Everyone saves themselves differently. For me, it sometimes looks like lavender candles and fingers typing out words in hopes that someday I’ll read something that tells me who I am. A lot of the time it’s escapism. Losing touch with reality is very comfortable and very familiar. Sometimes it feels like having such control over your body that with concentration on breaths you can press harder…Just so the hurt bubbles and doesn’t pour. The sensation is felt in different places and depends on how fucked up you are. And if it still hurts the next day, you get butterflies.

The first time I understood the concept of saving someone I was seven years old. A little boy had told me he didn’t want to live anymore. That’s the first time I remember feeling trapped by an admission. This followed me around.

My little saviours have changed. For a year it was sleep. Many times it’s been sex. Once it was love. For the longest it has been dissociative. When your head is in the clouds and the thoughts race so quickly it feels like you don’t have any…that’s where I’m most comfortable. i guess that’s the theme in all of this: comfort.

The next admission came over the phone. It was a girl whose pain I wished I could love away. I remember the hysterical cries of her screaming on the other line and I’ve never driven so fast to get to someone before. It was like she wasn’t in my world anymore, her mind in a cycle she couldn’t control. These episodes then became contained in a library. Just the two of us, between the shelves no one wandered through. That’s how she saved herself when we were sixteen.

Each time you move after a night like this, the pain reminds you that you’re alive…because what is it to be alive other than to be in pain? By nature, we measure life by pain and lack thereof. Starvation is pain; dehydration, love, grief, desertion, birth, heartbreak, illness, dying, exhaustion, disappointment. They all lead to us knowing we exist. And that is how coping morphs into habit. It reduces you to human nature. It reminds me that I exist.

Seventeen: a nice guy tried to get ahold of me past midnight. 80 messages and multiple phone calls. I woke up to a buzzing floor and he had been taken to hospital. I saw the messages in the morning. The butterfly effect of this event i wouldn’t realize until years later.

It’s almost physical the way I feel myself losing touch with reality. Maybe I was born sensitive. A “disposition”. It’s like getting high. You can feel your immunity to your surroundings deepening until the surroundings are barely there anymore. And then, you’re brought back. This is the ebb and flow of a spiral. And it’s how it’s so easy to end up here.

Eighteen: A girl messaged me saying she wanted to die. That was the first time I had to call 911. I didn’t know where she lived and it took time for them to find her. She ended up being okay.

As you get higher, don’t become a voyeur. You are only meant to float, not abandon.

It’s like masturbation really. You know you probably shouldn’t, but the temptation feels inevitable. And the higher you get, the better it is.

The epitome of control is learning how to hurt yourself only in ways that bring you back to the world. The weed has your head going up, while the spiral brings you down. But this brings you into the present.

Twenty-one: The world shut down. Some people were forgotten about more than others. Our friend jumped into the river and was missing for 6 days. The river we had swam in and laughed around became a site of memorial.

At the end of the day, there is no one way to save a life. It is a process made up of multiple loves, a hundred smiles, a thousand touches, a million steps, and a whole lot of us being there for each other.

The coping I do by myself is bolstered by the ways people bring me down from the clouds or up from the depths. Having a mind made up of pathways where spiralling feels inevitable is tiring. But you find solace in what you can. And when you can’t, you find ways of pushing through that too.

