I'm Doing Just Fine

"It's okay, you don't need to worry about me," I lie through my teeth and I swallow the screams.  I tell them not to worry but I'm worried, I'm scared, I'm coming apart at the seams.

"I'm doing just fine," I tell them when they ask but the words burn my tongue.  Fine is a lie, fine is a myth, fine is a long way off and I wouldn't know it even if I felt it because it's been so long since I've really been fine.

"Everything's great," but nothing is great and I'm falling apart.  The weight of each morning crushes down and the chorus of my sick and broken brain sings lonely, stuck, worthless over and over until I can't see straight.

"I'm just tired today," but tired of what I don't tell them.  No, don't tell them you're tired of waking and tired of breathing and tired of lying through your teeth.

Everything in me hurts but I push a smile that stings my eyes onto my face and I lie through my teeth and people smile back because I haven't slowed them down.  Because if I told them the truth they wouldn't know what to say.  Because when they ask how you are they don't want to know- not really- they want the civil answer, the easy answer, the one that requires nothing from them.  Because when they ask it's out of politeness not of caring and I'm so tired of fighting with myself I can't bear to fight with them, not over this, not over me.  So yes I'm doing just fine and everything's great and I'm just a little tired today.

Let it Take Me

Change comes barreling down the tracks and I dig my heels in.

I will stand here, I will wait for it to hit, but I will not move.

I cannot move.

I am paralyzed with fear and the bright lights of new dawn come towards me ever faster.

I fall down the rabbit hole of memories and I ache for something familiar, even if it hurts.

I reach back in time, grasping at something long gone just to feel the comfort of the familiar against my skin.

At least the things that scarred me left their marks behind so I can trace them when the world changes a little too fast for me.

Maybe that's the sickness inside me; the wanting of the things that hurt me just because I'm familiar with the pain.

Maybe I should let go of that and open my arms wide so change can sweep me up and away.

But I don't know how.  

So instead, I see the train coming and I plant my feet on the tracks and I stand still. 

Let the change plow me down.

Let it destroy me.

I am familiar with destruction.

I am familiar with the feeling of being overrun with pain.

Let it take me.

Living Grave

 There is a kind of grief that no one prepares you for.  It is grief not found in the solemn pews of a funeral home or the quiet agony of a cemetery.  It is grief that finds no resolution over time, but instead sleeps, silent under the skin until it wakes and bites deep and hard before falling asleep again and leaving you aching.

It is grief that finds me when I look into the mirror and don't recognize the eyes that look back at me.  It is a grief that mourns a girl, lost to time and pain, a girl whose body didn't die but keep on going long after the spirit of her was snuffed out.

There is grief that sinks its teeth into me like a panther and reminds me of the girl I used to be; the girl who died.  I mourn the loss of innocence and youth I used to be filled to the brim with until I was spilled out on the ground.  I ache for the loss of the girl who saw the world through pastel hazes like her eyes were made of stained glass.  I cry for the girl that no one in my life now had the chance to know.  I cry alone for myself and who I used to be.

The grief that swallows me whole, unannounced and inconsiderate is one that I never prepared for in all my loss.  It is inescapable and raw as I look in the mirror and behold a stranger.  I miss her, I realize now, I miss the naive girl who believed in magic and had a dangerous faith in everyone she knew.  I miss her, her bright eyes and wild laugh, and unburdened spirit.  

Life teaches you to grieve the people you lose, but what I never accounted for was being among those people myself.  How do you grieve yourself and live in the same skin after the person inside has died and gone?  How do you mourn a spirit of the past while trying to raise a new one?  How do you bridge the gap between who you once were, who you lost, and who you've found?  I don't know.  

