Don't Wander Alone

“It is dangerous to wander alone!” – one of my auditory hallucinations, 2025

entries

  • Warzone

    This will probably surprise those who know me in real life, but as a young kid, I was a social butterfly. You may now gasp in disbelief. From the moment I learned to speak, I wanted to speak with everyone. When another child entered my field of vision, in my head I would instantly decide that they were my friend, even if they didn’t know it yet. While no one was exempt from Little Sarah’s friend status I was especially interested in the quiet ones. I was reminded well into my teens of the many occasions when, as a little kid, I would have the shyest of children giggling and running around with me within ten minutes of meeting them. Back then I had no fear of people, I had not discovered any reason to be guarded.

    Despite this natural social nature, my mom decided to homeschool me. Unlike me, my mom wasn’t social. Her whole life with other people, perhaps my father being one of the only exceptions, was a cyclical confirmation that humans were scary and untrustworthy. She sensed danger everywhere she went as a woman, as a mother, as a Christian, and as any other identity she held. As her belief of eventual persecution became more extreme, she withdrew us more and more from others until we were together alone most of the time, my time with others replaced by time with her. My dad travelled for work, leaving us alone in a house together most of the year. We became inseparable; I was never allowed to be far away from her and she couldn’t bring herself to ever be far away from me, even when dad was home.

    As I grew, I began to pick up on a dichotomy of good and bad days. On good days, my mom would wake me up and we would spend the day learning dead languages together and listening to history audiobooks. For lunch, we would watch TV on the couch while eating chips and sour cream. We would get up and dance together in the kitchen when a good song came on the radio. She would rate my cartwheels and exasperate herself into laughter trying to explain why I couldn’t marry Abraham Lincoln, a childhood dream of mine.

    However, on the bad days, she would get unpredictably, wildly angry and distressed at me over things that made no sense to get so upset about. Every day her triggers changed and I struggled to keep up. Some days if I asked a question she didn’t like that could be all it took for me to end up standing in the corner for three hours. On other days she would be fine with the dumb question, but if I forgot to clean up a mess that would be the breaking point and she would destroy the house, ripping everything out of place while screaming and crying at me. I felt safe telling her that I didn’t like her salads whenever I had to eat them, until one time she broke down sobbing and told me she knew I secretly didn’t love her and that’s the real reason why I hated her salads, before running to her room and locking herself in it all day. If I failed to thoroughly blowdry my hair after a bath, I would get lectured long into the night on how my lack of ability to follow basic instructions would mean I’d become homeless in the future. When I apologized I was sometimes not sure what I was even apologizing for, but I was made to apologize again and again and again because to her I always sounded like I was faking it.

    As the bad days started to outnumber the good ones, I began to dedicate most of my energy to making sure that she felt happy and safe. I listened to her describe her symptoms of anxiety and depression, to her rant about her grudges against her siblings and my dad’s side of the family. I listened to her monologue about her increasingly extremist religious views and paranoia of the government. I listened to her talk about her relationship problems with my dad. I listened to her recount her first marriage. I listened to her tell me way too many details about her childhood trauma, much more than I should’ve known at that age. Throughout these listening sessions, I tried not to disrupt her view of reality because that was the only trigger that stayed constant. While I was too young to understand what was going on in the bigger picture of our relationship, I found myself understanding her as a person. I stretched my child brain beyond its years, developing emotional skills that went farther than what was normal, all just to understand her. I thought it would help with the bad days. Everything would be fine if people could only understand her, but they didn’t, so it was up to me to keep the peace by being the one who could. I tried to show her that I loved her, but I’m not sure she ever believed it.

    As I got older and more bad days happened despite my efforts, I began to realize the hard way that this emotional availability only went one way–from me to her. She had so much pain and fear going on in her head that she didn’t have space for my troubles, which were quickly mounting in an emotionally chaotic environment. There were times where she was appeared capable of listening to me, and as a naturally open person who was talking to their mother of all people, I was eager to share. Who can you open up to if not your own mother? A mother is psychologically programmed to fall into unconditional all-consuming love with you the moment your first cry as a baby rings out. If your own mother doesn’t love you, what does that tell a child about themselves?

    Through her, I learned many different reasons to fear people. I found the things I had opened up about headlining those bad days. The things I had told her, that I thought were understandable because I understood them about her, were being repackaged and shot back at me like bullets, twisted into a personal attack or evidence of my inherent problematic nature. Any emotion I talked about feeling, any problems I felt I was having, and the thoughts I had on something would be used as evidence for my impeding life of destruction and failure, or as someone who was incapable of being loved, or as someone who didn’t love or respect her. Every piece of information on myself as a person became a weapon on her side of the battlefield and I had no defense built up. I had wrongfully expected the same understanding that I freely gave to her to be freely given to me as well.

