[cw: suicidal ideation/rumination]

*

The more I think of it the more certain I am that helping Benny and the rest of the crew is really the most important thing for me to be doing, on a broader level and a longer scale. I've felt so unmoored from G-d or having any real faith-- there are so many things I haven't done in years (and our tour schedule means I miss so many of the high holidays...) and the less things I do the more guilty I feel and the less I want to try-- but doing good for others, fighting alongside others, remembering and meditating on personal and ancestral struggles and pain and justice and harnessing those things to try and relieve others of their struggles and pain; all those things can be meaningful in their own way, even if it's not religious-religious. And maybe that's how I can give to others so I'm not just a selfish little prince and I can make up for everything with Lorenzo and everything with... the business.

My moods are still so chaotic. Talked w/Anna on the phone about it alongside all the religious/faith things-- not enough to worry her, hopefully. She knows how I can be. And the talk did help in various ways, but I still want to kill myself. I won't. I'm writing this here partially so I can keep that promise and remind myself of all the reasons I shouldn't. Benny's amazing and keeps wanting to see me and believes in me enough to let me help him in more and more areas. Getting to know the crew better has also been amazing and I have something of an obligation to them now, or the starts of one. I have so many more friends there now. I won't want to kill myself in a day or two and I just have to wait for the thought to get dislodged from my brain. A lot of people would actually be upset if I killed myself, now. We haven't gotten a #1 single yet and we've gotten up to #8 now it's SO doable and it just hasn't happened yet. Killing myself would screw things up for the rest of the guys.

See, I write all that and I can believe all that but a nagging voice in the back of my head keeps reminding me that none of them know what I'm ACTUALLY like, and if they did, how many of those reasons to live would still exist? They say you can fake it till you make it, but I've never been able to do that with anything without going crazy. Imagine going crazy trying NOT to go crazy... if anyone could do it, it'd be me. But yes, that nagging voice reminds me of all these things, and then I wonder if I deserve any of what I have at all, and the idea of talking to anyone fills me with shame. All I can see are the darkest ugliest parts of me and that's all I think anyone else can see. I can fight all this better now than I used to, but G-D is it exhausting. Really, the only reason I'm still wallowing in here is because I'm stuck on a bus on the road (this also would make it logistically difficult to kill myself). Next to Sam, and I don't want to bother him, and he's seen me writing before. He'd asked what language it was I was writing in, and I told him Farsi, which is partially true. Also told him that it was mostly for practice, so I wrote about whatever came to my head. Satisfactory enough for him.

*

Thought I could make it through the final leg of the tour without anything else blowing up, but Nathan isn't very happy with me right now. I know he's good friends with Greg-- I remember he told me he's known him since he was a teenager. But at the same time, what goes on between me and Greg is between me and Greg. Or it should've been, anyway. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, of course, so he thinks I WANT Greg to leave. Thinks I have "lead singer disease" and I'm jealous of anyone hogging the spotlight from me, or whatever.

I told him I didn't want to get into it, because it wasn't his business, and because, again, he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. "You fuck with my friends, it BECOMES my business. --Like what the hell, man, I thought things were getting real cool between us, and you do all this bullshit??" UGH. At least Rory wandered in where we were before long and diffused things. He probably hates arguments like this the most out of all of us, wishes every day could be smooth sailing; the jokes turn from a light shower to a deluge. Sometimes it can be frustrating, here it was relieving.

Once again hoping that I can make it through the rest of the dates without anything else like this. Just lay low and keep it truckin'.

PS: Moods still haven't been great, but not nearly as bad as before. Can sleep again.

*

Gregory's last official show-- he's leaving soon to get ~married~-- contained the best vocal performance of his I've ever heard. I won't tell him this. I know it's petty. I still feel too bitter to be nice. But I still wanted to acknowledge it somewhere so it's not just sitting in my brain. Asshole.

And yet I think of it and it still makes me think things like-- we could've done so much more of that, together. We could've done even better, together. I could've kept making you better. You could've kept making me better, and we already sounded so fucking beautiful together. And isn't that so much more fucking exciting, so much more interesting and thrilling and fulfilling, than settling down (emphasis on SETTLE...)??--There were so many things he intentionally kept his eyes shut from, kept himself away from, and I couldn't open his eyes for him or bring him where he wouldn't go (you can lead a horse to water, and all that). I have no idea when it's going to stop being frustrating to think about. Everything about it just feels like an utter failure, and failure still stings so deeply.

I'm not surprised at this point that I couldn't convince him to stay, though. I was dedicated to it early on, but then the party happened, and then I met Benny (who's been such a darling; why do I even think about Greg when Benny exists...). I'm not looking forward to meeting whatever new keyboardist we'll get, or having to learn to work with a new person. I doubt Walt'll want to hire someone interesting. I suppose we'll see.

*

That ugly angry vengeful part of me wants to just tell Lori everything and sit back and file my nails while I see what happens. Even now, even after admitting this to Pammie, my smartest friend, who-- in her smartness and sweetness-- told me very honestly that it'd be like spitting against the wind. (Because I have no idea how Lori would react, she barely knows me and would likely just hate me for telling her more than anything, I have barely any seniority to speak of, me causing trouble for personal reasons would make me look more like a liability myself, etc. Which-- all good points! I HATE that they're all such good points but I love that she laid it out so plainly and that she does so for most things when she thinks I'm about to do something stupid. She keeps me honest!)