I don't know so I weep at the sight of empty, strange eyes in the mirror and I cringe away from the foreign voice spilling out of my own mouth.  I don't know how to lay her to rest, that girl I thought I'd be so sometimes I read her favorite books and sing her songs and try to catch her ghost for a moment.  I read her diaries and smile as tears blur the lines written big and wild and in vivid colors that bring the stories to life.  I close my eyes and wish she'd come back to life, if only for a moment to help me catch a breath.  She breathed so easily, I remember now, breathed free and careless like life belonged to her.  If only I could remember how to breathe like that.  If only this useless body could remember for a moment how to live like it used to when she was pulling the strings.  Instead, I have a new soul trapped in this discarded corpse of a body that so often feels like it doesn't belong to me.  No, it belongs to her;  to the girl that died.  To the girl they killed.  To the girl who deserved to live.  To the girl I lost.  

So instead I live clumsy and unsettled in the skin that doesn't feel quite right and I grieve her, I grieve and mourn myself.  I am a grave unto myself, a grave no one visits.  I am a living mausoleum free of flowers or condolences save for the grief that resides in my chest and roars so loudly it shakes these stolen bones.

Person Made of Words

 I am a person made of words.  

Phrases stitch my limbs together.  Stories fill my head like flowers fill a vase.  Words are etched into my bones and I fear what secrets my body might betray if I let someone x-ray me, for all the words seem housed there in the marrow.

I am a person made of words and he leaves me empty every time our eyes meet.

Sentiments dry up on my lips and I swallow thorns when I see him.  It is a waking nightmare.  It feels like the stringy sinews of my muscles being pulled out one by one.  The world feels far away and as he speaks, the words evaporate out of my skin and my mouth and my bones and I am left hollow.  I sit for weeks wondering who I used to be.

I am a person made of words and he takes them all for himself, like he always has, like he does everything else.

I see him and I try to talk myself off the ledge, hold my breath, don't spin out.  But the spinning has begun already and I am too late to stop the catastrophe.  What is a bird without wings?  The ocean without waves?  The sun without heat and light?  What am I without the things that piece me together and make me real?  Worthless?  Alone?  Empty?  Quiet?  Haunted?  Whatever it is, it is what I am with him.  

I am a person made of words and I have none when he sits down beside me like he's done nothing wrong, like he belongs there, like I belong to him.

The words I prepared for years, for this moment exactly, shrivel up to dust and I have to swallow hard not to choke on what they used to be.  Soft civility comes out instead, muted and weak the way everything feels when he comes into a room and takes up all of the space and all of the oxygen and all of the words.  He asks questions and in a daze, I answer them gently as I feel my heartbeat slow to a dangerous lull.  If he keeps talking, I'll cease to exist.  And I die softly, gently, lonely, when he shows me the wedding band on his finger and when his wife walks in and they walk out hand in hand and he leaves me once again.

I am a person made of words and they fail me.  

He sucks the life from me, the words from me, the strength from me.  He takes everything I have, everything I am, everything I need, and he absorbs it to make himself more.  As if he needs more.  As if he isn't the center of the gravitational pull of the planet, as if I haven't died a thousand times wondering why he left me alone, as if he doesn't own everything he puts his eyes on.  He takes, and takes, and takes and he can have it all because he kills whatever tries to exist beside him.  He is the weed choking out the flowers in the garden.  He takes all the oxygen and when I look at him, I am at a loss for the words that keep me alive and he does it all with a smile. 

I am a person made of words and he is a plagiarizer.  

He is a thief and all the words he has from our time together are poison that still runs in my veins, killing me a little at a time.  He continues to exist by snuffing me out and he doesn't care that it will take me months to heal from the last five minutes we spent together.  He doesn't care that I have spent five years healing from the five months I truly knew him.  He doesn't care that my most sincere wish is that I had never met him at all. 

Mental Illness and Faith

Mental illness and faith are hard to reconcile.  They feel like two of the biggest things that make me who I am.  My mental illness is my battle of a lifetime, it's the thing I can't get rid of no matter how I change my hair or my clothes or my face.  My faith is who I am, inside and out.  The two stand in opposition, they grapple and fight and I am taken between them and tossed wherever they go.