    Before I went to college, my mom added a new phrase to her collection of lower-impact bullets–the rubber ones, if you will–the kind she only fired during the better days or in front of other people:

    “You used to be so cheerful. You had a real heart for people but you seem so closed off now. I miss the old Sarah. What happened to her?”

    Now, as an adult, the little Sarah never left me. I feel her move around inside trying to guide me, but there was a time up until recently when I didn’t let her move too much. I had my own arsenal and I fired it when I felt threatened, but what I considered to be a threat was skewed.

    Every time someone asked about me or my inner world–if I was okay, if I was zoning out, how my day went–I would fire at them. I assumed the information I gave would be used in their arsenal later when their own inevitable mother-style Bad Day happens. Even though I had never seen them behave like her, I felt that any moment they would turn on me and everything I had told them in confidence, even the simple things, would be melted into bullets and tear through my sense of emotional safety with them. I held everyone at a comfortable distance by coming across as defensive and snappy. Despite this, I loved them, but with the distance I had created with my attitude I felt deep down that nobody loved me as much as I loved them, or understood me as much as I understood them, just like how my mother didn’t understand me as much as I understood her. In retrospect, every time I treated someone poorly I felt that tug in your psyche you get when you’re doing something wrong but can’t put words to it, but instead of introspecting I let it slide. I couldn’t apologize because an apology was like freely handing the other side a bomb; an admission of wrongness is something that would ruin my side of the war when their inevitable Bad Day happened, the weapon that would give them the victory no matter how wrong they were. They could always throw that back at me, use it as evidence that I’m riddled with flaws and can’t be correct.

    It’s ironic how I often compare getting away from that house to swimming off of an abandoned island, only to now live in the middle of the woods miles away from others, hiding in the foliage from the society I had such a passionate love for as a kid.

    So, recently, I’ve been asking myself, have the people I’ve surrounded myself with given me a reason to believe that they are going to hurt me?

    And, well…no.

    I’m not at war. The people around me love me just as much as I love them and I had been treating them like imposters. I had been keeping them at a safe enough distance that no ammo could be gathered, no weak points exposed, but in doing so I cut myself off and hurt many people, even lost some that were so important to me. For that, I’m sorry that I’ve caused so much harm.

    My sole focus for most of my life was escaping my parents, so much so that recovering from them became an afterthought. I thought I was aware enough to somehow avoid perpetuating cycles, that the behavior I endured was so obvious to me that I’d immediately catch myself if I started doing it. But really, how much of ourselves is simply a collection of the people around us? Thirty percent? Fifty? One-hundred? Does that percentage go up if you’re a child? Does it decrease as an adult? Is our minds baseline really only made up of stories and memories and the traits of the people we’ve been around the most, gathered throughout our lives? Maybe not entirely, but also probably to some large extent yes. Since I know that extent cannot be completely determined and also that the majority of my experiences in my currently short life of twenty-four years have been filled with sad stories, bad memories, and harmful people, I should’ve known better and been more self-aware.

    Like everyone else, there’s no way I could ever be totally separated from the way I was raised. That presents a unique set of challenges I’m still learning about, but once in a while, I’m reminded of how it’s all worth it. The newfound realization that nobody is out to get me and that people love me as much as I love them has lifted a weight off of me I didn’t know I was carrying. I’m not cured and never will be, but the world seems a bit brighter for now, and I’ll take what I can get even if it means I’m the idiot once in a while. The war ended a while ago and now I accept that it has.

  • Review: Morbius (yes, i actually watched it)

    I think the short length of the movie was one of the few things the creators did correctly, as if I had to actually sit through two hours of Morbius, there would be no review because I would not watch it. In the spirit of the movie, I will not waste too much of your time with this, either. I won’t even bother explaining the plot because as far as I’m concerned, you’ve had several years to watch this and realize it was bad on your own.

    So, let’s break this down into an numbered list. The numbers don’t matter that much, but I know Buzzfeed made everyone love numbered lists. Hopefully there are enough millennials here that it’ll satisfy those ancient neuro-synapsys enough to balance out the frustrating material in them.

