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« on: April 29, 2017, 10:44:10 PM »
Hello, everyone! Long time, no see.
First of all, I’d like to apologize for my disappearance. I know I’ve disappeared multiple times in the past, but this was by far my longest time away from the site. Second of all, as a moderator and someone who swore to stay active and committed to this place, I think I owe it to you guys to finally explain why I keep vanishing like this. It’s not going to be a very fun post, and it’s certainly not going to be very kawaii of me, but it’s something I definitely need to get off my chest and feel like you guys should know as well.
I don’t really know how to say it, so I’ll get straight to the point: the Churro you know isn’t me, she’s a persona I play. I’m not lying about my identity or anything of course, I really am an 18-year-old girl who loves cute animals and all things pink, but I guess you could say that Churro is somewhat of a fake fantasy version of myself or who I would rather be. She’s bright, she’s confident, and she’s happy. Then there’s the real Churro. When I was 9 years old, I developed a debilitating panic disorder that kept me from even leaving the house other than out of necessity. I didn’t sleep, I could barely eat, and I repeatedly indulged in dangerous behaviors such as washing my hands until they bled because I could never feel clean enough until I no longer had skin. When I was about 13, I had finally fully overcome the disorder and never had another panic attack. But that wasn’t the end. As soon as I overcame the panic disorder, I slipped into an emotionally numbing depression. I haven’t gotten any better. I’m not even sad, I’m just numb to the world. It’s kind of scary, actually, because it’s getting to the point where I can’t even cling onto memories of what emotions were like. It’s fading away, and my fear is that one day I won’t remember what feelings were like at all or even remember that I ever could feel them.
The mental disorders, of course, are worsened by the physical ones. I have chronic pain, a permanent spinal malformation, chronic fatigue, a sleep disruption in my nasal, and chronic memory loss. Not to mention the dyscalculia (dyslexia but with numbers/math). Though I’m legally disabled, since I can (even with pain) still work like an abled person, I’m disregarded and ignored when I need accommodation for my problems. That sucks. Also, people think my memory loss and dyscalculia = stupidity. I’ll be honest, I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but I’m no idiot. I have an IQ in the 140s, I’ve had a college-level education of English and grammar since I was in middle school, and I’ve had people I barely know go out of their way to tell me that I’m one of the wisest young adults they’ve ever met. I know this sounds like I’m tooting my own horn, but I don’t actually believe I’m all that smart (and definitely not that wise lol), I just don’t think I’m dumb because I can’t remember what you told me five minutes ago or I take longer than average to work out a simple math problem, and I think those are all good examples of why I don’t think I’m all that dull. Okay--I strayed off topic here. The point is that, even in adulthood, I get bullied a lot for being “slow/thick-skulled” (or, as my grandmother likes to say, “a dimbrain who should get married now while you’re still pretty, because you won’t be able to get into college.” Thanks, grandma.) and that just adds to the whole mess of why I’m just not a very happy or confident person.
What does any of this have to do with disappearing from MR? It’s like this: Churro is the me I want to be, and over all of my time here I’ve obsessed over keeping her perfect and not letting my real self slip through the cracks in that pink-haired, purple-eyed mask. That, in my already difficult life, is a very daunting task to keep up. Going online and carefully orchestrating messages so that you seem happier, smarter, more confident, and better than you really are is not something I could keep up with when I was having my bad episodes. When my chronic illnesses flared up or when I could barely get myself up out of bed because I just didn’t see the point in just repeating motions every day, putting on a mask and playing Churro is the last thing I wanted to do. And those days have been becoming more and more frequent. Adulthood has been hitting me hard, my parents have gotten divorced, my friends are having a hard time putting up with my mental and physical slips and leaving one by one, have been trying to get into college while fighting the voices playing through my head telling me I'm too stupid and wasting my time, and have been struggling through an abusive job and the stress of job-hunting for a better one that will actually compensate for my disabilities and, you know, pay me.
It was all too much, and my energy for Churro was at 0%. It still is… so, I’m back. But I’m putting my mask away. I’m sorry to everyone who has high expectations for me to be the Churro you’ve known, but all I want is to be able to come back to the site I love and actually be able to enjoy it instead of drain my energy on a façade.
Thank you to everyone who reads this whole thing, and thank you even more to everyone who’s still going to stick by me even if I might seem different now. I'm glad to be back, and relieved to have finally allowed myself to stop pretending.
Sincerely,
Churro (the real one this time)
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If you're not interested, just say so. He was so nice to me when we first met. Didn't expect him to turn out to be such a butt. 
I'm doing something nontraditional too, and I'm continuing a novel I already started for Camp NaNoWriMo but never completed. In my opinion, NaNoWriMo is all about writing and having fun, so I don't think you need to stick yourself to some solid set of rules and just participate however you want. 