When I am depressed, I'm hopeless.  I'm turned inside out with exhaustion and breathing feels too hard.  My hopelessness, however, doesn't extend to my faith.  I know that my God is on my side always, I know my salvation is firm, I know my final destination.  But the thing that trips me up is that the hope I have in Christ does not cancel out or lessen my depression.  I can lay in bed sobbing, heartbroken and exhausted and also know that God loves me.  Sometimes when people hear what I'm going through, they seem to think that if I'd just pray more my depression would go away.  As if I don't lay in bed sobbing, gasping for air, screaming in my heart for God to fix me, begging for relief, aching with fervent prayer for a reprieve?  Being clinically depressed is not the same as being in the darkness without God.  Being clinically depressed while also trusting in Christ's salvation is sitting in the darkness, unmoving, broken, with Jesus's arms around me while I fight through the side effects of a sick mind.  In my experience, when I ask God to help me with my depression, God has not taken a Mr. Clean eraser to my brain and cured me.  He has, instead, lead me through prayer and supplication to open conversations with my parents, to therapy, to working myself into healthier mindsets.  When I talk to people who tell me I need 'to give it to God,' I get discouraged.  As if I didn't think of that?  As if I haven't already?  As if that wasn't my first line of defense?  As if I would be 'cured' if I just had a little more faith?  No.  People who say that are people who don't understand what I'm going through.  People who say that fail to see that God has already got it, already provided for me, already helped me even though he didn't 'cure' me.

Anxiety is hard to reconcile with faith.  How can my Creator, who sent his Son to die for me let me feel so worthless for so long?  Does he forget about me?  Has he left me?  Does he even care?  These are questions I ask about everyone in my life.  Questions my sick, tired brain asks about my parents, my best friends, my most cherished people.  And my sickness extends outward and asks the same questions of God.  It confuses me, and it makes me feel like I'm weak in my faith even though I know it's not my rational brain who's asking.  My rational brain says that God looked down through time and ordained the exact circumstances that lead to my birth because I am worthy, because I am loved, because I am His.  My rational brain knows that God knows me, personally, individually, and he has plans for me.  My rational brain knows that God promises he will never leave me or forsake me.  And yet, my rational brain is not always in control. My anxiety often makes me feel like a fake when I sit in a church pew where I should feel most at home and can barely sit still because anxiety is eating me up telling me that no one wants me there, that I am in the way, that I am nothing.  I stand between God's people-my family-and I feel nothing but judgement that my brain has convinced me lurks in their eyes and their words even though I know better, even though they would hold me and weep if they knew what my brain was saying about me.

Sometimes, my fellow Christians are the ones who misunderstand my illness the most.  They know that I have the insurmountable joy of God and the peace of Jesus living in me and they can't understand why that isn't enough to make me feel better.  Honestly, I can't understand sometimes either.  When the darkness takes over, when I've spent my days counting in eights to keep my mind busy and popping my fingers to keep my hand busy and taking measured breaths to stay on my feet, I wonder why I don't have the "peace" that everyone else seems to have.  The reality though is that I do, my peace just looks a little different in the scope of my anxiety and depression.  My peace is my therapist that makes me feel incredibly safe and helps me learn how to deal with my illness.  My peace came in the form of parents that didn't bat an eye when I told them I was sinking and needed help; they just said "whatever it takes to get you feeling better."  My peace comes in the form of friends God strategically placed in my life who prove time and time again that my anxious shutdowns will not scare them away and who reassure me of their love as often as I need.  Sometimes they tell me 'just listen to God' like I've been ignoring him all my life and he's been saying "feel better" the whole time.  I have listened to God, I have followed his leading.  His hand in my healing wasn't an instantaneous cure.  It is an ongoing process of trusting him while retraining my brain and clinging to him while relearning what life should look like.

Mental illness and faith can coexist.  They DO coexist.  It's not pretty.  It's complicated.  It's something I never see or hear talked about and it's something I have such a personal connection with.  I guess that's why I'm here, writing this.  I believe that God looked at my life, knew the battles I'd face, and gave me this outlet as a way to help people.  I have the chance here to educate people who don't fight these battles on how to talk to me, how to help me, how to understand me.  Even if only one person reads this and realizes something new, that's enough.  