Sometimes I think about the difference between pride and self-respect. I’ve always thought the only difference between the two is a lack of audience.
For two and a half years I’ve been trying to find a sense of self. I’ve written before about how this has never come naturally to me, but with a life full of distractions, it never bothered me much. When it eventually did, I tried everything to brand myself. I finished university and got a job in my field, figured out my sexuality (more or less), lost and gained friends, moved to another country, started from scratch. But when you live as a reaction to everything around you, you realize you cease to exist when not in relation to something else. If no one is around to hear the falling tree…does it make a sound?
I don’t know how to exist without other people. I don’t know what is too much or too little for me. I will always be talked down in an argument because when there is conflict, it means they are wrong about me. And the version I am with them can’t be called into question.
I’d rather swallow my hurt and let life happen to me, than to watch someone walk away. And that is not pride, nor self-respect. It is an absence of both. I grieve their idea of me more than grieving them.
I want someone to teach me where the line is. If you leave someone because you’re embarrassed to be known to stay with someone like them, is that self-respect, or pride? When does it change from doing it for the onlookers, to doing it for yourself? If no one knows what has happened between you, no one can tell you to get out.
By nature, someone exists on the necessity of an other existing as well. Someone embodies specific qualities that are valued because other people do not possess these. If the other disappears…what is the essence of the someone? If everything I do is reactionary, how do I exist without the other? How do I become firmly planted in who I am, enough for someone to be supplemental to me, and not my other half?

tw: sexual assault

Sometimes I feel like I’m out of my mind. I don’t write anymore because I don’t have lessons or stories with happy endings lately. As I put my thoughts down, I edit out a lot of what I actually feel so the words are easier to digest. For whoever the fuck even reads this stuff.

“I feel like a deeply fragmented person”. To say I feel like a person is a stretch itself.

That’s what I answered when a psychiatrist on a screen asked me what the “main issue” of our meeting was. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to explain to a stranger that I have no concept of myself; that I never have. Or that the “traumatic experience” she reads about in the file she got from my doctor isn’t the one that affects me so much anymore. And the only reason I told my doctor about my (non-consensual) “virginity” experience was because I was begging her for a referral to a therapist, and me being depressed simply wasn’t enough to warrant one. Talking to the psychiatrist recently, I thought about how it was a similar but worse experience two years later that I’ve not once ran through in my head since it happened, because repressing it is better than feeling it all at once.

I either feel everything at once, or I feel nothing at all. That isn’t to say I’m incapable of feeling things that exist between polarities. But the way I think about things – particularly how I exist and how I relate to the world, is either obsessive or indifferent. 

I guess I think about when I was raped as both – with obsession and indifference simultaneously. It isn’t lost on me that “indifference” in the way I’m using it now, is actually repression. A coping mechanism. I’ve heard and learned about a ton of stuff to do with PTSD. I know the fact I’m writing about the 28-year-old scumbag shows you my feelings towards him and what he did do not consist of indifference. But in the two and a half years since that happened, I’ve not once explored my feelings around what he did, what I did, what I didn’t do. That’s probably the issue.

When I say I don’t really feel like a person, I am aware that seems like a really far-out concept. When I’m okay, I don’t remember what it’s like to not feel like I exist. And this isn’t the presence of the feeling of I don’t exist…It is the absence of the feeling that I do exist.  I don’t have the yearning to not exist, because I don’t feel the weight of existence enough for that. That’s what I mean when I say I either feel everything – my world perpetually crumbling around me – or nothing – numbness, lack of existence. That sort of stuff. And that sounds pretty cynical. I do live a life which includes great friends, jobs I enjoy, an amazing family, things that are supplemental to inner feelings of happiness I simply don’t possess. I think I’ve always been a little bit broken. I don’t find joy in things others do. A problem in affect is how I see it.

I used to not write about these feelings because I didn’t want anyone to know my inner workings. But now, I really feel like I have nothing to lose. The past few years of my life have been fucking hard. I have a lot of stories I’ve rarely spoken about, experiences I wish I’d grown up without, and I’ve lost relationships in the past year I thought I never would. It’s impossible to separate the decline in my mental health from the natural progression of adulthood. Relationships change, your brain develops, your world is made larger by education, both formal, and the times when life teaches you the hardest lessons. But the theme in the past couple years is how significantly I have lost myself. I guess that’s why I’m writing now. I want to be a self. I want to know who I am, and be able to exist in life with real happiness that isn’t fleeting, dependent, or flawed. I’ve been without that for too long. 

I’m sorry this doesn’t have a positive ending, but I just don’t have one for this. I’m just getting out my thoughts, and maybe some people can relate to what I feel. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s better on paper than floating around in my head.