I don't have any STDs! Thank god. I was nearly having a panic attack in the waiting room. Well, that's it then - I have to keep it that way.
Rich had sent me a load more weird texts a couple of nights ago, and I suddenly started crying so hard I thought I'd never stop - my mum came in, looked at the phone clutched against my chest and pryed it from my grip, seeing it as the source of the problem and... getting rid of it. She turned it off, and it seemed so perfectly logical. It didn't make it go away, but it did pause it.
I've not talked to my mother properly about my gender issues since I was a teenager. Even then... I don't think she grasped the extent of it. She didn't see the self-harm - she didn't know that I was trying to starve myself to prevent puberty - she didn't know that when I was over at my female friends houses, it was so they could dress me up. She didn't know that they referred to me in female terms. She didn't know how afraid I was of going to school. But of course she didn't - because I never told her, and i was very good at keeping it all lockedlockedlocked.
Well, we had one of those all-nighters, talking it all through... and I think I just needed it to clarify everything. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't a decision made in one night - I've known it to be the answer for a long time now, and recently it has nagged at me more than ever... I just want to give myself a chance at happiness.
I can't cry like a normal person - I bottle things up until it comes out in an absolute explosion - I've had swollen eyelids ever since! Finally started to cool down - thank god, would look like a right nutter at work tomorrow.
At the sexual health clinic, they told me they have a number of free counselling services, and also gave me the information for a few other places to reseach, and of course I'll be seeing my own GP as well. (I want to at least do part of it through the NHS so that it's all on record - I had enough trouble getting the information about my broken wrist sent to my GP so I could get a physiotherapist, so even if I just inform them so they can be kept up to date, that would be good. Which makes me realise I really have made me decision - every other time, I've wanted to go private so it WOULDN'T be on record.)
Of course I have a massive journey ahead of me, which I'm sure will be even more difficult than I can comprehend right now - but I feel... so much better having just decided and got it out there. It's a terrible thing to carry all on my own, but I'm not alone anymore. My mum outright asked me... and I said yes, I tried to tell you this before and you didn't believe me! "I believed you - I was just scared for you - but I want you to be happy."
Now, for something a little less intense!
How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]
The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [Not abandoned, exactly.]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen - [HATED, HATED, HATEDDD!!]
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwel
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce- One day, one day!
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
More than 6, but 17 read is still pretty poor show. As you see, I have a habit of abandoning books - a lot of them where reading for uni, but once I decided I wasn't answering on that text and the tutorial for it was over, I abandoned it - I was trying to read about 6 books a week at that point, if I wasn't going to use something, I certainly wasn't going to waste my time reading it - if anything, my degree made me like reading less - because it was all within time limits.
Anyway, any recommendations from the ones I haven't read? |
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