I also have the chance here to talk to my brothers and sisters in Christ who have these same struggles and let them know: your fight with anxiety or depression or any other mental illness doesn't make you any less of a Christian.  Your fight doesn't mean you've failed your faith and it doesn't mean God has abandoned you.  He chose us to exist.  He looked at His creation and decided that it needed you and me.  We are not accidents, we are not extras, we are not by-products.  We are Creations of the most high King who holds time in His hand and calls the stars by name.  We might have been chosen to fight some of the hardest battles, but we are not a forgotten regime left to fight and die.  

We are known.  We are seen.  We are valuable.  We are not alone.  

I am known.  I am seen.  I am valuable.  I am not alone.

The Dragon and The Smoke

I am used to the monster that lives curled in my chest.  She claws at my throat when I try to speak.  She wraps her tail around my lungs and squeezes until I cannot breathe.  She constricts and screams and cuts.  She is a dragon, furious and dangerous and she lives inside of me and she has for as long as I can remember.  They call her different names: Stress.  Fear.  Worry.  Their names are too soft, too trivial, too weak.  I know the true nature of the beast and I call her something else.  I call her Anxiety.  I call her evil.  Demon.  Monster.  Pain.  No matter what I call her, she curls up beneath my sternum and she feeds.  She feeds on every skipped heartbeat, every uncomfortable silence, every unkind word that comes to my ear.  She feeds on the toxic sludge that has been poured over me time and time again.  She is strong.  She crushes bones, she swallows common sense, she ignites the air until all that is left for my lungs is fire and toxic smoke.  I have lived with the monster in my chest for so long, I no longer try to rip her from her home between my ribs.  She tears at my flesh and makes every moment feel like I am bleeding.  I live with a dragon in my chest.

There is a new monster now, that puts the dragon to sleep.  There is a new monster that is stronger, more dangerous, more evil than Anxiety could ever be.  He is dark-made of smog and gas and something intangible.  He settles into the joints of my limbs and slips into my tear ducts until they ache and itch and sting.  He is not loud like the dragon.  He is soft, persistent, inescapable.  He is stronger than the dragon, stronger than me.  They call him sadness.  Grief.  Loneliness.  They do not know the depths of his empty eyes.  I have seen into the abyss and I call him Depression.  He is not my friend, he does not want good for me, he does not want me to survive.  This new monster puffed in the face of the dragon and she fell asleep, too tired to fight-to claw-to climb.  She sits like a rock in my chest while the new monster grabs me by the throat and whispers horrors in my mind.  He binds my hands and lays me down and tells me not to get back up.  He tells me not to eat and not to try and not to care.  He tells me life is not worth living and I listen.  He is so convincing.  When I try to argue, he puts his heel on my windpipe until the edges of my vision fade to black.  Sleep is so much easier than fighting.  He makes every moment feel like I am coming apart at the seam where my soul meets my mind and darkness becomes a familiar escape.  I live with smoke in my head.

They like to fight, the monsters inside of me; the dragon and the smoke.  When the dragon wins, my senses are on overload.  I see danger in every corner and resting for even a second might mean death.  When the smoke wins, I am dead on my feet.  I cannot see straight, and breathing is exhausting.  The monsters inside of me; the dragon and the smoke, they like to dance.  They work together to wear me down.  The dragon fans the flames and spins me faster, faster, like a top until I launch into the sky.  She relishes my scream, my panic as I fly, my inability to stop, my lack of control.  The smoke overtakes me and stops me instantly and I fall like a stone back to earth.  He relishes my impact, my blackout, the ache of my breathing that feels like too much work.

I wonder, how long can one human be tossed between monsters before the body fails and the lungs give out?  I wonder, how long can I last in the clutches of these evil things inside of me?  I wonder what will win; the dragon or the smoke?

