I’m convinced I’m dying. Of course all of us are slowly dying, and it would be stupid of me to pretend to be immune from the human condition. This pain feels immediate. My head, my stomach, my shoulder blade, my sternum, my lower left quadrant, my wrists, you get the point. It is all painful and broken. I am broken. Maybe not beyond repair, though I’m exceedingly tired of sewing myself up. No one else ever comes along and offers anymore. I was too proud to accept before and now everyone is gone. What does that mean?
Thanks to 2000s Cymbalta commercials, we all know depression can hurt. It’s not insane to think my mental anguish is manifesting as physical symptoms. My physical pain competes for attention with my mental pain. I spend most of my time convincing myself I’ve made both up. Well, I used to. Now I go to therapy. Therapy has cleared my head and my heart. My therapist says I’ve done a lot of hard work and come a long way. My soul feels like it’s being fed for the first time. It doesn’t make it any easier to discover it was empty.
I am incredibly lonely. All of my sources of joy are gone-- they’ve been replaced by complete and utter disgust with who I was. The wrong combination of who I thought everyone else wanted me to be and what I thought would make me perfect. My interests were never mine at all. Most days, I understand why I couldn’t keep going. It’s not a crime to wake up in your own body and demand better for yourself. My organs unionized and made the collective decision to stop feeling like shit. My feet are planted in the sand. I am something new.
I will admit it kills me that I failed. It’s difficult to see everyone bend themselves into this desperate world and find yourself a lousy contortionist. I’m all wrong. Everything is too loud. Things that should be fun and sweet and joyful-- friends sharing pizza on the subway together, couples kissing on street corners, freshman girls teetering on cobblestones-- turn into entitled, disease-spreading assholes. I create monsters out of molehills. I judge and I judge wrong. I can’t make new friends because I don’t trust myself to like them in six months. The people I love do terrible things and I say nothing. I do nothing. I am nothing except every tiny little interaction I have with the world. They are allowed to be reduced to best behavior. I refuse to believe I will ever experience a satisfactory enough existence to justify existing at all.
It’s an impossible way to live. When you are constantly judging yourself, it becomes easy to see other behavior as instinctually right and yours as inherently wrong. Their thoughts become yours, and eventually you are judging yourself based on standards no one keeps themselves. You jump higher and grow stronger. You fix yourself before they tell you to. I relied on judging myself as a way of protection for a long time. I was so good at it. Don’t get me wrong, I still constantly said the wrong thing because that’s apparently part of my charm, but I at least felt like I had an understanding of social rules. I had the energy to police myself constantly.
Now I feel lost in a way I can never come back from. My voice has always been soft but now it feels weak. Words are more difficult to bring to the tip of my tongue. I’m always mixing them up. I’m not funny anymore. I don’t know how to allow myself to exist in the world without making fun of myself for being there in the first place. But why must I sacrifice my sense of self to be accommodating? I used to do it all the time before I blew up. I’m so very good at squishing myself down. I am a flier plastered against a wall-- bright, interesting for a period of time, designed to be ripped apart for the enjoyment of others. I get in no one’s way. I’m replaced when I expire. Maybe I’ll hang around a bit too long and everyone will see how fucking pitiful I am and feel sorry for me or maybe they’ll look at me and think of what could have been. Nothing involves me or my feelings. I’m even a wall dressing within my own mind.
In therapy last week I told my therapist about a brief moment in a video that haunts me-- a woman with a baby cutting the line to get a beignet. I used to think about what an asshole she was. How dare you not wait in line? Lines are the great equalizer. It’s undemocratic not to participate. Why? I know that equity and equality are not the same. We all have shit, internally or externally. So why am I over here trying to qualify her for something she doesn’t have to earn in the first place? She had a goal and she executed. The collective was satisfied by her explanation. It’s not that deep.
Except for me it is. For a long time, I thought it was selfish to assume my pain was worse than anyone’s else’s-- theirs real, mine a desperate cry for attention. When I finally started talking to my friends more about their lived experiences, it shocked me. I realized I was working with fewer tools and most of them I taught myself. It was almost inconceivable to me that if I had simply learned to communicate my needs earlier and to the right people (ugh, that’s so key), I might have realized I wasn’t an irredeemable monster earlier on. I just needed help. There is nothing morally wrong with recognizing you are experiencing a greater inconvenience than most. All you can do is ask. Rejection is not blanket condemnation of your worth. It’s simply an acknowledgement of limitation. In the end, it might end up saving you.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want from this life. I keep an elaborate, ever evolving manifestation board. I carefully search Pinterest for vibes and my own media consumption for inspiration. I recognize the board is an evolving, living document. I will grow and change, just as my board has many times already. Yet I am still convinced there is some perfect iteration I will find if I simply ask myself the right questions. How do I find joy? How do you enjoy culture when you don’t feel part of it? How do you write something down, give it permanence, when you don’t value your own existence? The exercise of asking these questions often makes the board feel obsolete. My goals are less and less material. I won’t see it when I get there-- I’ll feel it.
When you spend your entire life numb, there is no greater joy.