    Number One: The Slow Motion Scenes

    So, when a film has a slow motion scene it typically serve a purpose: to draw you in to the details. What details does Morbius want you to see? A few mid-tier bullet dodges and characters literally just running by the camera with swoopy shapes trailing around them. There is nothing interesting going on, no ornate detail the scene is drawing your focus in towards, just…Morbius being fast. Out of the many slow motion scenes I saw, I only recall thinking two were cool, and both were during the final fight between Morbius and Milo. Another slow motion scene sticks out in my mind but only because it was close enough that I could see the plastic sheen of the prosthetic vampire teeth they stuck onto Jared Leto.

    Number Two: Literally the Biggest Plot Point

    The whole reason why anything in this film happens is because Morbius is a sick genius. That’s not me saying he’s cool; he’s literally sick. He has a disease that requires three blood transfusions a day to survive. But since he’s also a genius, he’s trying to find a cure by studying vampire bats and eventually mixes his DNA with vampire bat DNA to cure it. On the surface, this logic makes sense if you don’t think about it too much, but unfortunately, I thought about it too much. Why would you, a person who needs an external source of blood to live, mix your DNA with a mammal that also requires an external source of blood to live and come out expecting to not need an external source of blood to live? That’s really all I have to say about that.

    Number Three: Martina

    Near the beginning of the movie, we hear Morbius brag about her capabilities; she’s apparently overqualified and brilliant. However, we never actually see her be overqualified and brilliant. We only see her follow Morbius’ instructions and fall in love with him. She never does anything to help him or herself that would be seen as a testament to her smarts, talent, or strength that Morbius says she has. She is totally dependent on Morbius to describe her to us and make her do things. The only ounce of personality we see from her is that she has a cat. I get the movie isn’t about Martina and I’m tired of the all-pink girl power “of course I run like a girl” trope as much as the next zoomer feminist watching Roe v. Wade crumble to dust in real time, but my complaints aren’t that she’s not outshining the men around her while in heels and on her period. My complaint is that she’s a tissue paper thin character that can’t stand up on her own without Morbius being there to give her a reason to exist. He doesn’t even have chemistry with her, she’s just the only female he interacts with on a consistent basis. Rather unfortunate when you have possibly the most gay-coded character being Morbius’ best friend. I honestly thought those two would be the ones to ride off into the sunset together after punching each other around a bit. But alas, all writers have a persistent, all-consuming urge to make the effeminate metrosexual-types the villains and the stoic masculine protagonist purely interested in his robotic boob-having companion. After I eventually get my writing degree, I expect the chip they put in your brain after handing you the diploma will force me to endure the same urges and I will be subjected to write my male characters within the context of this tired tropey dichotomy to appease the capitalism gods for the rest of my life. Pray for me.

    Side note, but when the police go to her apartment, why does that guy think shaking the litter box will call the cat? Don’t you shake the cat bowl to call them? What do I know, I only live with seven cats.

    Number Four: Artificial Blood vs. Real Blood

    Why is this an ethical debate? It is shown multiple times in the movie that Morbius can get real blood without killing people. There are literally entire packets of it hanging in his laboratory freezer. Nobody has to die for him to rely on it, so why does he insist on only drinking artificial blood like it’s some moral high ground? If relying on real blood would cause him to grow a hunger that would result in uncontrollably killing people (as is a plot in some vampire stories), that would be understandable, but that is never shown to be the case. In fact, it seems like relying on the artificial blood is more dangerous considering it doesn’t sustain him for a consistent amount of time and is thus far more likely cause him to go into uncontrollable homicidal hunger hysterics at the wrong place and wrong time. Milo is the only person we see relying on real blood consistently, but he was a jerk with little regard for others from the start, so it’s impossible to know if he’s at the whims of an uncontrollable blood lust or just being his silly queer-coded villain self. It should be noted that the only times Morbius succumbs to bloodlust is when he first awakens with the bat DNA in him, although some level of control is still implied because he did not kill his hot research assistant, Martina, and even shows anger at the man who shoves her. However, this is the only time in the movie that consuming real blood is explicitly implied to be something out of one’s control and never at any other time, even with Milo and all the people he kills. For the most “Tell, don’t show” movie I’ve ever seen, this is a rather odd thing to never tell us.

    If you want to create a hero character with a moral high ground that gives them a slight disadvantage–like Batman choosing to not kill–it needs to be explained in some fashion why that chosen moral high ground is important in the context of the story. This sort of idea isn’t one that needs to be stated, it’s sort of an intrinsic thing you pick up on after consuming enough media, so it’s rather surprising that this isn’t expounded upon in any way.

