Flake

I feel as if I am getting more and more unreliable as the years go by. Every time I realize I haven't done something that I said I would do, a knife twists in my gut and I get gripped by this cold terror that I'm slipping; the act is slipping and soon everyone will know how worthless I really am in spite of how hard I have worked to hide it.

No, but listen. I avoid my friends and family. I forget to do household tasks except at times when I'm not in a position to do them. I procrastinate on assignments and person requests and end up scrambling to finish them, if I remember to do them at all. I'm not making this stuff up. It happens. These are things that I do.

But they call me "steady." "Dependable." "Reliable." I believe that I used to be. That was a long time ago. The people who know me now still think I am as functional as I was then, and maybe they cut me slack because they think I'm going through a rough patch that I will recover from. That's what I tell myself, anyway. That's what makes sense to me.

I used to make promises to myself. Sometimes I even kept them. When the sun came out, I'd look at the terrified, aching child inside me and promise her that I would do better. I would be kind to her. I would keep her safe from harm. I would give her space to breathe, to dance, to create. I'd give her permission to tell stories. God, how she loved to tell stories. But it got to the point where the shadows would close back in and I would keep none of them, none of them. She doesn't trust me anymore. I don't trust me anymore. I don't know what the tipping point was, when the balance shifted. All I know is that now the bad days outnumber the good ones. All I know is that now I spend the "good" ones paralyzed by the knowledge that soon my veins will freeze over again.

I don't keep the promises I make to myself; to tell the truth, I hardly make them anymore. It's useless. If actions speak louder than words, my words say I am worth nothing and my actions scream it. I am not even worth honoring a promise. But as I treat myself with less and less consideration, I am losing the ability to have integrity everywhere else. Out of practice.

I used to write to get the bad blood out. I used to lay it all out on the table and come away seeing things a little more clearly. It was something like this. But now I look at this and all I see is how many times the letter "I" appears in it and I want to erase them all. How dare I? As if it isn't bad enough to waste this time, these words, acting as if I am important, I have to do it on a public forum, too. I don't have to, but I am doing it anyway and that is disgusting.

These are not rational thoughts. They're what the illness puts in my head.

See, this is why I want an official diagnosis. I don't care what it looks like to you. I want an expert to tell me that I am sick so that the little nagging voice at the back of my head that tells me I am just making excuses for weakness and laziness will shut up. I know I don't experience the world the way healthy people do. The way I am constantly aware of my heartbeat. It pounds. If you touch me. If I have to speak. If I walk into a room and there are people in it. If I think of the things I need to do. If I wake up. It pounds. It pounds. It pounds.

I am not a danger to myself in the way I was last year, but I am afraid of myself just the same. I think I will wait forever. I think I will turn to stone. I think I will die waiting for someone to give me permission to live. I don't starve anymore. I don't cut. I don't bruise or deliberately deprive myself of sleep. I don't destroy the things I make because there's nothing to destroy. I don't make. I lose. I lose. I lose. The things I defined myself by are gone.

I am surrounded by people who love me and I feel so goddamn alone. I need help. I need help. I need to stop being such a whiny little brat and face reality. I need help. I don't know what I need, besides sleep. I'm tired. Everything is heavy.

Good

Upon learning the news that you’re quitting, she says it’s a shame. “There are only a few good ones,” she says. Implication: you’re one of them. “They’re all good ones,” you say, but she shakes her head. “I have different eyes than you. I’m older.”

And you wonder, you wonder whether there is anything you could say that would make her pause to think, anything you could do that would let her see your eyes as anything other than clouded by youth and naiveté, make her wonder if maybe, just maybe, the reason you’re one of the good ones is the fact that you believe they all are.

They all are.

You want to explain to her that it’s not that you don’t see what she sees. On your fifteen-minute breaks you sit alone and grieve in silence for the ignorance, the gossip, the all-too-human failure to see outside one’s own sphere, to remember the fragility of the worlds of others and how it matches one’s own. Laziness, back-stabbing, off-color jokes—It’s not that you don’t see. It’s not that you don’t know. But you think maybe she doesn’t see what you see—the young mother raising her daughter alone and never complaining, never—with word or silence—letting anyone know if it’s hard. If it hurts. Does she see the couple who lost their son treat every “bad one” as their own? Does she see the old soldiers and the young drop-outs who hide their scars in equal measure and continue because they believe with everything they can bear to have that there is a way for all this to be better? They all do what they can with what they have.