Forbidden Daydream

I tend to live in extremes.  I love hard, with all of my hope and my heart and my head.  When I get hurt, the wound is deep and it takes years for the scars to start to form.  Even after something has scabbed over, all it takes is the slightest touch to tear me open again.  When someone loses my trust, I turn my back and run as far in the opposite direction as I can.  And when I get away, I take a few breaths and then I run a little farther just for good measure.  When someone brings me joy, I set them on a pedestal and I crown them victor and they get a golden badge engraved with kind sentiments and I throw all of my love into them at full force.

It's hard to live like that.  It's hard to make your way in a world that is so angry and apathetic and aggressive when every slight feels like a sword to the side.  It's hard to keep your eyes open when everything is so bright that your eyes sting and smoke rolls in so fast that it makes you blind and chokes you in a second.

There was one ledge I never allowed myself to fall over.  I built a wall at the edge of the cliff, three layers deep and tied a rope around my waist and anchored it to the thickest tree stump I could find.  I sat with my eyes on the sky and tried to keep my attention away from the one place I knew I couldn't go.  I let the world distract me and keep my mind busy.  

But years of boredom and abandonment wore the rope around me thin and a few months ago, the last tired thread snapped.  There was a freedom that I never knew I wanted and all the sudden all I could see was the wall in front of me.  I stepped across the space and I stepped up to the wall and I pushed.  And he said all the right things and the wall started to crumble.  It only took a few minutes for the wall to turn to dust and I walked right through the wreckage and stared down into the abyss that I tried to save myself from for so long.  Because loving him is a disaster in the making.  Because falling for him will never turn out right.  Because he's the best thing I've ever known and it's bound to break me.

In the ravine at the bottom of the fall was his smile and the way his laughter always sounded like it was surprised out of him.  In the ravine was the one person I said I'd never fall for.  And then I stepped over the cliff with my arms stretched out wide and let the world go as I fell.

Maybe it was all the years between us that made it feel safer.  Maybe it was all the miles that built up between us.  Maybe it was the kind words that caught my attention and pulled me in.  I don't know.  All I know is that I stepped over the cliff and I crashed into the river at the bottom and I didn't even feel the impact.  And the daydream I never let myself slip into swallowed me whole.

Now all my bones are broken and I don't feel it.  Now all the blood is rushing from my hands and my arms and my heart and the water around me is red and all I can see is the sundrenched sky color of his eyes.  Now all I can hear is his voice, even though I almost don't remember what it sounds like anymore.  Now, I've broken the last rule and I'm floating in a daydream that isn't real and it's the only thing keeping me going sometimes.  Now, it's the only thing comforting all the pain and easing me to sleep when the nights are long and cold and dark.  And it's not even real.  But it helps me forget everything else, and that's all I really want anyway.

Another Letter I'll Never Send (#6)

 Dear ******,

This isn't the first letter I've written to you.  This isn't the first time I've had so many things to say that I needed to release it all just to keep on going.  I have so many things I want to say to you.  So many questions, so many angry rants, so many exhausted pleas.  Today has been so difficult and I'm mad at myself for how often I wished I could see you today.

Part of me wishes I could celebrate my new project with you.  For a time, you were the only person I trusted with my art.  I want to show you what I've got in the works and tell you what I have planned and get your ideas because they always stunned me with their originality.  And yet, for years I couldn't write a word because you stole the joy from it.  You took it from me and it's taken so much time to get it back, to water the seeds, to coax the joy back out.  I don't know if I'll ever trust anyone with that part of me again because of what you did to me.  That's something I want to scream at you about.  That's something that has been so difficult for me to forgive.  That's something I don't know how to get over.  Because you said that it was sacred to you the way it was to me and then you betrayed it...and me.

I want to forgive you and start fresh.  I want to believe that you had such a good reason, that you've been trying so hard to get back to me and you have this spectacular apology planned.  I want to believe the best in you.  I want to believe in who I thought you were.  