    Number Five: The Train Scene

    If you’ve seen the movie, you know the exact scene I’m talking about. I have to give credit where credit is due: I have not laughed that hard at a movie in years. I wasn’t sure where the surprisingly somewhat decent subway fight scene was going when Milo started running at Morbius while he stood there on the train platform, feeling the wind poetically rush by as watercolor streaks around him. I sincerely thought he was just disassociating. But when he suddenly jumps in front of the train and starts flying in front of it like a furious orange kite, it looked so insane and silly that I cry-laughed. I ironically, and somehow unironically, love it. I wish I had a recording of my initial reaction, but unfortunately it’s a moment in time I’ll never be able to get back. I’ll always think of it incredibly fondly.

    Number Six: Slideshow Allegations

    Simply put, the pacing and the way everything unfolded felt less like a story and more like a slideshow. I have seen true crime YouTubers put together a far better constructed storytelling aspect about someone’s real-life murder. I don’t even know how to describe what went wrong in the writing process to make it feel so dry. By the time the movie was approaching the final obligatory end-of-movie fight scene, it felt like nothing had happened even though things had been happening. It felt like a presentation about Dr. Michael Morbius instead of a story about Dr. Michael Morbius.

    Number Seven: Jared Leto

    I want to criticize him because I don’t like him as a person, but with the quality of the movie itself I’m not sure if I can. An actor can only do so much with what is given to him. If I see Jared Leto in a movie, he’s usually the villain, especially if that villain has a wild sociopathic streak. I’d say he’s usually okay at this if he doesn’t have to move his face around too much or do any extreme over-exaggerated gestures, which is also known as acting. I must say, this role worked for him in that regard. Morbius doesn’t really emote except with anger, and even then the anger is usually obscured with a flash of CGI bat face. I thought that was a weird choice on behalf of the writers, because wouldn’t someone who spent their entire life disabled have a lot of feelings about suddenly being able-bodied? Even if the movie didn’t want to be a commentary on disability and chronic illness, Morbius could’ve been an interesting character by even dipping a toe into the feelings a disabled or chronically ill person might have. The closest we get to said toe-dip is when it’s revealed that Morbius calls every one of his childhood friends Milo because they all end up dying, painting every boy who gets the sick bed next to him as a temporary presence that is ultimately meaningless as they succumb to the illness one after another. Isn’t that even a bit powerful? That consistently watching your friends die would make a child grow to not form serious emotional attachments? But it’s never brought up again. It never comes up in the conflicts the characters have. As a result, Morbius doesn’t feel like a complete character. Milo feels more fleshed out because he at least has a sense of humor and his villainy gives him a streak of complexity, this righteous anger towards the way he’s been mistreated as a disabled/chronically ill person.

    My theory is the writers were just saving Jared Leto from actually acting, which is understandable.

    Well, that’s the end of it. I know it’s low-hanging fruit to criticize a movie that’s been criticized by just about every multi-celled organism on earth, so in order to somewhat balance the wildly tipped scales I will give it one compliment:

    My roommate’s cat, Juno, loved Morbius. Barely took her eyes off the screen for the entire movie.

  • I returned to the scene of the crime

    So, one day, I opened Facebook to discover that my parents had moved out of state without telling me….a month ago. In one aspect, it was a relief; I don’t speak with my parents due to many reasons and now they were far enough away I didn’t have to worry about accidentally running into them, but it also felt like a security blanket had been ripped out of my arms. I had lived my entire childhood in one house with my parents. It was for this reason that I had sworn off ever returning to my miserable hometown, but after I found out I had nothing to return for, the urge to go back suddenly appeared.

    On Thanksgiving weekend, my partner and I travelled there. I said I wanted some kind of closure on the terrible things that had happened to me in that house even though I knew it was unlikely, but I don’t think I entirely believed myself when I said it. I don’t know why I wanted to go back. The whole way there I felt stupid and selfish. Was I just in a fit because my parents hadn’t told me they were moving even though we hadn’t spoken in years? Was I self-sabotaging by picking at an old wound? Most importantly, am I evil for subjecting my partner to the horror of being in Paulding County?

    Well, turns out none of those questions matter because my therapist was telling me to make the trip, and I always obey my therapist because I usually don’t know what else to do.

    At first, I didn’t see my house and mistook it to be the neighbors. The neighbors house had always been painted a pale tan, but my house was a bright warm yellow sunrise color sitting atop a hill. However, looking at the hill, my eyes didn’t see the familiar yellow. It didn’t see any color at all. But as I expected yellow, my eyes moved on quick from anything that wasn’t that color. As I parked across the street, my brain and eyes began to work together and finally translated the image to me: it was white. My house was white. And my door, while now painted black, was the same door with the same fancy glass oval. As I approached, I realized I wouldn’t ever be able to walk through it again once the massive lock they put on all empty homes became visible. Still, I put my eyes against the decorative oval glass, peering in through the same unfrosted parts that Child Sasha had used to look out.

