A constant game of falling short –
This is about my 6th attempt at writing this entry, this “comeback” to blogging and to life, this big hollow promise that I’ll be better in the future – when you know and I know that I can never make those promises.
And I’ll be curled on the floor hiding out from it all –
In the last month and seven days I have come to terms with the fact that I am, without a fucking doubt, legit crazy. I’ve approached on tiptoe the brink of insanity and somehow managed not to topple over, and each and every time it’s a quiet tattooed arm that pulls me back. Yanks me back to myself. To her I owe my life.
Oh, and I’m feeling directionless, yes –
But that’s to be expected. I’m not whole. I am an ocean of darkness. My tides change like the moods of the wind: purple, ghostly, rich dark and wet like the jackets of rain drenching her: sometimes I confess that I imagine her arriving on my doorstep with her hair like the night plastered all about her moon-face and her eyes welling over with apology. It’s on nights like these that I would embrace her in the doorway and take her inside by the fire where I would undress her in the exhausted glow of embers whose prime like mine is long past. She isn’t whole either. She’s been hurt so many times that her hurt sings out of her without beckon and makes its way into suspicions she has about all forms of love. Like this one: she doesn’t know me. She wouldn’t like me if she met me.
I never claimed to be sane.
This life looks like a sentence –
She can only comfort me so much. As far as I am concerned she is a myth. Her sister too is a myth, and though I have heard their sad songs pouring out of dark spaces like a cathedral, I have to pinch myself to get myself to believe that somewhere in this universe two perfect beings are actually waking up hung over and getting on planes and yelling at their cats and arguing with their girlfriends over whether the ex who’s coming over for dinner tonight has any intentions of getting back together. And that they are blissfully unaware of their heroic daily act of saving my life.
Reader: Are you SERIOUSLY talking about Tegan and Sara again?
Me: Yes. #sorrynotsorry
Meanwhile, when I try to make art it looks and sounds and reads like a 5-year-old tipped over a bucket of car grease.
Are you still reading? I’m surprised.
You’ve found me shaking, sitting under a table, eyes wide in shock and blank with exhaustion, tears crusted over like blood.
I was sure I was growing nerves –
Please don’t leave.
I’ve been sobbing here for a month and seven days, holding my breath and forgetting to exhale.
I didn’t know that if I pretended to be all right for long enough the tides would shift and shipwreck me and strip my existence of its gold leaf. I didn’t know, but I should have known. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened – someone unwittingly walks up to a loaded gun, pulls a trigger and shoots the thread holding up the pile of depression that crushes me. It’s months before I’m able to un-bury myself. It feels much like being encased in concrete.
I will attempt, if you’ll sit with me, to unravel what happened.
A social event. A chain-reaction. Humiliation. A pulling of the rug out from under my feet, a rug that I had worked at for months to weave together. Too much trust, always too much trust.
(Sane person voice-over) And also taking everything too seriously. Too personally. Giving a shit in the first place.
My coworkers are not the incredibly amazing supportive people I idealized them to be: they are normal people. My significance in their lives is minimal. And that’s normal.
So….Robin, my coworker. There was a point in time where she was training me to do my job, my job which involves numbers, and numbers scare me, because I have a brain that combines colors and sounds and words, not a brain that combines numbers. I need to be taught numbers. Numbers do not come naturally to me. When I received new job responsibilities involving numbers 2 months ago, my boss believed I should be able to pull this knowledge out of my ass and not need training.
Robin was never officially asked to be my trainer – she just saw me struggling and decided to help. I relied on her. Perhaps too much. One day, she got frustrated with my inability to learn (which is perhaps correlated to her lack of actual teaching and more of doing the job for me), said something humiliating in the workspace in front of my other coworkers, and then did not talk to me for a week.
Melanie, who is quite level-headed about this kind of shit, decided not to be “involved” with my “drama” and stopped talking to both of us for a few days.
Writing this is painful. Reading this is probably painful. It’s petty and high school and stupid. But it happened, and it felt as though the entire world had turned against me, because I couldn’t do my job and literally had nowhere to turn. Please do not ask if there was another coworker I could have turned to, or if I could have brought it up with my boss, or taken the matter to HR. I couldn’t. I exhausted all avenues of recourse and pulled 10-hour days for 2 weeks attempting to teach myself a job I didn’t know, and mostly failing, mostly staring at piles of invoices in despair, mostly trying not to cry at my desk. The shriveled, charred, black thing that was my heart was unrecoverable. I spent most of every day and every night wanting to drink poison or take the elevator up to the 52nd floor of our building and throw myself into the Chicago River below. Or both.
I am fully aware of how dramatic that sounds, of how stupid and insignificant this story appears on paper.
But I can’t apologize any more for myself than I already have. I live every day apologizing for existing.
So, Robin broke me. I patched things up with her to the absolute best of my ability, I bent over backwards to make her not hate me. Melanie talks to me again, but we don’t all hang out together, and both of them keep their distance. Things will never go back to the way they were.
Around the same time, my ex (whom I considered a best friend) and a few other friends stopped talking to me. I pretty much scared them off with my drama. Nobody, after all, actually WANTS to babysit a terminally depressed person. Nobody wants the permanent task of convincing someone over and over that suicide isn’t the answer – one crisis is one thing, but daily crises become a headache. I don’t say this with judgment: I wouldn’t like me if I met me.
I’m slowly coming out of this block of concrete, but I’m weaker than before. I’m numb. I’m insecure, shaken, unconfident. My social skills have taken a major hit: a couple weekends ago I was invited to go out with a friend I don’t know that well and a group of her friends I didn’t know at all, and I literally didn’t talk to anyone at the table except for her for the entire 3 hours, because I was so uncomfortable with all the strangers that I quietly had a panic attack right there, undetected by anyone. I might as well have been invisible.
I don’t go out and try to meet people anymore, for friends or for dating. I have a date on Saturday, but it’s the first date since Liana (who didn’t work out; after the disaster of a 2nd date she told me she didn’t want a relationship so we shouldn’t continue dating, which is lesbian code for “I’m just not that into you”; then tried to set me up with a friend, who turned out to be more psycho than her, and thus the whole thing went to shit) and I’m only like 25% psyched about it. I don’t really care about dating – friends would be great.
A weekend without plans means approximately 60 hours of saving my own life, 60 hours of trying not to kill myself, 60 hours of staring listlessly into a TV screen or trying desperately to sleep, only to awaken crying with panic.
I’m not OK. I’m not OK but I’m sick of therapy. 3 therapists told me I was “fine,” refused to prescribe medication, brushed off my suicidal feelings as seeking attention, said that my feelings were perfectly normal given the situation, or became angry with me for not “trying” hard enough to get better.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, that’s why I haven’t been on here much, and I’m sorry for the lack of art.