I wrapped myself in my duvet wishing it would suffocate me when I was 20 years old.
I had just gotten a 92% on my cognitive neuroscience test.
It sounds frivolous, it sounds irrational—because it is.
There is no rational, or good reason why an A on a test with a D mean and median would, or should ever be the preamble to ending your life. And yet, it nearly did for me.
Two days before, I felt a dreadful sense of unworthiness, so consuming I felt my back breaking under its weight. I had been going to therapy seriously for about four months now, determined that this time, this time, I would do it right, and I would get better. Except, nothing was getting better, if anything it was worse. Before I had always been able to perform, to shove my pain aside like an inconvenience, break my spirit like it was nothing, and scream at myself like a drill sergeant that would be obeyed… or else.
Within 4 months, “or else” stopped mattering. “Or else” was no longer feared. “Or else” didn’t keep my room clean. “Or else” didn’t keep a smile on my face. “Or else” was losing to the sad sack on the floor begging for rest, begging to be seen, begging to be loved. The sad sack on the floor was pulling me down with her, her pain too painful for her to bear alone; she clung on so frightfully I fell into free-fall. “Or else” didn’t stop the fall, “or else” paled as I yearned to splatter across concrete. I yearned for it all to just—stop.
But even then I showed up to class, I took notes, I studied for tests, I achieved. When my friends could no longer stand to be around me, when my anger and bitterness poured from my pores, when I started falling, faster, and faster, and faster—even then—even then I knew what I could and could not get away with.
My pain is disciplined. She warps herself so cruelly, so perfectly into place, so convincingly fine you could roll your eyes when I pleaded for help. You could point to my near perfect GPA and scoff when I told you that every step I took felt like walking on coal—surely you couldn’t have made it this far if that was true.
My pain is disciplined, my pain is intelligent, my pain knows that loneliness is the cruelest punishment. My pain knew that when you couldn’t see the bleeding, my lungs could rupture without even a glance.
I stopped taking a knife to my wrist after 4 months, but I didn’t even try to discourage the self infliction of harm until nearly a decade later.
But I was supposed to be better. I no longer felt like a shell of myself, I was reckoning with the mirror. I didn’t meet the qualifications for Major Depressive Disorder according to my psychiatrist, so it seems that maybe nothing had ever been wrong at all.
I had been wrestling with my reflection seriously for four months, but I had begun to see her while I was in Paris—I’ve been seeing myself clearly for a year now; it is shocking how rest, stillness, and tranquility allows you to properly look at yourself. I had become unrecognizable to myself, I wanted myself back, and I was determined.
Getting her back nearly cost me my life.
When I left Paris, I left rest, I left stillness, and I left tranquility. I returned to old patterns, old friends, old routines, but my authenticity, stubborn and indignant as she is, refused to bend anymore. Once she realized how counterfeit and bogus my reflection appeared, how counterfeit and bogus I had become, she refused to be shoved aside… inauthenticity is so gauche.
Abandonment is easier when what—and who—you attempt to abandon doesn’t scream back at you. Performance and forceful conformity is impossible when my stubborn, and unyielding authenticity refused to kick around my sad sack on the floor.
On that awful Wednesday the brawl between my authenticity and discipline came to a head. My authenticity screamed at me, demanding rest. My discipline reminded me I would be nothing, just as I had feared, if I lost this final frontier: my ability to achieve.
I walked into the office of one of my favorite professors. I said that I was tired, I voiced my confusion: how on Earth was I still going when I felt so horrible? How was the façade so convincingly cloaking the rot?
I was reminded that others could not continue on as I had done. Unintentionally, my ability to achieve was dignified, and so my discipline grew arrogant as my authenticity shattered.
I poured everything I had left into this senseless pursuit for the next 48 hours. I told myself the emotional, physical, and mental drain would be nothing compared to the reminder that when I am nothing, at the very least I can achieve.
I listened to The Tortured Poets Department as I laughed at my sad sack on the floor, I used her humiliation to waterboard cognitive neuroscience into my memory. I did not relent, I did not rest, I worked every surviving, brittle fiber of my being and scoffed when they begged for reprieve.
