of suicide and crisis chat

I hit a low point last night.

I am so overwhelmed with this job search. I keep applying to jobs. I keep hearing nothing. Co-worker bought us DQ for lunch. I ate it, hoping it would at least bring some comfort. Hamburger and fries and ice cream. Comfort food right? 

I don't know when I'm going to figure out that food doesn't bring any comfort. Not any more.

Driving home, I felt so awful. About everything. My food choices for the day, my failure to find a new job. And those thoughts crept up on me. They crept up and then they blindsided me. 

Maybe it would be better for everyone if you just didn't exist anymore. Sure they'd be sad, they'd be heartbroken. But they'd get over it. You can't do anything right. What's the point? What's the point of trying? Just kill yourself already. What are you waiting for? 

They're always in the back of my mind. They always have been, for as long as I can remember. Usually they're pretty easy to push away, but not last night. I got home. I went straight to my bed where I curled into a ball and struggled to find a good reason to keep living.

Around midnight I felt panicky enough to try a crisis chat. Because I really hate talking on the phone. There's a disconnect between my head and my mouth. Words flow much smoother from my head to my fingers. 

I've done the crisis chat thing a few times, and I've come to an important decision. 

I think I'm too fucked up for crisis chat.

I was connected with Alex. Alex copy/pasted the answers he's been trained to give. And for some reason that always bugs me. I don't know what's wrong with me. These people are just there trying to help, and I voluntarily logged on to get their help, but I always end up kind of pissed off. I just want to reach through the computer and shake them. I want to yell at them to stop mindlessly repeating words and just TALK to me. 

A big part is that I'm too cynical. I can't let what they're saying help me because it feels so transparent to me. I felt like I could see Alex, probably sitting in his dorm room. He's probably a Sophomore Psychology major who tells his family that he just really wants to help people and doesn't really realize he's going to need a shit ton more schooling before he can really do that. I could see him sitting on a couch in his sweatpants, checking Facebook and copy/pasting textbook answers for the poor fucked up girl who wants to kill herself.

So I end up retreating behind sarcasm, behind macabre humor, just trying to get some reaction.  

Alex: What has helped you before when you've gotten these feelings?

Me: Well last time I relapsed back to being an anorexic because apparently I prefer the slow and steady method.

Silence.

Me: (that was a joke)

Silence.

There was a lot of silence. He was probably Facebook chatting with that hot girl from his Western Civilization class.

I filled the silence with ramblings for the most part. I tried to be honest, to get my feelings out so I could maybe go to sleep. But I just got tired of trying, tired of his robot replies, and steered myself towards being "all better." He picked up on that cue really quick (I'm sure he was relieved) and made his closing statement of, "Will you commit to making a Safety Plan?" I rolled my eyes and half heartedly gave him a few things I could do the next time I wanted to kill myself and then just said goodnight and logged off. 

I'm sorry that you got stuck dealing with me, Alex. I don't blame you. Not really. 

I guess I just want to have an honest conversation. I don't want to hear, "It is hard to feel pressured from expectations." I want someone to tell me, yeah, you're right. This world is really fucked up sometimes, and sometimes it's really hard to find reasons to keep going. I want someone to say that they've been there. That they get it. That they've reached that point where everything is too heavy, too much, and you're too numb. That they've sat on the floor of the bathroom and looked at the drawer that holds the sharp scissors and wondered idly if it would hurt. Maybe I just want someone to give me a magic answer that fixes everything, I don't know.

All I know is that I don't really feel any better. I've realized that the main thing, really my only reason left for staying alive is that I know it would destroy the Mr. if I killed myself. It would break his heart. So I'm mostly staying alive for him. Which is a reason, and it's a strong one. 

But maybe I want to find a reason to stay alive for me. 

a childhood best left forgotten

"I hate them! I hate them! I HATE them!"

