(it hurts to think that they can still go on)
will it be like this for the rest of my life? will the darkness, the emptiness, the monster that resides in the back of my brain, always come back around claiming what belongs to it? it doesn’t belong to it. it reclaims it either way. it always does.
I once said, I don’t really remember how I felt back in high school. I said, it’s difficult for me to imagine living like that, the way I used to. for three years. day after day after day. I don’t remember what it was like, what it felt like. I know how I felt because I’ve written so much about it, it was enough for it to burn itself a special place in my mind. I know I felt like I was dead, even if I was still breathing and blood was still running through my veins. I know I felt like I was invisible, like I was disposable, like I had a hole in the middle of my fucking chest and one day I was going to wake up to find out that the hole had finally swallowed me, too.
I know I felt like I wasn’t good enough. never good enough. never enough.
never enough. no matter how much I fought and tried and screamed and tore my skin and killed myself to be at least, a little bit, the tiniest bit, enough. I wasn’t. and it killed me.
until it didn’t anymore. until I was enough. pretty enough, sociable enough, skinny enough, quiet enough, not confrontational enough, intelligent enough. and they loved it. they ate it all up. all of them. and they loved me. and they rewarded me. and it was good.
until it wasn’t anymore because the monster came back. it always does. but I mentioned that already, didn’t I?
and then I fought some more, like I always do. because I don’t ever give up. even if I’ve been close to, I never actually did. because for some fucking reason I always feel like I have to keep moving forward. no matter how many horrible things get thrown my way. you don’t give up. you don’t get to give up. you didn’t when you had your chance to- sixteen, alone in your room and wondering what the fuck you could write in your suicide letter so your mother wouldn’t blame herself, so your friends know that they couldn’t have avoided it, that you are alone and terrified and completely exhausted and you haven’t got a single fighting bone left in your body, and you don’t know how you’re going to do it yet, you are still thinking about it, the less messy way, you don’t want to be a bigger burden dead than the one you were alive-, and that chance passed and now you don’t get to even think about it anymore.
and so I did. I fought. I evicted one of the monsters. or I least I thought I did. I realized, later, it’d been more like putting it in a little box and throwing the lock on, and hoping it would never find the key again. but it turns out, with one monster out the other one, the forgotten one, the one I had thought I had left back in high school, slowly creeped its way back in, silently but surely. and now my afraid it’s made itself comfortable in my brain again. reclaiming its throne.
is that why the feeling of not being good enough is back again? or is it the other way around?
I don’t know anymore. but I’m scared.
and it turns out, there’s other old friends who are back as well.
I’m terrified and I don’t- I CAN’T- talk about this with anyone. because they will worry or they will look at me like everyone did when I was fifteen, because what the fuck is an almost 22-year-old adult doing, thinking about hurting herself again. about scratching skin until it bleeds, until it marks, until the pain makes itself present on the inside of my wrists again. it’s not like I actually considered it. it’s not that. it’s more like an impulse, like a really stupid fucking idiotic impulse that pops up every once again but I can’t- and I absolutely won’t- talk about it. because they wouldn’t understand. they would judge me. they would think I’m overreacting. they make jokes about it. they don’t think I’m that bad again, bad enough to do that, they would think I’m lying, making it all up.
I’m scared. I’m tired. and I’m wondering if the façade is even worth keeping up if this is the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life.