precarious

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in which kendrick explains my mindset

                                                                Dude also gets me.

"I am a sinner who's probably gonna sin again
Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me
Things I don't understand
Sometimes I need to be alone..."
-Kendrick Lamar, Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe 

sanity log #3 (James Blake lyrics ensue)

My standard of life has reconfigured itself again.

In a stomach-tossing turn of events, happiness and self-love have become the norm.

It's the difference between writing on a frost white board with a black marker and writing on a midnight black board with milky chalk.

It's the reality that's changed.

Oh God, I can't believe the delusion I've been swimming in for the past few years.

Whenever I felt happy, it was temporary. And I knew it was temporary when I experienced it, knowing that depression was the center of my gravity. Perversely, depression became magnetic to me, eventually even cozy, a dark, warm, numb center of reality I could disappear in.

If I crashed down from happiness, it wasn't with the knowledge that I had to climb out of it. I convinced myself that I deserved it, tracing the patterns and mistakes of my past and somehow ruling myself to a life sentence of self-harm.

Not in the conventionally conceived way of self-harm. My scars were dark half moons under my eyes, self-imposed sleep deprivation, food deprivation, exercise deprivation. I stopped myself from excelling in school, from letting go of my inhibitions in social situations, from getting close to people. I didn't believe myself to be worth it. There was no tangible target for losing my friends in the past year, so I attacked myself. Like the Stars song, or like a strange inverse St. Ignatius, when there's nothing left to burn, you set yourself on fire.

Even amid the darkness of my psyche, I was prevented from falling completely from grace, because there were always present pinpricks of light. My family. My friends. Faculty at my college who supported me. Unseen friends from far away who supported me.

And there were always books. I have an entire adopted family that I owe so much of my wisdom and perspective to. Maya Angelou is my grandmother, John Steinbeck my grandfather, Alice Hoffman my mother, and Chuck Palahniuk my father.

Without them, and so many others, I'm not sure if I could have seen anything at all.

And I know for certain that if it wasn't for Chuck Palahniuk, I would have never had the strength to forgive myself enough to seek help. Helping yourself isn't glamorous. It isn't an insane road trip led by queen supreme Brandy Alexander, it isn't Plumbago and pastel colored pills, an elaborate path to self-destruction. It's making the very unglamorous call to Psychological Services and confirming that you're not a fictional character, and that your emotions aren't fictional or frivolous. They're real. You're real. And you deserve to give yourself the chance to heal.

I'm not perfect, and I'm not sure that I'll ever be. I never want to be. We're all damaged. But I am strong. I am resilient. And I finally have control.

Now close your eyes. Breathe. And feel it all.

James Blake, Retrograde

You’re on your own, in a world you’ve grown

Few more years to go,
Don’t let the hurdle fall
So be the girl you loved,
Be the girl you loved

I’ll wait, so show me why you’re strong
Ignore everybody else,
We’re alone now
I’ll wait, so show me why you’re strong
Ignore everybody else,
We’re alone now

Suddenly I’m hit
Is this darkness of the dawn
And your friends are gone
When you friends won’t come
So show me where you fit
So show me where you fit

I’ll wait, so show me why you’re strong
Ignore everybody else,
We’re alone now
We’re alone now
We’re alone now

I’ll wait
We’re alone now
We’re alone now

I’ll wait
We’re alone now
We’re alone now
We’re alone now
We’re alone now

Suddenly I’m hit
Is this darkness of the dawn
And your friends are gone
When you friends won’t come
So show me where you fit
So show me where you fit

sanity log #2 (so much for brevity)

This will be short, and I'll expound upon it later. I can't come up with a neat & grandiose way to tie this one up into a hopeful, sparkly little package like I usually can. I wish I could. But the truth is, I've finally woken up. I've untangled my mind, whose synapses were for so long as intertwined as a thousand necklaces in a jewelry box. I know what growing up feels like. It's fucking shattering & scattering & scarring. But it's necessary, and in the end, it's good. The only wisdom I feel like I have the right to bestow upon any of you is this: no one is clever enough to predict the course of their life. Since I was a child, I held close, like a cozy security blanket, the false notion that I would be unaffected by society and time, that nothing could change me, that I somehow, with the power of will, could make everything perfect. You can never truly know heartbreak until you look it in the eye. You can never know pain until you're panting for breath every time a room falls silent, until all the words you try to read or say bleed into an indiscernible pool, until you can't think of one reason to leave your bed in the morning, so you don't, until every time somebody looks you in the eye you count their motives and plan an escape, until your body and your thoughts become separate entities, until you can't stop crying and you don't know why you started, until you can't start crying even though every atom is begging you to, until you're crying for the first time in months in the office of an intern psychologist, only realizing the depth of your pain as the words involuntarily escape your lips, and they stream out, and they won't stop, and you can't turn back. I tried to evade my issues for so long that they melded with my skin, not disappearing, but affecting everything I did. Everything took on the color of my depression. But I've finally found the strength to confront it. And while my peers, my friends, my professors, my teachers, my parents all look at my grades, look at my actions and think "she doesn't give a fuck," "she's not trying," I look at every individual moment and trace how I got here, to this point. And I'm proud of every single one. The only lens that's true and that matters is mine, I know that for sure now. I'm done letting other people define me. I'm done looking at myself through others' eyes. I know who I am and I'm unstoppable. Not because I'm perfect. Not because I have the delusion that I can be. But because I have no other setting. I wish I could have made it here faster, I wish I could have the luxury of sweet retrospection. But every shard is a part of me, and makes me stronger. Makes me, me. I exist. I am. I count. And I deserve to not only exist, but live.

sanity log #1

 "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"-Kurt Vonnegut                 

I can feel a physical shift after crying, a sweet calm-after-the-storm, dust-settling clarity that I never know exists until I reach it. What's tricky is that I don't know I'm holding my breath until I let it go. When I'm depressed, I don't see it as depression, but a false clarity. I see it as reality finally hitting me, and so I wear it like an ugly cardigan and pretend it's a blood orange Michael Kors blazer, shifting my tastes to fit this "objectivity." Because really, all I want to do is exist on the same plane as everyone else. I too often feel like my thoughts and emotions are at a completely different altitude than those of my peers, so it's difficult to converse with them. I constantly feel like there's a hurricane brewing under my skin, and it rushes and rushes until I can't even hear myself think anymore, least of all hear anything else. But when I cry, it's gone. But it's always a matter of time until it collects again, starts spiraling and spiraling, just gradually enough for me not to feel it coming. Like a lobster in the cooking pot.

I cried today, but it was a different kind of cry. It didn't feel torn from my lungs like the first one, it wasn't violent or sharp. It wasn't a downpour. It was almost a happy cry, relief. The tears rolled down my cheeks, involuntary, but cathartic. I can feel myself finally beginning to heal.

And I feel in control, at least for today. I chose to write this, not out of knee-jerk escapism, but out of inspiration, knowing that I need to listen to Vonnegut and keep note of when I feel this way. Here's sanity log 1.