Her screams are muffled through the crooked door, but the words are too angry, to furious to be blocked out. It doesn't matter how tightly I plug my ears. It doesn't matter how hard I try to ignore them. I sink down further where I'm sitting on the floor of my closet, pulling my skinny, dirty knees to my flat chest, and let the numbness slowly creep over me.

Don't feel. It's better if you don't feel.

Her storming steps are shaking the house like a thunderstorm, but there's no safety to be found under this roof, within these four walls.

She doesn't stop, the familiar insults roll so easily off her tongue. She calls us every name she can think of. She hurls the words at the walls, she grinds them into the carpet, she fills the house with her fury, with her hatred. I don't know where the others are. We have all gone still as frightened little mice, creeping into dark corners.

I don't cry. I can't cry. Not about this. I know that with childish certainty. I can't feel anything. It's easier that way.

...

I don't remember why she was angry. I just remember her face, growing dangerously darker. But I was angry too, and I squared my slight eight year old shoulders and stubbornly stood my ground. I didn't deserve this. 

Her words grew steadily louder, her gestures sharper. Her anger made no sense, and I was so tired. So tired of her manipulations. And so frustrated with being helpless.

She said something. Something I don't remember. My temper boiled over, and I rolled my eyes.

I didn't see it coming. She moved too fast. Her hand cracked across my face, making my ears ring. I stumbled backwards, shocked, but she was in my face again. 

"Go to your room." She said through tightly clenched teeth, hatred in every line on her face.

I fled, my angry spirit broken. I barely got the door closed before she started screaming. I climbed on top of the mountain of cardboard boxes in the unfinished storeroom attached to my bedroom. I climbed all the way up to the small window, shoving it open with shaking hands. As far as I could see there was only mountain fields and trees. I wanted to get out, to get away, but I paused there.

She's a monster, my brain whimpered. My mother is a monster. I can't take this anymore. I can't.

What will you do? That detached, numb part of me asked tonelessly. Run away? And go where? Live in the woods by yourself? I'd read a book about a boy who had done just that. He'd lived off of berries and animals he trapped, and he even used a plant root as soap. I was a child of the wild mountains, but I was still afraid of the woods at night.

Tell someone? And then what? Get taken away? Away from your siblings? Put in foster care? You've read books about that too. Foster care is even worse.

That's when tears came. Bitter, helpless, miserable tears. I curled up on top of the boxes, holding my breath to keep from making any noise, and cried because I knew that I was just a kid and there was nothing I could do.

...

"Good morning!" The Pastor greets us at the door, smiling.

"Good morning!" My mother and father say in unison, smiling back. 

"Good morning!" I say, smile pasted on.

"Good morning!" Echoes my little sisters, my brother. 

We all smile because that's what you do. You smile. This is our stage.

We sit in the pew, all six of us dressed in our Sunday best, which is shabby thrift store finds. The rest of the congregation pours in, weather-beaten farmers, rough mountain dwellers, the meth addicts, their faces lined with pain and suffering, the fat, friendly old ladies who always smell like pound cake. There is the man who beats his wife and kids. He sits straight and proud, dark eyes fixed straight ahead. Beside him, his wife sits with slumped shoulders. Their children huddle in the pew like whipped dogs. They are to be pitied. We are not like them. 

The Pastor talks about God. He looks tired. I would be tired too, trying to hold this broken flock together. But my parents sit straight and serene. We are the picture perfect family. The family to be modeled after. Bibles in hand, silent and attentive. So godly.

And we are so good at this lie, I almost believe it. 

please tell me it's worth it

"I've been trying to figure out what's different about you." My friend said, her brows knit together. "I thought maybe it was just that I haven't seen you in a while. But I think it's because you're wearing jeans and not a dress."

She laughed, and I laughed, but it came out hollow.

No! Tell me I look skinny! I wanted to beg. I've been working so hard for this! Can't you see? Please tell me it's worth it! Please tell me I look different!

I didn't volunteer the truth.

I've lost 26 lbs, but it's not enough. What is enough? I don't know. Is it even attainable?

