Month: February 2023

Now I create my own traumas.

Do you ever wonder what would happen if you just didn’t get out of bed? What would it look like if instead of getting up and showering and getting dressed and walking the dog and getting on the train to go to work, you just didn’t do any of that and stayed in bed all day? Or how about two days? A week? A month?

A couple weeks ago, I was telling my therapist how I tried to kill myself once. It wasn’t necessarily a feeling of depression or hopelessness, though I felt those things. It was the feeling that I didn’t belong, that my friends are better friends with each other, that I’m not one to be chosen for anything by anyone. It was a lot of the feelings I’ve come to recognize in myself as rejection sensitive dysphoria. It’s kind of amazing how being rejected by one person or opportunity can make me feel like I’m unwanted by any one or any thing, how I don’t deserve to be alive or take up space.

I had been out with my friends and when the bar bill came, I didn’t have enough and two of my friends were upset because they each had to put so much in. Remembering it now, it seems like such an innocuous thing. I could have apologized and promised to pay them back. In fact, it seems like I had a lot more options than silently going home and eating an entire bottle of pills. I cried when I told my therapist about swallowing one dry pill after another, not making the decision to end my life once, but over and over again with each swallow. I want to die. Swallow. I want to die. Swallow. I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.

The pain I felt telling this story to my therapist was by far more intense than the pain of actually living it. It’s like I carry around all this pain from living through trauma. I have the poverty, the neglect, the religious indoctrination and subsequent rejection. And now I also have the traumas that I’ve made for myself.

I joined a 12 step program when I was 29. I was sober for 7 years. I went to meetings, and the “meetings after the meetings,” and I did step work and I held nothing back. They kept saying that once you stop drinking, your life gets better. And around me, everyone’s lives were indeed getting better. But not mine. Which meant I was doing something wrong right? Because they say if you quit drinking and do the work, things get better.

A couple years into my sobriety, my depression was so bad that I stopped getting out of bed. I remember that first morning I felt so anxious, going back and forth between feeling like there was no way I could physically extricate myself from the mattress and feeling like the consequences of not getting up would be even worse. I lay there debating with myself until it was too late, wondering if I should get up and go to work after all until the time for work came and went. I spent the rest of the day under the covers, powerless to turn on the TV or distract myself with my phone. I wondered if people at work even noticed I was gone. Night fell and somehow I was able to sleep through the night, even though I’d spent the entire day in bed, and on the second day, it was slightly easier to stay in bed because I had already done it once. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. So I stayed in bed again. And again the next day, and also the day after that, and so on until I hadn’t left my bed for two weeks.

I was able to keep my job thanks to a boss that I didn’t respect but for whom I’m incredibly grateful. But those feelings.

Every day, I wake up with nowhere to go. I wake up regretting that I didn’t die in my sleep. I wake up wishing I could go back to sleep. I’ve been sleeping for 10–12 hours a night and though my body doesn’t need more sleep, I still wake up exhausted and all I want to do is escape consciousness for just a little while longer, and then just a few more minutes, and then just a little more until I’ve slept away my whole life. Every morning I wake up feeling that familiar feeling of anxiety, of being in between, of trying to talk myself into extricating my body from the bed to wash it and dress it and take it somewhere we’ll find meaning, and of knowing that it doesn’t matter, that life will continue on whether I stay in my bed or leave it. Nothing matters.

I can’t help but feel like this is an overreaction. Cue the self-judgment and feelings about feelings. I lost my job in November. People lose jobs all the time. People stop paying their credit card bills all the time. People struggle to buy food, and maintain relationships, and participate in routine self-care. Are all those people also depressed and suicidal, or is it just me? Am I the only one that can’t seem to manage what life throws at them? Am I the only one with the tendency to just crumple when things get hard? If getting laid off can send me into such a tailspin, I’d venture to guess my mental health was pretty tenuous to begin with. Every day is full of opportunities, but instead of making me feel hopeful and optimistic, I’m even more depressed because of all the opportunities I can’t make myself take every single day. And so every day is the same because I don’t ever do anything different. I lie in bed and think about my trauma. I think about the things in my early life I couldn’t control and I think about escaping those patterns but I don’t know how. And I re-live all the depressive episodes I’ve had before, drowning in anxiety with the covers above my head wondering if anyone will notice I’m gone but too afraid to find out.