When that 92% stared at me, it wasn’t relief that washed over my entire being, it wasn’t excitement, it wasn’t pride, it was the irrational realization that my very best would only amount to 92%.
92% didn’t feel worth the pain anymore.
My sad sack on the floor had swollen so monstrously, while my discipline had deteriorated under the weight of that damn 92%.
Though I should have understood that 92% was the most my dejected, worn out, and crumbling self could have achieved, I had been so used to waving off my fatigue, the thought never even crossed my mind.
I crawled into bed at 5 in the afternoon. I pouted and I crumbled. I ratted off to my poor roommate, realizing my own sense of futility as words tumbled out of my mouth. When I was finally left alone, I was left with the weight of it all. I was also left with the fresh pills that laid in the orange tube.
I begged my other roommate to take them out of the room.
They sat there as I rambled on: about the tyrant that lives inside my head, who did not seem capable of relenting.
I woke up the next day, it was Saturday now; I expected to feel better, I was even worse.
As I laid there, wishing nothing but to be done—not dead, just done—I saw faces from years ago, I heard voices. I saw dejection, I saw horror, I saw grief. I heard them say she was too young, too full of promise, too capable—too capable to have ever thought tying a rope would be the best solution.
I remember the aftermath of her death, regretfully more than I remember before. I remember the questions, I remember the confusion, I remember being demanded to tell them how it happened, as if the ‘how’ mattered more than the fact that she’s gone; I carry my anger. I carry my anger so tightly, so fiercely, so stoutly; I told myself I would never, ever, give them any excuse to treat my life like a fleeting anecdote in their laughable, pathetic hero’s journey: “for I have endured so much, I am the only one who matters.”
I am ashamed to say my anger clung on tighter than my hope. I am ashamed to say deep down I know if it wasn’t for my anger I wouldn’t be sitting in my dream apartment, living the life I could only dream of, finally beginning to loosen the shame that once coiled itself around me like a python.
I remind myself I am here, I remind myself I endured, I remind myself that is what matters most. I am not ashamed to have survived.
I remember my friend always. I carry her with me. I honor her in every way I can. I feel guilt. It lives inside me. Not just because she is gone, not just because she never made it to high school, not just because I didn’t know, but because I know, deep down, if it was not for the anger and fierce indignation I felt in the aftermath, I never would have made it past that solemn Saturday.
My guilt nestles itself against the floor, it is absorbed and held by my sad sack on the floor.
It is my guilt that interrupted the free-fall. It is my guilt that said enough was enough. It is my guilt that reminded me my friend did not die for me to end the very same way. It is my guilt that reminds me that she did not witness the aftermath; if she did, she surely would not permit anyone to feel and weather what I do, what her family do, what her friends do, what our entire community does.
That Saturday, as I wallowed and accepted my fate. My guilt and my discipline did the oddest thing: it seems they had reconciled. My discipline relented, only slightly, only to now accept that my sad sack on the floor had to be honored. Ironically, it is now my discipline that attends to her most reverently.
My discipline, for as cruel as she had been, had only ever wanted to survive. Never did she imagine that she would be seen as the tyrant that burdened me so completely I wished for nothing but cessation.
She was the one who rallied the rest of my system, who said I could not keep hating myself if I was to survive.
I’ve apologized to my friends now, even as my sweet sad sack on the floor bitterly reminds me that “being fun to be around” is not a prerequisite for reverence. She still remembers the loneliness, she still remembers the discomfort, she remembers. I endearingly take her hand, I kiss her forehead, I tell her people are only doing their very best, and that we do not need resentment to remember.
I still remember too, I still remember that they stayed, even if it was only when I was explicit and clear in my cry for help.
I never did get confirmation, that firm confirmation that what I have experienced is real. I have slowly released the desire for my pain to be seen—truthfully, honestly… at least by others: I have accepted my responsibility. I have taken the mantle of savior, of sufferer, of truth bearer—it was always only ever mine.
At the time I thought a 92% was the end of the world, I see the irrationality for what it is: not an indicator for my intrinsic failings, but as a sort of forewarning. Irrationality is not your vice, irrationality is the blaring alarm that tells you something sinister has taken the helm.
I finished the class with an A, I finished that entire semester with a 4.0; nothing to show for the scariest day of my life other than these words.
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