All I want to do is eat. Eating is all I think about. It's becoming an obsession to the point of scaring me. It's getting harder to say no. Food owns my thoughts.

Sometimes it feels like this is my body fighting back. It makes sense. I'm starving myself. That's what I'm doing. In plain black and white print. Starving.

But, my brain argues, that is really just a very convenient excuse, isn't it? Oh it's not YOU who just ate all that food. It's your body. What a load of bullshit. You're not only weak, you're a liar. A pathetic, weak liar who tries to pass the blame onto someone, anyone, else.

What am I doing?

I am so tired of this.

And yet I can't stop wondering...are there really any recovered anorexics, or just failed anorexics?

Why on earth do YOU need to stop? My brain mocks me. There are girls who weigh 80 lbs. They are walking skeletons. People see their fragile bones and KNOW what they are. People look at you and they can't even fucking tell you've lost weight. If you told someone you were anorexic, they would laugh in your face.

I've always known the truth. Always.

I'm slowly killing myself.

But maybe that's what I want.

the kind of cold that creeps into your bones

The sun wakes me. Sunshine, for the first time in days. My eyes are so heavy. I have to drag them open. My brain is filled with static. My body feels like it belongs to someone else. It is uncomfortably bright. Sunshine. This should make me happy. Right?

I walk down the stairs, slow and dizzy, and he greets me with a smile. I force the corners of my mouth upwards, but I feel nothing. He's talking, happy to see me awake. I feel like I've forgotten how to be human. My responses are slow, delayed. I sit down on the couch because my legs can't support the weight on my shoulders anymore.

"What's wrong?" He asks, his eyebrows knitting together.

"I'm just tired." I say, and it's true. I am tired. I want to lie back down and never wake up again.

"You're tired?" He raises an eyebrow, laughing a little as he glances at the clock. I've been asleep for a long time. "How are you tired? That's crazy."

I try to arrange my face into what might pass for a sheepish grin, running a heavy, heavy hand through my tangled hair. "Yeah. Crazy."

I can't wake up. I'm trapped in dreamland, slowly drowning.

...

Last night we went to a concert, standing room only. I wore long underwear, my winter coat, a knit hat, and a bulky knit scarf. I spent most of the concert shivering. My friend gave me her gloves with a raised eyebrow. I took them, but I still shivered. I swayed on my feet, but not to the music.

Don't you dare pass out. Don't you dare. I fiercely berated myself for three hours. Around me my friends danced and clapped and sang. I stood frozen and dull with exhaustion.

Finally in the car, he let me turn the heat all the way up. By the time we got home, I'd managed to stop shivering. The few feet from the car to the house set me off again. Upstairs getting undressed, I almost started crying. I couldn't feel my fingers or my toes. I was shaking. He pulled me into bed and wrapped his warm body around me, holding me close until I fell asleep.

I did really good this week.

But today defeated me.

In this haze, this thick fog, I ate. My feet walked into the kitchen. My hands put food in my mouth. I ate and I ate and I ate.

Oatmeal. Half of a gyro. Half a box of hot tamales. Peanut butter. An apple. Popcorn. Chocolate milk.

I ate and somewhere in the back of my mind, I hated myself. I felt guilty. I felt ashamed. But I didn't stop.

I forced myself to workout, pushed myself to speed walk up that treadmill incline for 70 minutes. Punishment. Retribution. Justice.

But really, I feel nothing. I feel nothing at all.

of plateaus

Plateaus are strange.

In all instances, really. I mean have you ever stopped to think about how strange actual plateaus are? Like someone grabbed hold of a mountain and sliced off the top. Like giant birthday cakes littered across the western plains.

I'm coming off a plateau. I've noticed this happens about every 10 pounds. I hit 130 lbs and stayed there. For weeks. I was so frustrated. And then suddenly, the numbers dropped. The dropped and dropped and then I hit 120 lbs. And then I stayed there. I stayed there for what felt like a hundred years. In reality it was about one month. Maybe two months? And now suddenly the numbers are dropping again. I waffled between 118 lbs and 119 lbs for a while, but now they're dropping. Quickly.