My therapist asked me last week about my suicidal ideation and asked if maybe it’s time to check myself into a hospital. I told him that wouldn’t help because at least now I’m showing up for my classes three times a week, I’m claiming my unemployment and sending my resume out into the void, I’m feeding and walking my dog and paying my rent. I hate my life and I wish it would be over but sitting in a hospital where they don’t care about my quality of life just that I have one, racking up more medical debt I’ll never be able to pay, and missing school and my other day-to-day responsibilities doesn’t seem like very much of a solution. I have also thought about this at length and I’m not stupid. The people in my life care about me even though I can’t really understand why. I know acting on the SI would be traumatic for them, too. It occurred to me that when someone dies, their birthday is always a hard day for their loved ones, as is the day that they died. If my birthday is already going to be difficult, I am not going to add a second hard day, especially when it might coincide with another day of celebration, so if I were to act on it and make an attempt on my own life, it probably won’t be until the summer. I’m not sure how comforting he found that, but at least he didn’t bring up checking myself into a hospital again.

On perception.

I was young when I noticed how someone’s face changes as you get to know them. I was studying my friend’s face for some reason and remembering how it had looked to me at the beginning of the school year. It had changed. Why do people look different when you get to know them? It’s like there’s a newness or freshness when you first meet that wears away and never comes back. It’s like people who are strangers wear a mask that only strangers wear. Strangers become acquaintances become friends become relationships become seeing someone, really seeing someone, what they look like under the Stranger mask. I think we all have a Stranger mask.

I have a mask.

I’ve never seen it.

I have a mask I’m always wearing that I can never see. I can’t ever see it because it’s the Stranger mask and I’ll never be a stranger to myself. Sometimes I stare at my eyes in the mirror and try to see what everyone else sees, I try to picture my Stranger mask. Sometimes I stare at my own eyes in the bathroom mirror until the shower’s steam covers my reflection with fog. Sometimes I stare so hard at my own eyes in the mirror over the sink, leaning uncomfortably, nose almost touching, staring so hard until I’m not seeing eyes or a face or myself but amorphous shapes that have lost all meaning.

One time I was in treatment because I was so depressed that I wanted to kill myself and I didn’t get out of bed for two weeks and in the group we shared our names and pronouns only one person said “no pronouns please” and it was so silly that I had to stifle the disrespectful chuckle and the clinician/moderator/babysitter/teacher/Stranger asked “then how shall we refer to you?” to which this person answered “please don’t refer to me.” I told this story to someone who said they felt the same way and followed up with: “please don’t perceive me.”

And that’s silly. I can’t control perception. I can’t control what I see and what I can’t see. I wear a mask that I can’t see. It’s a Stranger mask that only strangers see.

Please don’t perceive me.

I remember staring at my friend and wondering when her face started to change. When did she take off the Stranger mask and put on the face I saw then, at the end of the school year waiting for summer, and then onto fall where I would be sure to see so many new faces for the first and last time as they shifted from Strangers to something slightly less strange but not quite friend because I never really had friends.

Please don’t perceive me.

I wish I could see my Stranger mask. Sometimes I think it just makes me invisible, unable to be seen until we’re already friends. But other times I wonder about this Stranger mask. Is it handsome? Does it look empathetic and sincere? Does it have kind eyes and a warm smile? Is it attractive? Not attractive like handsome but I mean magnetic. Some people’s faces are attractive in a magnetic way. You look at them and you want to keep looking at them. You want to know them. You see their smile and you want that smile to be directed at you. Is it possible my Stranger mask can be that? I know it’s not. I know the face I wear, the one I stare at in the mirror, bent over the bathroom sink waiting for the water to be warm enough to make me feel something close to clean, staring until the face disappears behind the steam, I know that face isn’t magnetic. I know it’s not the kind of face you stick around for because they never stick around.

I was young when I noticed how someone’s face shifts and settles into place the more times you look at it. I have not stopped thinking about that since. Every new person I meet, I know they’ll look different. I try to take a picture with my mind so I can remember this moment and how they looked in it because you only get that moment once and then they change.

Ichigo Ichie.

I remember hearing that phrase first as the name of a restaurant my parents like going to on special occasions where they do tricks with spatulas and shoot sake into your mouth, and then I heard the phrase in the perfect Japanese accent of a naked boy as he lay beside me in his bed. Ichigo ichie. He said it doesn’t have a direct translation to English and though he tried to explain, I could tell that I didn’t really get it from how he reacted when I tried to say it back in my own words. But I think it means we all wear a Stranger mask that everyone we meet only gets to see once. The gradations between stranger and acquaintance is vast. Even the mailman, whom I might not recognize outside of his blue uniform, has a face that looks different now than the first time we met.