The old man with the broken arm says it’s taken him a lifetime to learn the things you know, but you know where he’s come from and it’s not about you or about him. He did what he could with what he had. Now he reads the people coming through the door and knows the words to say to make them smile; he reads in the breakroom and comes back to tell you about what he hopes will happen when he dies. He tells you to keep a smile on your heart, not your face, because it doesn’t do much good if you can’t feel it.

They’re all good ones.

I wonder if she knows about the good ones. I wonder if she knows that, for so many of us, every word and gesture, every smile is consciously selected from our extensive armories, where we’ve kept it and honed it and polished it, practiced with it over and over again to protect ourselves please god let me make them happy don’t let me fail don’t let me fall please I don’t want to hurt anyone I just want it to be okay for me to be here. I wonder whether she knows. We have to be good because anything less than that and we are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We are not sure whether we have permission to be here.

We do what we can with what we have and it is not enough, not enough, never enough and we wonder what it’s like to answer the phone without having to keep our voices from shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails without my hands shaking. I wonder what it’s like to be able to answer emails at all, to not smile at the first sign of fear or pain or confusion so that no one will know it hurts, no one believes it hurts, I wonder what it’s like to know how to say that it hurts and I am drowning. I wonder whether she knows how many of us look ahead when we’re told we have a bright future and see nothing, nothing. “With your positive attitude, I know you’ll go far,” he says, and I am a walking suit of armor with nothing inside, so I smile and say thank you.

I am one of the good ones. She doesn’t know what that means. I am one of the good ones and I have broken my own heart and blinded my own eyes to the things I don’t want to see. I am one of the good ones; I am opening my veins to water the earth in hopes that something better than me will grow—

all this good, and none of it will ever be enough.

And I am tired of writing sad things. It's time to goddamn make something again.

It Goes Like This

Now.

This is what happens now.

It’s three AM, and you’re alone. You’re tired. It’s been a long, hard fight, but the end is finally in sight. Just one last push, you tell yourself, and the sun will rise.

Now is when they take you.

You should have known that it would be like this. They wait until you’re vulnerable, and then they strike. They surround you, circling. Hello again.

Worthless.
Pathetic.
Selfish.
Weak.
A waste of time.
Of breath.
Of love.
Everyone would be better off without you.
They’d only be sad until they realized how much unnecessary space you’d taken up.

Failure.
Promise-breaker.

Coward.

Do it.
Do it.

You deserve it.
You deserve to die.

They only have to wait. Exhaustion will bring you to your knees, and then they move in. Hands at your wrists, your hips, your throat. You can’t even scream. It’s cold. Freezing

This is what happens now.

There’s a blade on your dresser. You could give them something to appease them for a while. A hurt and a failure in one—Oh, they’d love it, and then maybe they’d at least let you breathe. God knows they play with their food.

This is what happens now: you fight.

You twist. You kick. You bite. The sky’s still dark, but there are birds waking up somewhere and singing to the sun. You hear them. Damned if you can’t have faith in the invisible, too. You fight. They’re too cold to understand a heartbeat. You decide what happens now. Shadows can’t exist without a source of light somewhere. You’ve beaten them back a thousand times, and they’re still stupid enough to try again? Not a chance. Not this time, and not the next, and not in every lifetime after this. You are a warrior.

Adamantine.

This is what happens now: you win.

Sure as fall turns into winter, they’ll be back; these battles are the price of seeing spring. But now, as night turns into morning—now, you’ve won.

What do we do when we need to rant? We write, we write, we write. So let me say this as clearly as I can:

Fuck your labels. Fuck your preconceptions.

I am not a hero and I am not a saint and I am not a Sad Girl and I am not a broken doll. I am not your answer. I am not your project. I am not your savior and I am sure as hell not your responsibility. I'm another stupid human. Go to hell if you're one of the ones who's told me I'm more. I'm not more; no one is more. I am a stupid human. I'm a perpetual student. I'm the one you call at three AM.

