About three years ago, I began looking for a way out.

I remember my initial cry-for-help was pretty simple and vague. My Facebook post read something like, "There's got to be a better way."

One of my friends, a self-proclaimed die-hard hippie, was quick to answer: "You could try WWOOFing, crabbing off the coast of central California, getting in with the Ren Faire, traveling with the Rainbow family, join a commune, do some FEMA shit or somethin'..."

Aside from any of that seeming very improbable and unlikely to attain (future me says: it's actually not), I remember thinking, "Hippie communes? That shit don't exist no more. If they do, they are FOR SURE cults lulz."

Anyway, long story short, I actually did find a commune (we preferably know them as 'intentional communities'), moved there, had a good first couple years, and now I fucking hate everything, just as much as I did before, if not more. Likely more.

So yeah, my birthday is in two days. I am cripplingly anxious and don't want to see anyone. Leaving my room is a fucking nightmare. It's 60 degrees in February and I'm pissing in a gallon jug like it's negative eight because I don't want to make eye contact with anyone, let alone talk to anybody who might be walking by my dorm as I relieve myself. Right, we don't have flush toilets, so peeing means you go outside (like god fucking intended) or do it in a pee-jug type thing in your room and hopefully, you clean it out every once in a while ("every once in a while" in this context meaning, "whenever you're expecting to get laid and don't want your company to see the disgusting state in which you normally live).

Any-fuckin-who, I was supposed to cook dinner tonight. We share responsibilities, right? It's really a pretty dope way of doing things and getting chores done and whatnot. Someone washes all of community's laundry, someone else makes the food. Other people build shit and maintain buildings while people other than those people account for all our finances and money bullshit and there's also a lawyer I guess. It does work pretty swimmingly.

At least until one of the people who agrees to do what they've agreed to do has a breakdown and bails on literally five dozen people all expecting to get their bellies full. Like, yeah, we all know how to boil elbow pasta and reconstitute cheese powder, but dammit, these people scheduled their days thinking, "I'm not going to have to account for making myself food, so I can spend that time doing this or that productive thing." Then they show up to an empty dining hall where the other 364 days of the year, there was food and go, "Well fuck all. I'm glad I put my effort in today. /s"

And you know what? I don't even fucking care. The note I posted regarding my abandoning my shift read something like, "I don't know why I took this chore on. I don't know what made me think I could make food for community when I don't even have the level of self-regard to feed myself on a regular basis." Right, I guess to catch you up, I signed up for a shift which someone had recently vacated. This was supposed to be my first time cooking dinner for everyone and boy-howdy did I show everyone how fucking impotent I am when it comes to taking on new responsibilities.

Okay, okay, okay... I'm not just getting down on myself. I know that there's some fucked up childhood bullshit going on whenever it gets close to my birthday. It makes me super fucking anxious and I fuck up pretty much everything else in my life, be it financial or romantic or whatthefuckever. I think I have an idea why:

Seventeen years ago (possibly pertinent point: I'm turning 34, so literally half of my life ago), my mom gave me a generic birthday card in which she wrote, "I hope you enjoyed whatever you spent that gift card on. It was meant for (a friend of my mother's)." Which was super fuckin weird, seeing as I hadn't stolen a gift card from my mom. I mean, like, yeah I totally drank her and my step-dad's booze, but like, I was a bitch kid... I wouldn't have stolen money or anything like money... pretty much because I was scared I'd get caught somehow. Alcohol was different for some reason.

Anyway, that kinda fucked me up. I was already having your typical, "who the fuck am I" stressors of being a teenager, coupled with some seriously bad middle kid syndrome (I'm the second of two to my mother's first husband, who was an abusive, do-nothing alcoholic, middle kid including my shining star half-sister... which like, literally, she's fucking awesome... no hate on her, but like, yeah... my older sister was a wannabe gutter punk shithead and my younger sister was the can do no wrong, fluffy white feathered wings of the next savior, and I was just... fuckin forgot.

So now I'm here, desperate to not exist, unwilling to inflict harm unto myself, and just feeling stupidly sorry for myself. Ugh. I'm sorry. Thank you for listening to me rant. I am so drunk right now.