submit your sadness: lack thereof
I’m depressed, which is a synonym for sad but this is worse. It’s my Major Depressive Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Anorexia Nervosa. Everything is at stake all the time(that’s the anxiety talking) and it’s do or die even though there’s no escape, there is no flight for me, only the fight.
I was abused by hired help as a child (left in public places/ parks, with people I didn’t know, locked in their basements and out of my own “home”. It’s only a house, it isn’t a place I feel safe, secure, free or fulfilled) I tried to tell my parents they thought I was making it up. Then they neglected me and never knew what was normal or not because they intentionally isolated me. I’m broken, I’m Benjamin Button, I got to grow up backwards: When I was young I yearned for an imaginary friend. This might seem strange to most, why would I not want someone from school or the neighbourhood? Simple, they never stayed. Perhaps they would sing rhymes and skip rope with me on the playground or play tag at recess, but I was always tugged away at the arm, as if to tear it from my shoulder socket, in front of a couple cars at the risk of being run over while their parents picked them up in the kiss and ride. From there, my nanny drove me in the black Saab sedan that had a flat tire she never took to the garage to get fixed, she drove us somewhere different every day where she would leave me for all hours of the afternoon. I was abandoned who-knows-where in the woods with people I had never met, public parks alone, and pushed down the steep stairs of basements I had never been in before as I heard the door lock behind me. I looked for someone to see, to listen when I tried to talk about these things and, as is common in abused children, created a whole world within my mind where I was safe, secure, free and fulfilled. There I had a family that had not abandoned me. I trained my senses to be more sensitive, if I concentrated I could feel the touch of my twin, true mother, the hug of a father, I could smell their scents, see their face, and hear the words I wanted, things had I tried to tell myself: “This is not your fault. You are O.K. You are beautiful and brilliant. You do not deserve this. We are so sorry. We love you.” This was the nurturing I needed. I self- soothed. I sustained myself from the inside.
This is my greatest gift, my human consciousness, the ability to accept others and the outside world while continuing to choose what could be considered craziness or an overly active imagination. I cannot care which reality is right. My head is both a Heaven and a Hell and I have made myself happy here.
That’s what I wrote in my english existential essay but I don’t believe it because I think I feel and fundamentally fall at all faiths. I am all alone.
i’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to write you. probably because i also have an eating disorder, constructed so carefully out of the genetic soup of depression, anxiety, addiction and ocd i carry around inside me and given spark by, like you, events beyond my control. and i’m still working all the time on all these issues. have you ever had to untangle like seven necklaces that snagged together into an epic knot in your jewelry box? that’s what i feel like my brain is like. i loop through one chain and find another knot further down. i have to back track. unloop the loop, change hands, put the knot down, frown at it, try again.
when i read your submission i was filled by a sense of intimacy, immediacy, like we were too close to touch, though all i know about you is this little piece, it felt like a lot. which is why it took me almost two weeks to respond from my previous submission, a submission i felt i could respond to with smiling, waving kindness, as though i was waving goodbye to a ship that had almost slipped over the horizon.
so i’m going to tell you what keeps coming up for me whenever i think about you.
when i think about you i think about this girl i’ve been in group with for a really long time, like almost two years, who is also a survivor of childhood abuse and who has made really huge strides and is literally a little bit better and more clear every week when i see her, but who gets really frustrated by her own progress. she keeps talking about fighting with her therapist. “i’m 34 years old!” she cries, “when will i be healed!”. and i wonder what she thinks healed is. if she thinks healed is a place you can get to, like ibiza. and once you get there if you can stay there forever and forget everything bad that ever happened to you. i wonder if she thinks being healed is like being reborn. if she’ll be the person she was before the abuse, if she’ll find the switchback that leads her to that alternate reality, where she can have the chance to grown up unhurt. and i can see that she can’t see the elbow room she has slowly been giving herself, that she has and is changed, and i can see that the fact that she can’t see this progress or give herself credit for it, is what is keeping her chained to these fictions of healing.
i think she has the story about herself that so many of us do with mental illness. the story goes like this: i am sick. i am so so so so so so so so sick. the end. and the story is static. the story is dead weight. the story has nothing to do with the organic nature of the brain.