And let's face it. You're going to call me. Every time you do, you sing the same guilty song--"I'm so sorry, I feel so bad, you have so many people's troubles on your shoulders, I feel like I'm using you"--but you're going to call me. There's no one else you would call. That's not my hubris; those are your words. You can take that guilt and put in a sack and fill that sack with stones and throw it in the sea. Watch it sink before you pick up the phone. It changes nothing.

Take a deep breath. You're not the only one. This is a crime with multiple offenders and no victim. Really. I am not your victim. I am the one who loves. You talk as if my love is something finite, as if it will run out or wear thin if I have to spread it out over too many people. Believe me, it's limitless. In the depths of my despair, when I didn't have the energy to feel anything besides a crushing need to disappear, I have still loved, and the love was honest, and the love was my strength. I am the one who loves, and that is not my weakness. That is not what hurts me, though you seem to think it is. I am the one who loves, and that is why I'm still alive, and that is why I will never give up.

A lot of you want answers, and I do, too. I want to know why it is that nothing I say seems to make any difference. I tell you I'm safe, you're not hurting me, I want you to call me, I care about you, I'm here for you-- doesn't matter, apparently, even though I'd never lie to someone who's in tears. I tell you I know you'd pick up if it was me calling you-- "But you don't call. Would you call anyone?" I am the one who never calls anyone.

Character is destiny? Fuck that. Characterization is destiny; watch yourself become what they think you are. Watch them take the pencil from your resisting hand and write a new set of vices and virtues for you to memorize as you get accustomed to where they put you. See, it doesn't matter that time is kind to the courageous and I am courageous, opening like a flower on the clock face of the seasons, opening like hands and I'm learning to reach out with them, watching the slow, certain progress of the morning glories I've trained to grow up and along my ribs. Never mind that. I'm the one who never calls anyone.

I am perpetually fascinated by how many people think they're perfectly justified--caring, even--to tell me how much I can and cannot take. I don't want to say it, but I think I have to: When you tell me my chosen course is too much for someone like me, but stop short at offering even a single alternative-- when you all but drown me in torrents of guilt for calling me, but you still do...I can't help but think that all this remorse has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you.

When It Gets Bad

I will not harm myself.

I will not provide a microphone to the stream of disparagement and abuse in my head.

I will remember that it causes others pain when I treat myself badly.

I will remember that this is temporary.

I will eat.

If I have the energy to fight, I will.

If I am unable to fight, I will at least hold my ground. I will at least not surrender.

I wonder if this is self-sabotage (you can’t fire me I quit). I wonder whether this is the antithesis of falling in love with strangers on the train. I wonder when I will fall in love with myself and stop wondering whether I deserve it—and whether this wondering will weather any storms, I can’t tell you. Not tonight.

Emergency Room

You’re twisting your hands in your lap, trying to breathe normally as you take in the blank, beige walls, the blank, beige furniture, the blank, beige floor. The cameras in all four corners. The bullet-proof metal door. This room that seems better suited to an interrogation than to healing—an observation which, when voiced, gets you a reassurance from the school nurse sitting across from you.

“They just want to make sure you’re safe.”

You nod. “I know.”

And then in bustles the interrogator herself, wheeling a computer on a stand. She greets you both and plops down next to the nurse, pushing back her long, gray hair, and assures you that this won’t take long. She has a template. You smile and nod, and give her your name and date of birth when she asks.

“So, what’s your story? Why are you here?”

You answer, as briefly as you can. You explain how much of yourself you’ve been giving away, and how, and how much of it is blood. She is brisk, brusque, sympathetic. It’s all right. She reminds you that you’re still young and you don’t know everything. You nod. You know. She reminds you that sometimes people are just looking for attention. You know. She reminds you of the limitations of the internet as a means of forming and maintaining relationships. You know, you know, you know. And then she says it.

“Someone as fragile as you are should be careful.”

Fragile.