Sometimes it almost scares me how quickly they drop. 

I've hit 116 lbs now. I'm so close to my first goal weight! So close.

This is the point where that little voice starts asking me, When are you going to stop?

I'm not sure how to answer that.

of getting high

I got high for the first time in my life tonight.

Growing up I was a "good girl." More truthfully, I was afraid.

I'd never even smoked a cigarette.

I kept waiting for it to hit me. I was drinking beer. We were watching hockey. The smoke burned the back of my throat, familiar and strange at the same time. I waited. And I waited. And I waited.

Then suddenly I realized it didn't matter. I laid back on the couch and just stared at the tv. My friends were laughing and talking around me, but I wasn't really paying attention. They became a comforting sort of surround sound of noise, and I?

I was calm.

I wasn't worried about food or calories or my weight or how many minutes I'd logged on the treadmill or my job search. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't anxious at all.

That's when I realized I was high, and I had to suddenly fight a mad desire to laugh. I could've laughed and laughed and laughed forever and ever. It'd snuck up on me, so subtle. I settled on grinning.

"What's so funny?" Someone asked, grinning back at me.

"Everything." I said, and they laughed. But I was too comfortable, too relaxed to mind. The couch underneath my bare feet felt so soft. And there was nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear.

At least, not until tomorrow.

of weakness

I check the clock and do a double take. I've only been walking on the treadmill for 15 minutes? I'm gripping the rail, my feet speed walking up the eternal hill that is a treadmill incline. There's sweat dripping down my face, and all I really want to do is let the treadmill dump me on the floor so I can lay down.

15 minutes?

I usually do this for at least an hour.

I push myself to 40 minutes and by the time I get off, my hands are shaking. I wearily climb the stairs from the basement, my brain furiously working the numbers. It's not enough, I realize with a stab of panic. 40 minutes is just simply not enough.

I make it to my bedroom, where I collapse in front of my computer. I crunch the numbers on the calculator so I can see them. So I have to look at them. So I can know how badly I failed.

I didn't drink enough water today. 

I didn't get enough sleep.

I was just being lazy.

I should have just pushed myself harder.

I'm out of shape from that one day I missed last week.

I'm trying to rationalize my sudden weakness, but I'm too tired. I should shower, but I don't want to go back down the stairs. I should go get back on the treadmill, but my willpower isn't strong enough. I give up and strip, climbing into bed next to him. I'm shivering now. My fingers are numb chunks of ice attached to my hand. I curl up against his warm back and try to warm up. I fall asleep before I stop shivering.

I wake up several times in the night, blearily uncomfortable, but too half asleep to figure out why. The early sun finally wakes me enough to realize I'm drenched in sweat and freezing cold. I can't warm up. I'm not hot, I'm not feverish. So I guess this is what cold sweats are like. Damp and freezing and miserable. I pile all of the blankets on top of me and attempt to get warm. I never do.

I reached 117 lbs.

why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?

What makes me love you despite the reservations?
What do I see in your eyes
Besides my reflection hanging high?

He reaches out a hand, warm and gentle, to touch my cold face. He rests it there, against my cheekbone, and looks at me with quiet eyes. Behind his head, the candlelight flickers, and I breathe. I breathe in and out. I can feel every bone in my hip pressing painfully into the wood floor, and the record crackles softly, comforting.

Wide-eyed walker
Do not wander
Do not wander
Through the dawn

Both my eyes are fading
No light in the evening
Planted like a seed in sand and drowned in rain

"You are so beautiful." He says, and then he smiles. The lines around his eyes crinkle. I'm counting calories in my head, but I stop to smile back. His face lights up when he smiles at me, and I am greedy. Those smiles are precious. They are mine. I study his face and try to etch this moment into my memory. I am afraid of forgetting.