    I had expected a husk, one where things had simply been removed. I did not expect a cleaned husk. I had this strange expectation that, spiritually, one would be able to feel some kind of trauma had taken place there, but with how much I saw had been modified, I doubted that any ghosts could remain attached. Our rustic green chandelier in the dining room had been replaced with some strange metallic pointy contraption with a light bulb at each jutted end, a brutalist piece, sitting in a box of pure white walls and carpet. There had once been ripped green wallpaper that we had tried to pull off ourselves, ripping some of the drywall in the process, but all evidence of it and the damage had completely vanished. The once chipped up railings that I used to dig my fingernails into out of stress showed no indication that anyone had ever touched them before. Everything had been so meticulously cleaned, replaced, and purified as if it was once a crime scene. It had been a crime scene. But I had needed it to stay a crime scene, I had needed to learn more about the crime and now I couldn’t. It was gone. Two decades of my life scrubbed and painted over, fresh for a new imprint, ready to receive new blood.

    I walked around back and saw that the large rounded deck that my dad had built himself, a point of pride even once it had begun rotting through, had been replaced with a standard square one whose stairs awkwardly cut into what had been my mother’s herb garden, now a totally dead flower bed. I walked past it quickly towards the pet graveyard. As I stood in front of the lumpy ground, I had a hard time convincing myself that their bodies still lay under my feet. The place did not feel like itself anymore. There were moments where I would look at something–the cheap tan plastic border for the flower garden out front, the lake on the farmers land behind me, the jasmine vines that took over the chain link fence–and know that it had been my home, but then looking up at the pale carcass of a building would instantly remove any sense of familiarity. My hot pink bedroom was likely no longer hot pink and Jamie Muffin’s bones were supposed to be under my feet, but both things were obscured in their own ways, so how could I be sure of any of it? How could I be sure that my bedroom wasn’t still pink? How could I be sure that Jamie Muffin was still buried there?

    My partner and I got lunch at a restaurant I used to busk at for college money. He sat across from me and graciously let me have the booth side of the table, as he talked about how he had moved several times as a child. He said he felt weird visiting his old house, seeing new people there and all the changes they did to make it theirs, making it clear it was no longer his. But the big hurdle he explained was that he, and now I, could never walk through our old dwellings to “work through stuff”. Even if we did get a walk-through, would only one walk-through suffice? Would really that be all it took to tidy up our feelings? How many times would someone have to return to a childhood home to successfully move on? How many times do we return to memories in our head and move on from them only to replay them later?

    I went back to my actual home in Appalachia that night. When I was four years old, I swore I’d escape to the mountains and get away from all the scary things at home, and I had. Now, I looked around my bedroom at my belongings. I remember having looked at the objects from my parents home as mementos that I had taken on my great escape–my desk, my nightstand, the globe on my shelf, Cottontail the duck from a souvenir shop in Cave Springs–but now I saw them as survivors. By bringing them with me I had facilitated their escape, but not from what I had been escaping from. They had avoided another potentially worse fate: erasure. I worried that the cleanliness I had seen that day had the power to clean the memories that stick with you for a lifetime, that keep impacting you and your relationships and the world and yourself. The kind of cleanliness that makes you question if you’re home. Who knows if there’s anything worse than coming home and not finding the crime scene you were raised in.

    As I’ve put distance between myself and the visitation, I realized that fear of forgetting wasn’t a reality. The house it was has never left me. Even though it no longer physically exists, I find it suddenly erected around me when my ceiling fan does the same rhythmic clicking noise that my old one did, when a door slams, when I hear my roommates quickly approach my bedroom. The feeling of it being there isn’t pleasant. It disrupts my life. It’s not healthy to hold on to it. However, wishing it gone feels like destroying a part of myself, which I guess is part of the reason why I wanted the house to stay the same. But the house hasn’t stayed the same, and to be fair, neither have I. I want to return to the scene of the crime, but every day the crime and I take a step away from each other, and now, we’ve both crossed a threshold where the miserable click of the ceiling fan is all I have left of it. And even though I’ve been acting miserable about it right now, I think that in a few years time when I have more of myself built up away from it I’ll look back at on those memories of my old home and feel relief at the sight of the distance.