And then there's the stupid part of me that just wants to forget it all and hug you.  I just want to call it the past and let you back in.  But it's like a movie where I keep looking out the window, waiting for you to drive up and day after day I'm left disappointed.

Today I've gone through the full spectrum of my feelings towards you.  I was mad at you this morning.  I was afraid to see you this afternoon.  Tonight I've wanted to ask you a thousand questions and then wanted you to tell me everything will be okay.  If you had asked me back then, in that coffee shop where we would be today...I could've made a lot of guesses.  The reality is not one of them though, and that is what hurts me more than the rest of this mess we've become.

Forever Conflicted, 

M

A Page From His Book

 He has such a hard time letting go. 

He can't let go of the past.  He can't let go of his problems.  He can't let go of things that are already gone.

But he's very good at letting go of me.

So I'm taking a page out of his book and I'm letting go too.

I'm letting go of his sweet, empty words.  I'm letting go of the memories of us that turn my stomach in equal parts of revulsion and regret.  I'm letting go of the hope that he might become the man I hoped him to be.

He's so good at holding on.

He holds on to people, but not to me.  He holds on to moments, but not ours.  He holds on to feelings, but not mine.

So I'm taking a page out of his book and I'm holding on too.

I'm holding on to things that take my mind off of him.  I'm holding on to things that make me happy, but not him.  I'm holding on to myself because some one has to.

He's got hands that seem to hold so much, and yet he lets me slip away despite the way he says he feels.

I've spent my whole life trying to hold on to things that are being dragged away from me.  I've got scars on my heart and my soul and my hands from holding on too tightly to things I wasn't meant to have.  I guess he's just one more thing I have to learn to let go of.

Another Letter I'll Never Send (#5)

 Dear ******,

It's been so long since I've seen you, I don't know if you'd recognize the person I've become.  Sometimes I wonder if you'd been here through the last few years, would I be where I am now?  Would the hurt have been less?  Or would it be more?

I saw you once at a baseball game.  And I kind of wanted to throw up.  And I kind of wanted to call your name.  Instead, I put on a baseball cap and stared at the floor until you were gone because I couldn't breathe.  So much of who I used to be was tied up in you.  So much of what I imagined my future would look like was molded around you.  It's strange, to me at least, to pull apart that future.  To strip all of my plans down and separate out the reality from the dream.  It's strange, even still, to have to rip you out like a weed.  It's odd to me that even now, you were in my life longer than you've been out.  That when I look at my collection of years on this earth, I've still spent more of them at your side than by myself.  But the clock is ticking and the time is counting down.  Soon, I'll be more of myself and less of you.  That's odd to me too.  That one day soon I'll have lived without you longer than I did with you.  It's a sadder thought than I'd imagined it might be.

I normally have a point to these letters but I fear I don't know what I'm trying to say but that never mattered to you.  You always let me talk without needing a big reason.  That's what we did for each other.  That's what best friends do.  Looking back on it now, I don't know that we ever stood a chance.  Things seemed poised to fall apart one way or another.  And while I miss the joy we had when we were together, I don't really miss you.  But I do miss having someone who knew me as well as you did.  I've tried in your absence to open up to other people, but the thing I had with you is something I don't think I'll ever get back.  It's something I don't think I can do again.  Not after losing you.  Not after growing up.

Sometimes, when I have really bad days, I think of you.  And I almost want to call.  Sometimes, when I have really good days, you cross my mind.  And I think of how you would've celebrated with me back then.  But the reality is that I don't have a number to call.  And I don't actually want one.  I guess my nostalgia just creeps in and stabs me every once in a while.  And I guess that's what I wonder about you: do you ever just think about me?  Even for a second?

I'm old enough now to know that we're both healthier when our worlds don't intersect.  I'm okay with that now.  It's just moments like these when I feel like I'm standing on a mountain looking down at where I've been and out at where I'm going that I think of you.  And I hope that even if it's only for a second, sometimes, you think of me too.

-M