After all is said and done I feel the same
All that I hoped would change within me stayed
Like a huddled moon-lit exile on the shore
Warming his hands, a thousand years ago

I walk with others in the yearning to get out
Claw at my skin and gnash their teeth and shout
One of them wants only to be someone you'd admire
One would as soon just throw you on the fire

He brushes his hand through my hair and sighs, satisfied, content. His eyes close and I watch him, his dark lashes, the slight crook in his nose, his lips. The record crackles, stops, the arm returns home with a quiet thump. I untangle the blankets from around my legs and get up to turn it over. Side B.

"I think this is the best birthday I've ever had." He says softly as I return to our nest of blankets on the floor. I kiss him gently and then lay back to rest my head on his arm. The antiquated ceiling fan above us is still, and I think about time. I think about how today he turned twenty-six. How next year we will turn twenty-seven. Then twenty-eight.

Why is life made only for to end?
Why do I do all this waiting then?
Why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?
Why is life made only for to end?

I try think about myself as a mother. Of him as a father. I try to picture our child with his curls, my grey eyes. I feel a soft lurch of longing. This child only exists in my imagination, and I am running out of time.

Time. It never stops. No matter how much I beg, how tightly I close my eyes, how much I pretend. 

I cannot picture myself as a mother. I cannot see myself with a child. I can barely take care of myself. Some days I fail even at that. I am not strong. I am not brave. I am broken and selfish and twisted and weak. The thought of it terrifies me, of all the harm I could do. The pain I could cause. I see all the wrong, all the fucked up, all the hurt that lives in this world. I see my own mother's footsteps before me, and I am afraid that I will follow them.

So I close my eyes too. I press my face into his shirt, and he wraps his arms around me and we lay quiet and still until the music ends. He kisses my nose and smiles because he isn't afraid. I smile back because I am fated to pretend.

After all is said and after all is done
God only knows which of them I'll become

(music excerpts taken from Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues album)

you are a wrecking ball

You are a waterfall
Waiting inside a well.
You are a wrecking ball
Before the building fell.
And every lightning rod
Has got to watch the storm cloud come.


I'm losing my job.

My company is (probably) going under. I'm (probably) going to get laid off. Nothing is certain. Nothing is for sure. 

I have no control over what is happening.

No fucking control. 

The Mr. has been trying to coax me to search for a new job for probably a year. I just couldn't face it. I tried. I failed. Anxiety is a bastard. It just sits in your head and refuses to go away, refuses to be silent, refuses to be pacified. 

I work in a creative field. I'm a graphic designer. 

I'm a creative person. I don't know any other way to live my life, but being creative as an occupation is terrifying. 

I create something. As sterile and removed as I make it, it still contains a tiny piece of me. I can't help that. I created it. 

A new job means applying. It means interviews. It means strange eyes, judging eyes, critical eyes looking at my work. Looking at me. Looking, judging, criticizing. There was a point in my life when this was expected, normal. Not pleasant. I won't go that far. But I was used to it. It didn't send me into an anxious spiral that ended with me sobbing on the treadmill at 3:00 am. 

I hate myself so much. How could anyone feel any differently?

I don't know when I got so broken.

So I'm job searching. Frantically. Because I don't know if tomorrow I'll be sent home. And being unemployed is not an option for us financially.

I'm going to lose my job. No one else will hire me. Who would hire me? I'm going to fail. I'm going to fail at everything. We won't be able to pay our bills. The Mr. and I will lose our little house we bought a year ago. We'll be homeless. The Mr. will resent me, hate me, leave me. And then I'll die alone.

This is how my brain works every time I try to convince myself that maybe everything will be ok. 

Does that sound childish? Stupid? I should just suck it up, right? I should just knock it off. I should just stop. 

If you figure out how to press the STOP button, let me know. Cause my head is a dangerous labyrinth, and I'm lost.