The truth of the matter is what I can't say to anyone, lest they worry, lest they make a too much of a 'big deal' out of things, lest the feeling is temporary and I have to live with the fallout long after the feeling passing. The truth is, I want to be dead, and unfortunately, I have wanted it for a long time.
But I won't ever actually hurt myself, because I'm too afraid of the concept of hell that has been instilled in me since childhood. But I used to pray for death to happen to me. I used to beg for it, imagine what a drift into oncoming traffic would be like. I don't know who I was praying to, maybe God, even though a large man with an omniscient hand on the universe was a concept I had always doubted. After all, He was the bringer of hope, and hope, as I have known it in my life, was the bringer of harsh disappointments. They key is not to get your hopes up, and you won't have to deal with the bitter taste of disenchantment and the 'life isn't fair' reasonings in order to keep going.
Believing in religion and then bad things happening to you was the recipe to blame a higher power you weren't sure existed in the first place. Did I not believe hard enough? What kind of Loving Master would stand by and watch as I was sexually assaulted, once as a child, then again and again when I got old enough to know better? Why would he let the first man that proposed to me take his own life? Why would he let dobermans rip my dog I had raised from a handheld pup get ripped to shreds before my eyes? Give me a big heart, a forgiving nature, an addictive personality, and a string of bad boyfriends? I wasn't over one thing, before there was another problem piled onto my back to deal with.
So, if you can't blame God, or the Universe, or Fate, then you have no one to blame but yourself. To take responsibility for how your life has been thus far. So, on top of the crippling anxiety, the PTSD, you get depression.
And then, and then, and then.
You meet this person. This life-changing person that makes your heart permanently in your throat, shows you how to be brave, to be sexy, to love yourself. You're in a different state, away from everyone who could ever have judged you, and for the first time, you are truly free.
In the wake of your divorce, you have this moment. Riding on the back of his motorcycle over a bridge, Young the Giant playing in your ears, the scent of pine trees and fresh rain in your nose, and for a single moment, you let your arms fly out beside you, your eyes closed, free. You can almost see the full trust and thrill of love being tattooed on you in this very second. You get a maddening relief from an entirely haunted existence. You want another hour, another five minutes, another two seconds of being around his celebrity. And you don't know that even though this moment is the best thing you've ever felt before in your life, its one true highlighted moment of bliss, you don't know that it will make the rest of time fade to darkness by comparison.
He cheats on you. When he is suddenly ghosting you, gaslighting you. When you have the audacity to have a pregnancy scare. You're alone in a new state, stalking his social media masochistically, and comparing yourself to his new girl[s]. You go on dates with other men, other men that don't make you feel even close to the way he did. You want that feeling again so badly that you let him back into your life, just to let him break you in half, all over again. And your halves get halved.
Suddenly, you're a shell of any confidence you ever knew, and a ghost of a person. You stop eating, you start to accidentally hurt yourself bumping on your own protruding bones, you lose the strength to even go to the store and buy food. You live on water and cigarettes and binge watching mindless TV. You're throwing up every morning and your gag reflex is so agitated that you can't even brush your teeth without provoking another bout of vomiting.
And then, you're on the floor of your apartment, face down into the ugly brown carpet, starving, nauseated, breathing in the dirt and dust, and you're crying so hard that your eyes are swollen beyond seeing. and you are the closest you've ever felt to dying. Somehow, you pick yourself up off the floor, pack your things, and drive back down to the people who would give a shit if you died.
These stories are all relevant to the story of why I bought a Vespa. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do for myself, that I could drive over bridges listening to indie music and get that feeling back in my own way, on my own terms.
And the Vespa is relevant to how I lost my leg. I wave to my roommate goodbye to go to work, put on my cute little star helmet and biker gloves, and head to work like any other day. After the shift is over, several coworkers told me I had such a happy work day, smiling and cheerful, as if trying to highlight the stark difference between then and what my life has become afterwards.
I'm not even going to talk about the long journey in the hospital, the drug induced insults to my supportive friends, the tears of my parents, the almost complete absence of my siblings, the nightly screaming for three straight months... The real hard part is the limited time you get to grieve your old life, when society says you are supposedly 'healed' now. The realities you face after the loss.
