#exploring home

[kerouaille]

[spacecowboyart]

Exploring Home Pt. 2

It is six in the morning on a Saturday and I’d never thought a Saturday morning would feel this suffocating. I’m pacing the room and trying to explain to myself that everything everyone said in new years eve was a lie, ‘this year wasn’t so bad’, you know what a lot of other people didn’t see that bad at the time? The holocaust. The holocaust was horrible! You know what also was horrible? 2015! 2015 was a very hard year for me. Mainly because I was faced by a lot of endings. After four years in college, 2015 saw me drop out. After nearly two years in a committed relationship, 2015 saw me mumble the words to myself, ‘maybe it’s over’, and like a slap in the face it responded ‘it is’. 2015 saw the end of most of my major projects, the end of my biggest aspirations and the end of what I sought out, dreamed of and worked toward, and it saw them end without any pay off.

To be fair, I can’t blame it all on a year, I can’t blame it on the abstract concept of time. It’s just that in my mind I need to find a period, a moment when I can see this end and I can start again. I dropped out from college because after four long years of seeking some kind of higher education I felt exhausted, and the day that I decided to leave, the day that I ultimately left and walked away I felt a huge weight lift off of my shoulders. After four years I felt I left one of the most abusive relationships I had never had in my life. College never came easy to me, not because I wasn’t smart enough but because the strain was too much, the pressure of having to cope with people’s judgement and hate took so much out of me. I had so many situations where I felt that one day that place, that abstract concept of an institution, that building that I had given this personification to was trying to kill me. As dramatic as it sounds it felt personally victimised by that institution. Just imagine some kind of slasher flick where there’s just a building with a knife taped to it’s side running behind you, that’s how it felt, if I’d put it in a somewhat comical way.

On one side you had the professors who honestly, not all of them were bad, but some of them were out right douche bags. I even had one professor give me an F in one of my courses because my grandmother had died. You had situations that were completely not in my control yet I felt like they were a very personal failure on my part. On the other side you had my mother reminding me at every step of the way how much sacrifice was being made personally by her to put me through college, and I wasn’t trying to be ungrateful, trust me. I was just exhausted. There came a point where I wasn’t even sure I had a will to live, I probably did, but I was just too exhausted to feel anything. Anything but the utterly soul crushing reminder that ‘you’re depressed and if you weren’t depressed, you could probably fucking deal with this like everyone else fucking can.’ That’s uh- that’s the voice in the back of my head, I try to ignore him, he’s an asshole. 

Then you had, drum roll please, the incompetent faculty. Don't get me wrong, some of them didn’t do a bad job, it’s just that the way they were told to do their job was pretty shitty in the fist place. Best example I can give is, I was given an administrative down from an online class, Social Work in Communities, first of all, fuck social work in communities, I can barely handle myself, how am I supposed to handle a whole community of people who, let’s be real here, don’t really want my help in the first place. I digress. Point is I was going into the class, I was doing the job but apparently it wasn’t showing up on the system, so after jumping through so many hoops for three months, I still didn’t get the class back, all I did was spend hours waiting for people to talk to me just to tell me to go to another office, but what can you do? All in all, my college experience was nothing, if not, horrible.

Now, we go into the failed love life. Nearly two years ago I met a man, a very nice, charming, loving, caring, funny man. He was all the bells and whistles. I truly loved him, I swear. But you know what sucks about relationships? That sometimes, they just don’t work. Sometimes they’re beautiful and nurturing, they’re like that one blanket at your grans house that she kept in the closet just for the really chilly nights and then that one chilly night sets in and she brings out that blanket and you just, you feel warm, loved, even cared for and you never want that feeling to end, but you know what? Morning comes, the chilly night becomes a really hot morning in the middle of winter and the blanket goes back in the closet and you hate yourself. The moment is gone, the sun came out and if you could run up sun rays and murder the sun, you would. 

But we’re not here to talk about blankets and killing the thing that makes the planet work but makes you so unhappy, hey, maybe that’s a good metaphor for responsibility or reality or something, I’unno. When it was good, it was good. When you were six thousand seven hundred seventy eight point nine kilometres away it sucked. Because there were these nights where all you really wanted was to have him there, tell you it’s alright and that you’re not totally fucking crazy for wanting to murder the sun... that happened to my friend or something, I’unno. You just wanted one good night, one nice chilly winter night just to have the blanket back, just to feel good again. 

‘The days are becoming harsher, and the rain washes away less’, that’s from a poem I wrote while I was still with him, it was one of those mantras that you say to yourself, something to signify, shit sucks, but they’re isn’t much I can do about it. But in reality, you just want it to sound nicer. But I also said it because it was true, I wasn’t coping well with my situation, I couldn’t find a way to deal with what was going on, and I needed something to make it all feel, better. Another mantra I would constantly, and I mean constantly use was ‘I want to go home’. Get this, I’ve never felt I’ve fit in, and in a figurative way, I never felt like I had a home and that is one of the deepest roots to my mental “issues”. When I found him, I felt like I had finally found a home, something for myself, a future, someone to love and love me back and it felt amazing. But when the rain started to wash away less, it was the only way I could find to get through the day. ‘Just think of home, think of what’s on the other side and it'll all be better,’ I used to even say it to myself when ever I was having a panic attack to calm me down, ‘I wanna go home, I wanna go home, I wanna go home’ I used to mutter that to myself and choke back tears as I tried to calm myself.

It’s not a secret, that not having that promise of home that I made to myself has made dealing with my depression and my anxiety a far more arduous task. I don’t have that one thing to help me sleep in the night, or keep me awake in the mornings. I lost my drive, my fire and to be honest I think I’m a long ways away from finding it again. In 2014 I had the world at my fingertips and I felt like a king, 2015 was the fucking usurper who took my crown, my throne, and my castle which I was really hoping was just a decently sized apartment, somewhere where I could feel at home and maybe have a cat who I could treat as my loyal subject. Who am I kidding, cats are treasonous assholes. For a very short time I had it all, and those it gets better messages stopped sounding like utter bullshit, but I don’t know. Maybe I just need a change of scenery, a change of weather, I just hope that some day everything might just be a little bit better.