I feel perpetually prickly, on edge and ready to fly. I have friends and I love them, but they don't know me. Maybe I don't know them. I'm not unhappy or I'd be posting on my other journal, but I'm shivering to leave. This is a beautiful place with a wonderful school and lovely people. It isn't home, though. No one's close to me, and my own body feels like an itchy dress I can't figure out how to unzip.

It isn't as though going to college will transform me into a different person, or rather transform me into the parts of me I prefer. It isn't as though I believe I can strip away the insecurities, the rages, the being too quiet and being too loud, the thousands of things wrong with me. It isn't as though I can toss them out and leave something patient and beautiful and self-preserving, while keeping whatever brilliance or beauty or compassion I already have. Even the most gorgeous campus and stimulating campus and friendly people won't change me, so if I'm the problem, then that's that.

The hopes are there, though. I don't have to reinvent myself to be happy or loved, because I've been both happy and loved, and at the moment I'm fairly chipper and liked. I don't have to wander around endlessly aware of all the things wrong with me, torn between feeling alone and feeling suffocated, trapped in a life that in many ways is better than it could be.

I want to leave, though. I want to find somewhere I belong and find people who can see all my layers and still love me--if they exist--and I want to find friends I can feel both close to and comfortable with, because right now it seems like I can only have one or the other.

Honesty is a major problem. There's too much inside me, it feels, roiling and panicking and mostly black and scratching at the insides of my skull. I hate lying, but when I'm honest, it's too much; the filter fades with a few people and if even one is the wrong person, suddenly my secrets have been spilled everywhere. I wish I could be utterly honest but then it'd probably seem like I was insane, or desparate for attention, or maybe just fishing for sympathy. And I'd be scared, too, that I was telling too much and trusting too much and getting too needy. It's that which makes me feel, sometimes, like I'll be like this no matter where I go, because I need people to turn to but I don't know what people really think or feel. College won't change that, but at least it will be a blank slate. I won't have to lie, but I'll only have to share with the people I want to share with. I can choose, for the first time in a while, who knows what.

And if I made the wrong choice, at least I had that chance.

Well I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today