Please don’t perceive me.

Maybe we have a lot of masks. Have you ever noticed how someone’s face looks different after the first time you meet them? Have you ever noticed how someone’s face looks different after you fall in love with them?

Have you ever noticed how someone’s face looks different after they break your heart?

Maybe we all have masks, but we all have faces. Maybe I’m the only one who’s ever seen my face, what I really look like underneath all these masks. What would it be to see that mask I wear that only people I’ve never met get to see? What would it be for someone to see the face I have under here that only I get to see.

Please don’t perceive me.

I want to be seen.

Not my circus.

“YOU WANT ME TO CALL THE POLICE?” a male voice shouted. I looked around for the source of the commotion from where I stood waiting for my dog to finish sniffing the same spot he’d been sniffing for the past five minutes or so.

Across the street from where I stood, a side street branched off and a man and woman were standing on opposite sides of a car stopped shortly after the intersection. There were other vehicles parked around and I struggled to see what was happening, exactly, as the man continued to yell. The car was running and the driver’s side door was open so I thought perhaps this woman had rear-ended him and thrown him into a rage. I couldn’t make out all of what he was saying but I heard “YOU HAVE YOUR OWN CAR” and then the man started to walk toward the back of the car.

My dog finished smelling and finally decided to add his own urine to the small patch of neighbor’s grass and as we started to continue down the road, I could see that there was only one car parked in the middle of the side-street, engine still running, and exhaust clouding from the tail pipe. The man backed away from the car and I noticed he was holding a messenger back. Suddenly, he started to run away from the car and down the same street and direction my dog and I were walking, but on the opposite site. I think I might have chuckled at the odd sight of this young man, perhaps in his early or mid twenties with short dark curly hair and a mustache dressed in jeans and a camel-colored denim jacket, suddenly break into a run. The woman, a blonde of around the same age bundled in a scarf and winter coat and wearing big-framed glasses, had not said anything this whole time and as the man bolted away from her, she started after him but a much slower pace, perhaps not wanting to stray too far from the running vehicle.

I was openly watching the two at this point. I am kind of always on high alert when there’s potential violence and a perceived power differential and I felt a little rush of panic when the man stopped, spun around, and started running back the way he’d come, straight toward the woman. At first I thought he was running at her and I was ready to drop my dog’s leash and run over to intervene. I could see the woman tense up as well, but the man continued sprinting past her and got into the driver’s seat. As soon as she realized he wasn’t coming toward her, the woman rounded on her heel and got herself into the back seat of the passenger side before he could leave and as she started to close her door, I could hear him screaming “GET OUT” holding out the vowels of “out” in a high-pitched ragged shriek that had the quality of holding nothing back, of expelling extreme emotion. I watched as the car sped away from me down the side-street and I thought I could still hear him yelling even after the car was out of view.

I have been on the verge of tears constantly, lately. My suicidal ideation is through the roof, to where I’m starting to think about which specific date would have the least emotional impact with regard to holidays and the birthdays and anniversaries of my loved ones. Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook and I had to stop it because I started crying during the epilogue because it was set in the fall and I love the fall but when I think about the future and this coming fall, I only see darkness; my unemployment income will have run out by then and between trying to finish school and looking for a full-time job that will presumably be OK with me taking classes in the middle of the day, and between that and the calls I’m getting from my credit card companies because I haven’t paid any of them in months because I’m at the point where I can’t even afford groceries and it’s all just too much. I tried to sit down and write a paper that’s due tomorrow and I couldn’t focus because my mind would not stop distracting me: “How am I going to get dog food for my dog? He’s almost out!”; “My checking account is overdrawn by $500. How much food can I get from the grocery store with the $60 in my pocket and how can I make that last?”; “My roommate/ex is packing a bag… sounds like he’s getting ready for another weekend at his new boyfriend’s… the one he left me for that he started seeing while we were still together… I could ask him but it seems like he’s not talking to me… again… and also it’s going to hurt, no matter what the answer is…”; “Why doesn’t anyone want me?”

But watching this car speed away, I felt lighter. I don’t even know what they were fighting about, if you could call it a fight. I wondered about this woman’s resolve to withstand being screamed at and still get back in the car. I wondered if maybe she’d done something to hurt this man and that’s why he was so upset. It sounded like rage but it also sounded like pain. And I don’t know if it was a sense of camaraderie or schadenfreude but, though things still feel bad, they somehow don’t feel as bad. There’s something stabilizing about seeing someone else lose their shit. idk