You’re on your feet, ready to shove the word back into her mouth and down her throat to die there. “How fucking dare you? ‘Fragile’? I’m not some sad girl with bruised eyes and olive-branch wrists come here for your protection. You don’t know me. Put that down on your template. Make a space for it. I may be in pain, but I have shoulders Atlas would envy. I have hands that can push hearts back into ribcages and remind them that they’re beating. This body holds as many microcosms as yours does, and it’s been bleeding like this for six years, and I am still here. When I was a child and I cried to see other people suffer, they called me ‘fragile,’ but even then, my heart was an ocean and there were stories in my veins. I was born loving. I was born limitless. And nothing, not even I, can take that away from me. I will be scared, in pain, fighting, falling, trapped, and even lost, but don’t you dare deny my strength. Don’t you ever.”

You nod and look down at your lap, feeling your face twist itself into the familiar rueful little grimace that comes with disagreeing and being afraid to say so. “I know.”

I wonder what an artist looks like.

If I had a quarter for every time someone said it-- "You're an artist! I can tell." I met a man on the street today who tried to guess my major. "I'm thinking Art," he said, and I said, "No, I-- I'm not-- I'm not, I-I just--"

How deep the desire must be that gives rise to these stuttering denials.

That's how it is with me. You know and I know. The more I want something, the more vehemently I deny its importance to me. I'm still not sure where I learned to do that.

He said, "Hey, it's okay," holding up his hands as if he thought he had scared me. He didn't. I do, though. It's difficult, trying to carve out some sense of identity when you're not sure you have the right to one or even the right to take up any space. I'm scared of how fiercely I can want.

It's true, though, what you said. I'm real at other times, but behind the lens, or with paint on my hands and scraps of paper littering the floor, I'm awake. I feel like myself. Nothing else feeds me like that. The closest I've ever come is being with you. If I try to subsist solely on love, though, I'll drain you dry and you're too good for me to begin with.

I know, I know.

Would it break your heart to know that a lot of the time I am as certain of my own worthlessness as I am of the fact that I'll never talk about loving you in the past tense? But I think you already know it.

I'm trying. I only want the best for you. If you want me to be happy, I want that, too-- for you, for you, for you. And for myself eventually, but writing has been so hard. Lately I've been trying to write without putting myself in it because there's something telling me that no one wants to read that. Even now it's telling me that doing this is selfish and self-indulgent. A waste of my time and, more to the point, yours and everyone else's. That I should stop. So I've been trying to keep myself out of the one way I've known how to speak because no one...wants me, right? That's what it's saying, even though the best things I write are, without fail, the things in which I was the most naked.

Lucy showed us a picture of herself she'd taken, posing in the forest without a scrap of clothing on her. "That's how you have to be if you want to be an artist," she said. "Completely naked." Instead I'm trying to take myself out of the picture.

I wonder what an artist looks like. I'm sorry for everything but I would like us both to learn how not to be.

At Least I Sleep Through the Night

I dreamed we found the figure skater you told me about, and we watched her fly over the ice in an arena that was half-rink, half-stage. She was so young, younger than you'd said she was, and though she was charming, she couldn't match the adults who came after her in grace. "She won't be able to cash in on being a child much longer," I said. "She'll have to gain more skill to rely on." You nodded, sadly.

I dreamed there was a three-story house where a lonely old woman lived. It was falling down around her, but she was too frightened of her own memories to leave it. I tried to repair it for her, but my efforts only brought the walls down on us. Then he arrived, no doors to keep him out, and I learned what she had been afraid of. She told me it would do no good to fight, or to scream. I did both anyway.

I dreamed of all the gods from all the stories gathered in one place for a battle that would finish most of them. I was there, too, but they sent me away. There was no place for me there, they said. But since I couldn't go home, they made a new world for me, where I was someone else and everyone around me had the heads of animals. It wasn't what I wanted, but as the kind man with the lion head led me through shimmering curtains and candlelit tents, I remember thinking, "I could be happy here."

I dreamed the words tattooed on my wrist were disappearing one by one. I smeared my skin with ink from a blue ballpoint pen as I tried to write them in again, but I couldn't remember what they had been. Every new word I tried was wrong, and all the combinations were wrong-- God, they had been important, I knew that, but they were leaving me, leaving me, and I couldn't remember why.

