It’s been a month since I wrote a full body of anything. I have scribbled stuff here and there and left them in some cyberspace, and I have ignored many muses. Yet I never completed any of anything. Completely captive to my obsessive thoughts and depressive nature, I feel like I have surrendered myself. My overuse of the subject “I” in this piece is bothering me already.
After a week or two of motivation, good feelings, and happiness, the sense of defeat I feel in the background, even during the week when I am supposedly “happy” and can pretend not to feel it intensifies periodically. In the middle of all this, my artificial urge for control creeps in as well, as if flushing out water could somehow rinse out the rest of me too.
Most of the time I don’t even want to move, but when I do try to spend time with the people I care about and they ask me what I’ve been doing, I’ve made a habit of answering with “nothing.” When I had a job, I used to give them the “I’m working” version of that answer and never follow it with a second sentence. When I’m with the people I care about, I turn myself into a shell and focus entirely on them. It is easier.
The moment the conversation shifts back to me, I feel discomfort and fear. I start sweating. I feel empty, and the idea of them hearing that emptiness over and over makes it seem like their view of me will change in a way that can’t be undone. It feels like, for a long time, I’ve been hiding how hollow I am, and especially now, that they are finally going to notice.
It’s something I’m used to, yet it still unsettles me: falling asleep stresses me out. In order to fall asleep, I keep my eyes on a screen until I literally can’t keep them open anymore. On the nights I don’t do that, I toss and turn in bed for hours, eyes closed, waiting to fall asleep. It doesn’t work. Melatonin is almost worse than the sleep medication I took years ago. It gives me terrifying, grotesque dreams, and cutting off caffeine after noon doesn’t help either. When I decide to read a book, I internalize and overthink each and every theme of it.
In my dreams, I’m constantly losing things. It might sound funny, but in my dreams my hair gets shorter, my belongings are stolen, my boyfriend leaves me, the new hoodie I just bought gets torn apart, my mother dies; I end up completely alone, both emotionally and materially. To avoid thinking about anything, I live with constant background noise. I feel petrified.
I’m writing this so there’s proof that, at least for now, this is honestly how it feels to be me.
The cover art is Edward J. Woolsey’s Albumen silver print of ornamental lathe turning.