G-d, but I'm just so tired of being expected to shut up and hide and take it. How can I expect to be treated any better if other people are very aware of that expectation placed upon me (that I shut up/hide/take it)? How am I supposed to assume they won't use that to their advantage? And what the fuck am I supposed to do with all the pain I have left?? On top of all the fucking pain I already have from older things, things I should have gotten over by now, things that have left their mark on me far too deeply anyway. I just wish everything could STOP. Just so I could scream and spaz out and cry and curl up in a ball and not have anything else happen for however long it takes to let it all out of me.

It's been hard getting to sleep again, even with noise in the background. The noise in my head's louder. It was so much easier on the road, with Benny. But now he's gone, we were both too busy to exchange contact information, I have no idea when I'll see him again (outside of when we're on the road next), I need him so badly and there's nothing I can do right now to have him, and if he knew how much I needed him I might just scare him off anyway the way I scare off everyone else I'm even kind-of-honest with. G-d maybe I should just fucking die. Everything is too much for me and I'm too much for everyone. I'm too much for everyone INCLUDING myself.

*

Finally had the major blowup w/Greg I'd been trying to avoid at first and then egging on later out of spite. Went about as awfully as would be assumed-- actually, a little more awfully even than that. It was at his going-away party, and the both of us were some of the last people lingering around, so little excuse not to address the elephant in the room (the elephant in the unused-hallway-of-a-banquet-hall...?).

It was weird kind of awful, too, which makes it even worse. A clusterfuck of heightened mixed emotions that we had to keep off the table for nearly a year. Me being kind of drunk certainly didn't help. He kept trying to get my attention at the party, to pretend like we were all good buddies and his leaving hadn't cracked my heart into pieces I was still trying to stitch back together, so I kept shrugging him off at first, then once he asked what was wrong, I said-- didn't he have a girl to get home to? Yes, but apparently Greg had designated himself my designated driver or whatever. Maybe I was more than a little drunk by the end of things, so what. It was so gross seeing him pretend to care about me after everything that's happened this year. And I told him that, too.

Oh, what's gotten into me, I thought we were ~GOOD~ now, why was I being so difficult-- CHRIST he's so fucking clueless and I also told him that!! And that I'd opened myself up so much for him and he never understood that, that I did SO many stupid things to try and keep him happy and make him stay, to try and get it through his thick skull how much I cared about him, how he treated me like I’d just instantly be okay being second-fiddle to some girl I didn’t even know-- “You never even TRIED to know her”, he said, and I told him not to give me that bullshit, it was never like that between us, he just wanted to keep leading me along as long as he got to keep fucking my ass-- his mouth dropped open at that like I’d told him the earth was flat. “How the fuck was I supposed to know what you EVER wanted? You’d go off and fuck other guys all the time, we were with each other plenty this year, seems you were pretty fuckin’ comfortable keeping things about sex.” And of course he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. “And of course you fuckin’ say that! That doesn't mean anything!” (...It means what I say.)

(And then--) "You know how Walt likes to wax poetic sometimes, Jules?" Unfortunately yes. (And of course Walt had been in his ear-- one of the things I've always liked least about Greg was his pride at being Walt's ~responsible oldest son~ or whatever the fuck. I was never able to change that, either. Truly a failure in all regards.) He kept going-- "I was talking with him about you recently. About the way you are. And what he thought you were. And he told me that you were like a *fire*." --That is, if an eye is kept on me and I'm "nurtured" well enough (fuck you), everything is fine, but if I'm left unattended, I could either burn out or go out of control (cute!). At the end of all that, though, he said that I was a "talented basketcase", that he was physically attracted to me but had gotten to be completely exhausted being around me when we weren't fucking or on stage, that he doesn't have to stick around me even if I'm worth having in the band, so he isn't. At that point I completely snapped, got ready to swing at him, but he just pulled me to him by the collar and said that he thought Walt was being nice with his analogy, that he wouldn't go through the trouble of poetics with me because I wasn't worth any of them. I'm "just a neurotic little freak". Shoved me back hard enough I nearly fell.

FUCK it was so fucking humiliating and I brought it all on myself (not that he hadn't humiliated me all on his own before). Failures upon failures. The only saving grace is that no one else was close enough (and we weren't loud enough) to see or hear us.

Benny was smoking outside and I almost ignored him. I felt like (and still feel like) a fucking idiot; all I want to do is stay curled up in my room. I was so crazy in front of Greg. I ended up joking with Benny that I could use a cigarette myself after the day I had. He let me lean on him for as long as we were alone-- I must've looked as exhausted as I felt. We barely said a word after our initial greetings/jokes. I appreciated that he didn't ask me about anything that went on. I wasn't ready to talk about it and I'm still not. It's all too shameful. The one tiny shining light of the day was that I finally got his number and address. He's a truck driver even when we're not on the road, tho, so away more often than not. UGH. Of course it can't be easy. Nothing easy for me!

*