hard or soft?

It's funny, how much I can endure...how much I have endured. The amount of rejection and abuse and neglect and all of that shit that I've put up with, and come out okay. And the way I can cope with it now, and I'm living my life and it's great, isn't it? I remember someone telling me, forever ago, that it was so cool that I'd come to terms with who I was and my past, my future...that most people who have been through all I have take years and years, but at seventeen I had it all figured out.

I don't.


Sometimes, I feel like one of those little russian dolls. There are about a million of me, but they're all just hollow shells....and each one is meant for a different person. There is a big hard Danielle for the people at school, and a smaller, hard Danielle for the majority of my friends. I am a bitch, and we laugh about it, I laugh about it, and I get mad and big when I want to crumple, and I yell when I want to cry, because I am ashamed. Inside of all of those hard wooden dolls, at the center of it all is a little girl made of clay, breakable and delicate and so, so tiny....so small she's invisible.

Am I strong? I shake when people yell, and I want to cry when someone corrects me because I can't handle not being perfect. I have panic attacks and I have to listen to Bob Dylan in order to go to sleep...I surround myself with pillows and stuffed animals because after fifteen years of 'safety', I am still conviced that my mother's ex-boyfriend is going to strangle me in my sleep. I have closed off some aspect of myself to everyone in my life, even if it's just one dumb little thing, because I am afraid, I am terrified, that if anyone knew me completely....they wqouldn't want me anymore.