Decrying Gravity

I don't know why I don't want to go back on antidepressants. My therapist has made some pretty convincing arguments for them. And even if she's not 100% accurate, they're still steps towards possible improvement of some sort.

She took down the DSM IV last week and showed me the entry for depression. I'd read it before, of course, but looking at it this time I counted 7/9 criteria that fit me. It's literally textbook. Everything feels heavy, I'm worried and stressed all the time, my concentration/focus is suffering (I've written dozens of half-written blog entires because I can't finish any of them), nothing gives me pleasure, I'm varying degrees of suicidal, and I have been for months, if not since Governor's School last year. I am depressed, and it's clear it's beyond my control. So why don't I want medication?

Two weeks ago, I decided to stop taunting myself and take some definitive steps towards suicide. I mean, what's the point in always thinking about it and never doing it? And it was Fate laughing when I walked into Party City and the very first thing in front of the door was a stack of helium cannisters just like the ones I'd researched online. I bought one. Just $38 [the ones online were $50].

It's interesting, because Exit International argues that their tools will decrease suicides since they give individuals a feeling of control. And it's honestly worked. I've rarely thought of suicide since. I'm not as tormented or afraid. I'm just... heavy.

The heaviness is strange, too. It's not so much all movement; I spend most of my day pacing and thinking, after all. But when I'm lying down, it's like my limbs and body weigh so much more. It takes so much more to lift, an act of violence to get up, a dizzying array of half-woken retreats into exhaustion to gradually rise out of bed on days when I don't have another reason to get up. It's all just so heavy.

I could go on with symptoms. And, truly, it's not an easy period. I go over and over and over the scenarios that might play out with S when/if she comes back later this summer. The roulette poem does a surprisingly good job of illustrating the more realistic ones. But even then, I think it'll be better than this constant subliminal terror.

Because, truly, I've been gutted these past seven months. I've lost much of my empathy, my patience, my compassion. I don't care as much, don't feel as much, am so wrapped up inside myself consumed by her and the energy it takes to survive the weight [so to speak]. I have poured myself into this survival, and it's a feat that will quite likely not be reciprocated. It seems clear she's been broken. That in the significantly increased stress she faced, she found us severed. And while that is not an irreparable rift, she likely doesn't have the energy or will to try to repair it. I am waiting for a corpse. And even I cannot breathe life back into something that refuses, that needs to not live.

I am so hungry for intimacy. I want to try my body out, I want to enjoy physicality, I want to finally let someone inside me and let them see and touch and feel all of the knotted anguish I've kept ensconced for years. And I can cry and hurt and ache and let their touch and eyes show me that, truly, I am not the monster I have led myself to believe.

But, right now, she's only one who could come in. The only one who knows the way, has the key, could manage, endure, or desire it. And the fact that she is dead makes tragic an already desolate narrative. I am finally ready to open myself. But all I'd really be opening myself to is more vacant suffering. I guess I'd call that ironic.

Maybe that's why I don't want to go on medication. Because I feel, finally, so close to healing. I feel so close to breaking out of this dusky malaise and finally living in the brilliance I know life must be capable of. What's another month and a half to see if I'm wrong? The darkness will still be there to “fix” and “balance” when she's gone.

"When people stop being people, violence stops being tragic and starts to become the best means to any end."

That's it. That's the problem. That's my problem. For the duration of my life, I have not considered myself human.

It's why I can't talk about my needs.

It's why I live through others.

It's why I endure so much and never genuinely consider stopping because I can handle it, I can handle anything. I don't have weakness or need. My fallibility is entirely remediable and only exists because I am not good enough.

It's why I want people to use me, to hurt me, to disregard me.

It's why I don't judge myself by the same rules I judge others.

I am not people. And therefore violence done to my person is inconsequential, is acceptable, is necessary.

So it's pretty clear: I need to figure out how to accept myself as human, and all that entails. I guess I'd better get to work.

A response to this:

I'm drawn to so much of this blog because of that premise; that people are people and that, but for the grace of God go I in any given case.

But it's also what I use to try and forgive myself. When I look at people and systems and say "this is larger than one person," when people do terrible things and we can find a way to not utterly damn them, not reject them entirely, not leave them, it gives me hope for myself.

It's also an attitude I've had to cultivate. That request by Osama resonated with me, and, unsurprisingly, I went back to my own father. When he told me I couldn't come out to his parents, that I would either need to never see them again (and have them blame me for it), live a dehumanizing lie, or face the wrath of the one person who melts me into incoherent terror, when he says "They're *my* parents and I'm going to do what's best for them" as if I'm not his child, as if I'm not anything but a threat, I see the fixation.

He can't grok the terror he invokes, can't understand how telling a six year old "No, you don't love me" makes the child believe it's their fault they're not trying hard enough. Etcetera. We were not people but burdens, responsibilities, limitations. We were threats. And that is all the justification a person needs.

I am terrified of "going cold." That coldness is what allows that destruction, what allows people to stop seeing humanity and instead see enemies, see threats, see things to be feared, tossed aside, destroyed. I see in Osama's request that same coldness that is in the celebration of his death.

When people stop being people, violence stops being tragic and starts to become the best means to any end. Even when it starts so small. "Dangerous" only begins to describe it.