Returning

It feels strange here, navigating through the admin screens… it feels hollow, echoing, empty… like an abandoned building I have a vague memory of living in once.

I am being made to write here.  There is a threat that this will become a daily occurrence.  I suppose we shall see.

I am not well.  

I have not been well for a while.  For as long as was necessary, I kept everything together, kept going forward, even, to all outward appearances, successfully.

It reminds me of my mom’s cancer.  I had to keep things together because I was all she had.  I mean I had a father and a brother, but they didn’t do anything, just pretended nothing was going on.  And I was the one who drove (on my permit) to and from doctor’s appointments, listened to my mother’s own fears of her death and the loss of her womanhood – I had no idea what to say or do, I just remember sitting in the car listening and frozen and dying inside.

All my memories at that time are dark as if it had been perpetually overcast for a year and a half.  As if the lights in our home were all set at half-bright.  I remember bringing tea and ice chips… pulling hair from the drains, I remember the long, ugly scar I wasn’t supposed to see when I glanced into my mother’s room just as she stepped in front of the full length mirror to see what the’d done to her.

I held it together.  But I could feel it slipping, more and more through my fingers.  I was holding on but barely and the fear of losing my grip was a constant companion in my dim memories.

And now, it wasn’t cancer, but so strangely similar… Everything went wrong – I lost the men I loved, my relationships, my friends, and then I started the semester.  And it was hell.  It undermined everything in me, it destroyed my confidence, my idealism, my hope, my dreams, my aspirations…  They talked me into staying when I asked to quit in February.  They told me to count down the days when I said I couldn’t do any more in March.  By April I was putting one foot in front of the other and pasting on an automatic smile.

I stumbled out my last day and collapsed over my steering wheel, sobbing and I didn’t even know what for.

It wasn’t until my mom was in remission that I had the nervous breakdown.  I wound up in the hospital for six months.

They have to take care of you there.  Give you food, a bed, clean clothes…  Some of them even act like they care – no matter how broken you are.

I’ve been trying to hold onto friends.  But they have pain too, their own…  and it becomes mean little barbs that tear my heart… and I keep being told it’s my fault.  I keep being told all I’m doing wrong…  And everyone says my mind isn’t right right now, it isn’t right so I have to trust everyone else to tell me reality – but what if everybody else doesn’t see reality either.  What if they have their own filters of pain and insecurity and worry and old hurts that make them poke little meannesses at me… and then they tell me it’s me being paranoid instead of them being human like all of us…

Isn’t that reasonable?  Isn’t that possible?  I think it’s much more irrational to say that all people are absolutely perfect at all times.  THAT would be crazy thinking.  But because I’m the one who is crazy they all seem to feel they get a free pass to blame everything on my missed perceptions.  They don’t see what they are doing because it’s more obvious to blame me.  And so… I bleed.

Perhaps I should withdraw… from all of them… go into a hole where no one can reach me… and no one can hurt me…  I’m really not strong enough right now to take the little hurts of other people’s human frailty.  I have no barriers to deflect it, I have no well to absorb it… I am flayed to the exposed nerves and I can’t take anymore.

I feel alone.

Standing in the shower tonight I was suddenly struck… by this kind of terrible loneliness that is almost a grief… so powerful it doubled me over and took me to my knees, one hand pressed to the cold tile wall while the water diluted my tears.

Someone is staying with me.  But even his presence feels like loneliness.  This is a living death… everything inside of me has gone still and cold and I’ve just forgotten to stop breathing…

My limbs are heavy.   It almost feels too difficult to lift my fingers to press the keys.  I’ve let my head fall to the side and my eyes want to slide away from the screen.

I heard there is a place in Switzerland where suicide is legal.  They even provide the poison, as long as you are mobile enough to handle the cup yourself.  Dignitas.  Don’t we all have the right to choose our own death, with peace.. with dignity… while we still have the strength to lift the cup?

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