High heels? Forget it. Pants? Good luck. The beach? I'm not even going to try. Any social event that requires standing for hours? Depends on what kind of day you're having, between the ever-present pain and the willingness to be seen and become half-charming to others through said pain.
You were always uncomfortable with unwanted stares, now you have a neon sign that shouts at people as you walk by. Children point and tug on their mothers. Everywhere. Every time you step out your front door. Disneyland used to be a means of grasping at that small firefly of happiness before it floats on, now you can't walk Main Street. Europe, namely London, was always a dream, but now you fear to even attempt to travel for so many different reasons.
God forbid you had any mind's eye of what the perfect body looks like, because that's out the window. Maybe you never had a hope of perfection before, but it's so far beyond your attainability now that it's insulting.
Then you experience new kinds of hell as you watch your friends that don't know what to do for you. That try to laugh with you, try to make jokes, try to bring some light in a crappy situation. Or those ones, that try to convince you that you're still capable of that thing you just said you were afraid you couldn't do anymore. They mean well, at least. And it's definitely better than the ones that say nothing at all, out of fear to fall in such a category.
And the friends in your day to day, then ones that called you family, that supposedly had your back, the ones you spent every holiday with for years. That one friend that kept you company every time you went to Target, sat next to you in every night at the theatre, the friend whose mom buys you gifts at Christmas. The friend that taught you that it's okay to cry, to write what you want, who binge-watched TV and split meals with you. Maybe acts that profound were just another day to them, and you're the only one that it meant so much to.
All you know is, this is a whole new heartbreak, as they start to close their bedroom door every time they come home. As they eat more and more meals out. That continue those TV shows without you that you used to enjoy together. That don't come to help you after the umpteenth time you fall on your face in the hallway.
Communication solves everything, so, you broach the subject. But you only make it worse for yourself, because why can't they take time to 're-center' themselves without answering to you? Why can't they have a little bit of time for self-care? After all, they experienced hardship through this whole event too, right? After all, you're not their boyfriend or blood relation.
And just like that you've ruined your relationships with those closest to you by squeezing too hard. It was selfish of you to expect them to act any certain way. After all, you've worked so hard to be okay with everything that's happened.
You have no one to blame but yourself.
And you just feel, in a word, shitty. You're a shit human for needing help in the first place. You feel so guilty for burdening others, that you run. You run as far away as you can so you don't have to feel like a burden to a single friend within hundreds of miles.
People don't want to hear about your struggle. They aren't paid to. They want to hear about how well you're doing in the face of such a loss. They want you to be positive, and for the most part, I'm really good at it. Genuinely being positive, that is.
But sometimes you're so positive that it cusps down into the other direction, it overshoots by telling yourself that you should be grateful for all the blessings you DO have, that other people have it way worse, that you have no right to feel this way, adding to the guilt of feeling bad to begin with. Perhaps it was conditioning to keep a straight face, who knows, doesn't matter now. As you stare into the night sky, smoking your ceremonial menthol night after night, you are no longer hoping for happiness, just the next second of relief.
Those lows... Those lows... They seize you by the lungs, and they scream things so dark that you laugh at the person who was on that carpet not three years ago.
I walk around as a person who might be triggered by a certain string of words, mannerisms or expression that makes me have to stuff down images back to the pit I banished them to, in order to pass as a human being that's remotely 'regular'. I don't feel regular. I know I am not regular.
Not anymore.
Things have always been easier to put down in words than to say out loud. I often stumble over words in person, stammering, saying the wrong thing, or juggling syllables around. I just want to get things out sometimes, in a way that feels eloquent, so writing becomes the balm.
This is surely another a low point, being without medication, without therapy, and experiencing self-imposed banishment on top of everything else. God forbid in these times I get hungry, or tired, and risk starting a spiral. But this was something I needed to have said regardless. To allow myself the minute to fume, to vent, to finally feel everything. All of it.
I'm still trying to figure out the recipe for lemonade.