when i think about you i think about how these days every time i look down at someone’s hand and they are wearing a wedding ring, how i feel my gut turn over. i think about how i let someone put a ring on my finger, like i was a fixed point, like i was a mountain and that was my flag. i had been discovered, claimed, named. and that was the end of that story. lol. and how i believed it. how i believed all i had to do was fall in love and that love would stay forever and be forever and i would be the static place, the mountain, that’s what love was; a handshake that sealed the deal. i think that i will never wear a ring of ownership again. i think if i ever wear a ring again i will design it myself. it will look like a nest of bones. it will be gold. it will have a black stone in place of a glimmering gem. it will have ‘she’s mad but she’s magic’ engraved on the inside so that the words press into my skin. it will remind me the only person i am obligated to love is myself. the only person whose permission i need is my own. i already have a name. and i cannot be discovered because i am not stationary.
when i think about you i think about how it’s thanksgiving and it’s my first thanksgiving alone without my exhusband in ten years. and i think about how much i wanted to be alone this year, how grateful i am for it, to have the space to feel all the dissonance inside of me without small talk, without having to cough up something i’m grateful for to a table full of smiling faces. i think about how i kept lying about it to people, my plans for today, because i noticed how sad and uncomfortable it made other people that i was going to be alone and i wanted to spare them their own discomfort. this morning in the mirror i noticed that i’m starting to get some wrinkles on my forehead. earlier this year i pulled out my first white hair. i’m getting older and i am also dying. my own body is not even a fixed space, my own love for myself cannot even be forever and it cannot be contingent upon anything because everything about me is going to change, physical, mental, emotional, and is in the process of changing right now. my only choice is to stay liquid. i would never have had any idea that i could have changed my own life this much since last year. but i had to and so i did it. i didn’t know what it was going to take or if i had it in me to do anything i did. i just tried to do it and found out what i had as i went along. that’s what i did to get out of my miserable fucking marriage. that’s what i did to get out of my miserable fucking eating disorder. and there was no evidence i could do it at any time, there was only a fear that if i continued to hold on to my tiny rock, which was not ibiza, which was not anything except some quickly dissolving ideas i had formulated about myself in my early twenties, that i was going to be swept out with the tide and into darkness. or i could just let go and go out into the darkness anyway. continuing to go, willingly go, into that darkness is all that is really possible. asking myself to accept that is the only thing i can do. and it hurts all the time. but sometimes i feel free.
when i think about you i think about someone i was friends with who asked me, over many years, based on the fact that at one point we had not been friends for a period of time, to swear to her over and over and over again that i would never, ever not want to be friends with her again. and i would promise her that would never happen because i love her and because i was treating love and life like an inert slab. our friendship and love was a pile of jello turned over onto a plate and we were going to sit there across from each other for all eternity, smiling at it. when you swear you’re going to love someone forever, that you will never hurt them, that you will never leave them, you’re lying. not because you’re a liar but because *you don’t know fucking anything about your own life*. you have no idea what will happen to you. and in the course of not knowing, anything, anything, anything, even the things that seem most fixed and stable can change or disappear or fall apart. and you have no idea what will happen inside of you so that you can survive or embrace or let go of those things. you don’t know what weird little telescope life is going to hand you and suddenly you see everything, everyone, or maybe just one thing, one person, maybe yourself, very differently. it makes me think that all you can ever say to someone you love and all you can ask for from someone who loves you, is that they love you right now. because that’s really all there is. and the idea that love will find you, save you, float you, build you an island, is the most misleading and hurtful idea any of us can ever carry. it makes us reject telescope after telescope, until we’re standing in a pile of them, wondering why the fuck we feel so blind.
when i think about you i think about this line from the book i’m reading right now called the quiet girl by pete hoeg. the line is this: “happiness,” he said, “doesn’t consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of.”
i don’t know what it will take for you to let go of the thing that has been keeping you sustained, what has been telling you that you are sick, what has been telling you to hold on to it so you won’t drown because you will never learn to swim. but i know that you are alone. i know because i am alone too. it’s the truest thing. the only thing that is truer is that everything around you and me, including you and me, is temporary. and that you have as little of an idea about what is in store for you as i do. it could be anything. and in that feeling, that seasick, semi hopeful call of the void, the one-two-three-here we go, we are the truest of companions.
are you sad? so am i. lets talk about it. you show me yours, i’ll show you mine. we can be sad together and it will be ok. submit here.