What to do
When you’re empty
And alone
Just skin and bones
Willing to be reduced
To less.
I confess,
I feel useless
The grave
Speaks to me still
In words only I understand:
“Take my hand,
Rest a while.”
And I smile
At promises of peace
That leave me
Uneasy.
The pain in stranger’s eyes
Calls to me
In languages
Only we can utter.
Opens passages
To worlds
Only we
Have ever known.
I feel nothing. I only hear.
I hear the bored world telling me
I’m nothing special.
I hear death, charming and strong.
It tells me to come…
Beckons me with its fingers
The whisper, so close to my ear.
I shiver.
My heart beats faster as Death begs it to find peace.
“Come.”
My body longs for it,
My mind tingles.
Let me lie with you.
I come for death.
I rest at last.
I will not let your love touch me.
I’ve been touched before.
I will not let your words soothe me.
Up became down.
I will not believe your promises.
My own blood drowned me.
I cannot be yours.
I am not even mine.
I tried to kill myself. It didn’t work. I keep wondering… was I even close?
Why is it up to someone else to determine what is right for my life? Why is it up to others to tell me that it’s wrong for me to want to die? It’s a conflict of interest when family says it’s selfish for me to try to kill myself. If I’m in pain, isn’t it selfish of them to ask me to stay, to spare them from pain?
Mine is only one life. I want to go out as inconsequentially as a candle. People who don’t speak to me or spend time with me in my painful moments tell me I have to stay. It’s what they need, it’s what they want… but if they aren’t interested, they can’t be bothered to give their time to me, would they even notice if I was gone? This reminds me of my incessant need to shop and inability to throw away purchases I’ve never used.
I’ve heard it said that people who think about suicide aren’t necessarily going to kill themselves. When people decide to kill themselves they are often calm or at peace. This is what I felt. A sudden peace, knowing that this is what was right.
Afterward, I only regretted it not working. I may have been at peace or perhaps was so detached from the event that I had very little feelings toward it. Leaving this world was going to be harder than I thought.
I didn’t want to face my boyfriend. He kept asking to see me and I kept making excuses. When I tried to cancel on him for the millionth time in the course of three days, he called me out. I let him come. I left the door unlocked and lay in bed. When he entered my room I looked at him, emotionlessly.
I couldn’t bare to hold the weight of his pain. I rolled over uninterested and detached from his feelings. Why didn’t how I felt matter.
He climbed into bed and held me and cried.
It took me a few days but suddenly it hit me. If he had tried to kill himself, how would I feel?
My mind walks this tightrope carefully.
And nothing scares me like the demons I bore,
They rattle my ribcage till I’m trembling.
Like a wounded animal, my Sanity Roars.
I aim at my soul my harshest thoughts,
like bullets,
Take down joy with heartless hand grenades,
It’s safer to put my trust in let downs,
If I am the villain, of whom am I afraid?
I do not let happinesses’ warm fingers caress my face like sunlight. I do not let it unthaw my soul. I trained myself long ago to believe that happiness will always be taken away one day. Too much happiness means a lot of pain is looming in the background.
The TV show This is Us, has an episode in which Randal says that the need to meet his birth-parents is like a constant ringing in his ears. Sometimes it’s quieter and sometimes it’s louder but it is always there. I have swaddled this metaphor and held it close to my heart because it encapsulates so much of what I feel. Through every fun conversation, behind every smile and vibrating in my mind amidst every giggle is the thought that I will be unhappy again. That black hole of nothingness and numbness will swallow me up once more. It has come to the point that happiness feels like a tease. It’s like a joke played on myself by depression. “Here feel something” it smirks, a frozen wasteland, letting me taste sunlight, only to wrap me and suffocate me in its cold embrace once more.
Happiness terrifies me. It begs me to trust it. It tempts me with its warmth and comfort. It tries to befriend me but I cannot take its hand.
I came to a point in my life where I gave up on trying to be happy for other people. I gave my family a glimpse into what I felt on the inside. The energy it took to keep up my facade, had escaped me. I sat on the couch for hours, not moving, staring, unresponsive as if I was brain-dead. I did this for days at a time. Moving from one place to the other just staring–not faking smiles or interest when it wasn’t there.
I had told my parents previously that I needed help. After years of silence. After years of both of us ignoring an obviously critical problem I asked for help. They completely ignored me. I don’t mean they brushed me off and told me I was fine. I don’t mean they mocked me. I don’t mean they said I just wanted attention. I mean they said nothing. As if I’d imagined myself speaking they responded with silence. I said it again: “I think I have depression. I need help.” As if they hadn’t heard me they began a new conversation with each other. I cried silently for the rest of the hour and a half drive home and neither of them said a word to me.
