This blog is old.
I started it five years ago, during my recovery from the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in my life so far. I had just spent four months in a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt, months I spent in the deepest pit, the darkest hole I have ever known, as my mind drenched me in turn with deathlike emptiness and chaotic anguish, as doctors tried me on treatment after treatment, from pills that had me pacing the room in frantic circles to Electro Compulsive Therapy (which...did it do anything at all?). There are huge gaps in my memory of those months, because during them the passage of time became meaningless for me. I couldn’t imagine myself wanting to live, I couldn’t imagine myself having a future beyond that pain. When I finally did return to the real world, it was only because I’d decided that if nothing mattered I might as well do what people wanted.
As I started going through the motions again, tumblr became a source of laughter, excitement, and joy in a world which had seemed utterly empty of those things for me. I latched onto Sherlock with an enthusiasm almost unnatural in its endurance, and suddenly there were things I wanted to see and do again (even if it all happened on a computer screen). As ridiculous as it seems to me looking back on it, it was that television show and the fandom surrounding it which filled in the emptiness, warded off the hopelessness, and made room for me to get better again.
As I got better and finally stopped finding Sherlock so enthralling, I would look down on this blog. I would be embarrassed at the undeniably ridiculous and childish posts I had made. I would marvel how much I’d grown and changed since then.
But things aren’t quite so different now as I once thought they were.
One of the biggest markers I’d used to measure how much better I was had been that I was in a relationship that filled me with confidence and joy. And it really did fill me with confidence and joy. But as this person, who I called “my person,” became more and more the center of my life, I didn’t notice myself losing control of the source of all my confidence and joy. And when things started going wrong, when I started losing my trust in her (even before I knew I was losing my trust in her), I started losing my confidence and joy too. I was so concerned with comforting her and making sure she didn’t feel bad for treating me badly, that I didn’t notice that it was happening over and over and over. I ignored the friends who told me something was wrong. The promises she made were so clearly heartfelt and earnest that when she kept breaking them I found myself trying to make her feel better instead of thinking of myself and what I deserved. I put myself down for demanding things that turned out to be impossible for her - consistency and devotion.
I felt worthless without her, so all I could think of was how to make things easier for her, how to coach her into respecting boundaries without activating making her want to violate them even more, how to compromise my self respect (I called it pride then) to make the bar easier for her to reach.
Like self harm, this relationship became a destructive addiction for me. Like self harm, this relationship became a downward spiral for me. Like self harm, the short term relief of being in her arms, hearing her say everything would be alright, always masked long term repercussions for me. Like self harm, even when I accepted that something was wrong, even when I tried to make it stop, I continued to give in.
And now that I’ve finally told her that it really is over, after breaking up with her two weeks ago, she is still surprised. Maybe because she knows I can’t imagine myself without her. The world just feels so empty and tasteless without her in my life. Whenever I try to think of what my future will be like without her, all I see is a dull gray fog. When everything around me feels so bleak, it’s hard to see the point in carrying on.
But this blog gives me hope. Because at the time I made it, I would have said the same thing. I couldn’t see myself ever finding happiness, and yet I did, well before I met Theresa. I could never have imagined myself making it to college, let alone finishing it, or writing a 56 page thesis and beginning to understand the world in new and complex ways that I had no inkling of before, could never imagine all the new places I’ve been to and amazing people I’ve met. I proved myself wrong in the best way, and if I did it once, I can do it again. It’s time for me to start a new blog, time for me to find my own voice, my own joy again. I’m going to keep this one up as an artifact of perseverance, as evidence to myself that I can find hope when and where I least expect it.
My mother, as she was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, would often repeat the phrase “I want to be a person.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but over the past months it has resonated deeply with me. I struggled to (and then forgot to) try to retain a concept of myself as a whole person, which became difficult and then impossible when I had poured everything into another person, “my person.” The circumstances in which it happened were vastly different, yet, like my mother, I watched myself changing in ways that I could not stand, in ways that didn’t feel like me. Now is my chance to fix that. I want to be my own person. I don’t know how it’ll work out, but I’m going to try.
It’s going to be ok. It’s going to be ok. It’s going to be ok.
It’s time to start over.
