her well enough to tell her why she should say no. Normal isn't possible when I am trying to figure out adequate rules for my long distance relationship that I want to make work but I don't know the words to say what I need.

But maybe this is all just teenage angst. Maybe everyone deals with things like this. Maybe there is really no normal. Because normal is socially constructed and so rare that the one kid who is normal feels abnormal, because even though normal as an ideal exists, the media also perpetuates the vision of the abnormal and of teenagers who embarrass themselves and what not.