Once my mom got to see how little I could really care about my relationships, conversation, life, work, sleep, being awake, anything… and once she realized how much of my life I faked, she quickly went from ignoring my cry for help to believing I was not sane.
After I dropped out of university and lived at home unemployed barely ever leaving my house, my mom and I ran into the mother of one of my old friends. She asked me how I was and my mother witnessed me smile and laugh and charm her into believing my life was fantastic, I’d made amazing choices, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve never seen my mom look so scared. I think she finally realized how good I’d become at faking it. It: wanting to exist. I think she finally started asking herself the right questions: ‘How long has my daughter been fooling me? Why would she hide her true feeling from me for so long?’
I got off the antidepressants about a year and a half after starting them. I was angry to have been put on bipolar medication with so little analysis and counselling. Though several friends I had confided in had agreed that it was a correct diagnosis, I denied it.
I didn’t need the medication anymore, I’d found the key to the happy hormones I lacked: sex.
After 20 years of having no interest in physical contact I joined Tinder, met a stranger and lost my virginity to him on our third time meeting. I’ve heard that people who’ve experienced trauma end up forcing themselves to relive it over and over again.
Sex became something I needed. Without it I would spiral into depression and experience wild mood swings. Yet, I did not remain with any of my partners long.
Death is calling to me
As giggles roll through my body,
As I fail at something new,
As I look over at the nobody
That fills the whole room.
He whispers to me,
While busyness unfolds into nothingness,
And too much noise shuts the doors into silence,
My reflection growing more grotesque
As I transform from plaintive to violent.
Death sits with me,
Watches my dreams,
And I sleep in his arms,
He says we’re on the same team—
I fall for his charm.
I can cry silently in a room full of people,
Write about suicide in buildings with steeples,
Fear the highs because I anticipate the lows,
Consumed by this Giant, as the madness grows.
Death counts with me
As minutes barely pass.
Then suddenly weeks are lost,
And he’s been counting down till I crash,
And I’ve been double-crossed.
~Inspired by In My Blood by Shawn Mendes
A sudden flame of anger burns
Me up, and never dies.
The daggers that are stabbing
Me, escape me through my eyes.
A fear that freezes till I’m shaking,
I can’t steady my voice.
Fight or flight? I’m frozen,
You act like I have a choice.
Deflated lungs that represent
My heart, my mind, my soul.
I’m all warmth and smiles outside,
But inside, I’m corpse cold.
Murmurers mumble that it’s all for show,
But my heart can’t pump this mud.
How do I battle an enemy
That’s living in my blood.
I poison it with alcohol
And feel a moment’s rapture
But my guts will punish me
With physical torture after.
I soothe it with medicine,
It supplements the villain,
Puts my mind to sleep
So my enemy can settle in.
Speed up my heart with natural cures,
Like sex, adventure, friends
But I just feel more alone
When the superficiality ends.
My greatest nemesis
Overcomes my veins by flood.
I haven’t given in yet;
It isn’t in my blood.
Sometimes being self-aware is a curse. It creates an anxiety around every action and decision. Some of the first memories I have involve me restraining my excitement. I didn’t want people to notice me. I remember thinking ‘people will think you want attention.’ Now I ask myself: is that a bad thing? Isn’t that a normal thing?
I remember as a child not wanting to feel joy. I associated happiness with disappointment. I thought happiness was foolish. It meant I trusted something enough to allow it to affect me. I thought I was being smart by denying myself happiness. If I didn’t feel hope I would never have that hope dashed to pieces. I was preparing myself for the worst possible outcomes.
I didn’t tell my parents I was skipping school. Eventually, the school stopped calling when I didn’t show up. I didn’t tell my parents I was staying up all night because waking up alive devastated me. I didn’t tell them that some nights, I would drug myself with massive doses of headache pills so I could fall asleep without having to lie awake in silence for too long.
I didn’t tell them I exercised at night because I was afraid of gaining weight or that I didn’t eat for days at a time or that I loved that feeling of hunger. I didn’t tell them that sometimes I would inflict pain upon myself. It made me feel like I was receiving punishment I deserved. It made me feel a physical hurt that was preferable to the mental agony I couldn’t give up on.
I didn’t want my parents to think I just wanted attention.
I finally sought help in my second year of university. I had started sleeping with the lights on because I was imagining demons in my room when I closed my eyes.
The antidepressants made me dozy and unable to focus. I was dizzy and my mind felt cloudy all the time. It was a different kind of numbness. Vegetable-like. I couldn’t hold a conversation. I was an English and History major but I’d lost my ability to read. I slept constantly. I stopped making eye-contact.
Absently Searching 