Living Arrangements

It’s better to write that you want to give up than to give up.

It’s better to say “I can’t do this” than to stop trying.

It’s better to get it out. It’s better to get it out.

This exhaustion hit me like a semi. I don’t know. I don’t know. Funny how people can be so different. From themselves. Funny.

I was okay five minutes ago.

I can do this, though. Yes, I hear you, little voice at the back of my head. “Sure you can, but what’s the point? You’re not worth it. You never amount to anything even when you’re trying. Just give up. Give up. Give up. You give up on everything else, after all.”

Yeah, okay. I hear you. I also remember that we have an arrangement. You stay on your side of the line and I’ll stay on mine. No, I won’t come over. You have nothing to offer me.

Maybe I want to give up now. Just from…being tired, really. It’s an exhaustion thing. Give up and you won’t have to fight anymore. Right. But you know and I know it doesn’t really work like that, just like you know and I know that giving in to the urges doesn’t make them go away permanently, and the next time it’s easier.

Fuck you. I am not making this easy for you.

“Want,” okay. Right now. But not “ready to.” I am not ready to give up. I have too much to look forward to. You are not ruining this for me. Fuck you.

You stay on your side and I’ll stay on mine.

I’ll take time. For myself. I’ll take it from you. You watch. Maybe I’ll miss some assignments. Maybe I won’t always make it to class. Sometimes I need that. To hell with perfect grades if getting them means I have to break this semester. I’ll take what I need. I’m worth it.

Yes, I am. Yes, I am.

To everyone who's ever told me not to care about them

Don't you dare tell me you don't matter.

You matter to me. You matter to me.

And don't you say you shouldn't. Don't fucking tell me what I should and shouldn't care about. Don't you tell me what belongs in my head and in my heart. Don't even. Don't you dare.

Don't tell me your story's not worth continuing when I am hanging on every word like reading my favorite book for the first time. I am, I am. You trust me, say you believe in me, yes--then don't tell me what I'm seeing isn't real.

This ain't no hallucination, darling. I'm wearing down my fingertips, pleading myself hoarse for this. For you. For you. For you. I'm not wasting my time; don't insult me.

You want to make this about me? Let's go. If this is all about me, if this is about me being "kind" and "deserving to be happy," okay. Okay. If you just want to make sure I don't get hurt, then don't hurt me, darling. Don't. If what I want is all that matters, then treat yourself with the kindness you'd treat me. That's what I want. But don't you sit there and tell me I can't see you when your light is hurting my fucking eyes. Don't tell me I can't fall a little in love with everyone I meet. I do. I do.

Oh god, I do.

Unsent Letter #God-knows-what

Please forgive me. I’m going to let you down tonight.

See, I’m starting to get the feeling that everything I do is pointless. That I’m too weak to make any kind of a positive difference for anyone. I’ve been battering myself against too many walls these days—and I said I would stop.

I said I would come back.

I know it’s a bad night. Every night is a bad night. And I don’t say that to discount it, to write it off, to write you off… No.

But I haven’t been sleeping.

And if tonight is, in fact, the night that kills you—I will not, I think, even be able to say I should have been there. I should have stopped you. Because I couldn’t, see. Because this may be different from these other nights of ours, but also it is not. The fact that I’m here and you’re there and all I have are words you don’t believe, and you don’t even know what I look like or how close and how tightly I would hold you if I could—it’s still the same. Still our constant.

I want to help you, but I can’t. I have asked you to reach out to the ones who can. It’s on you now. I’m sorry; I know you feel like nothing should be on you, I know you feel like you can’t do anything right, but it has to be you, baby.

You have others. I see their messages, and your answers. I will just be one more. Nothing that tips a balance. Nothing, really, at all. This is not my fault. But night after night of this, and I am starting to believe that it is.

I have to be careful.

I’m sorry, but I have to be selfish. I love you, but I have to be selfish. And you, darling—You, honey, sweetheart, little one, child of mine who is not mine, my heart is breaking for you— but if you are going to be saved at all, you have to save yourself.

I hope you wake up tomorrow, to a sweeter sunrise.

I hope you wake up.