I know a human being can survive almost anything, as long as you see the end in sight. But how I feel is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The FOG is like a cage without a key.
Some days I wonder if any of the people in my life can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum TOTAL of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can’t be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?
You know when I cut myself, its something beyond despair, something very extreme. It’s about trying to GET to something. The physical act is a metaphor of trying to access something that is frozen. Something between who I was and who I’ve moved to and there’s this thick layer of ice and I can’t get to myself. It’s a positive act even though people around me find it horrible, self-destructive, terrifying and think that I have literally gone crazy. But what people don’t realize is that your body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
The bottom line is that my life has already almost slipped away from me. I have two choices: I can end it or I can fight like hell to save it. In these flashes of insight, I understand for a moment THAT one of the great dividends of darkness is an increased sensitivity to the light.
I think now a days that my body remembers what my mind forgets. The images are visual, auditory, olfactory, and kinesthetic. They aren’t laid down on the same tracks as THOUGHT. And sometimes, when they return to you, it is as if you feel them for the very first time. Memory lives on in the details, like the color of a room, a tone of a voice, the touch of a child, the smell of a man.
If only I had known a year ago what I’d be facing now. Until last year I lived with the innocent arrogance that my life was a simple product of effort, will, and design. But now I am a house of cards, held precariously by the fragile conspiracy of wind, WEIGHT, and angle. Perhaps it is best we cannot see into our futures.
All societies “helpful” comments imply that if I’d only do _____, my problems would be solved. Like it’s all within my grasp, able to be managed and mastered, if only I would try harder, longer, better. As I NOD my head in polite and pathetic appreciation for their input, I scream inside, “Shut up. Shut up. Unless you’ve been lost in this particular section of hell yourself, don’t you dare try to give me directions.
I think I should come with a consumer warning, like the labels that say “Handle with care” or “May be hazardous to your health.” I am unfit for human consumption. I STRUGGLE to articulate how awful and isolating this feels, but I can’t find the words.
I now think of depression as pain. It’s a kind of living DEATH, a non-feeling that is its own sort of agony. The problem was, I always knew exactly how dead I was, how my mind had shut down. There was STILL this consciousness of what I was losing. Everybody who is depressed is aware of what they’ve lost. That’s the real hell of it.
How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism and in some cases outright hostility.
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear? I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a DIFFERENT person then.
I THOUGHT about my life and how lost I’d felt for most of it. I thought about the way that all truths I’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
I realize that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions.
I like this quote, it’s so true:
“The price of anything is the AMOUNT of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau
