You keep me up with your silence

You take me down with your quiet
Of all the weapons you fight with
Your silence is the most violent

– Tell Me How, Paramore 

* * * * * *

I used to think that people were so lucky to have friends to spend time with (because I hardly have any) but lately I’ve noticed that even for people with many friends, their relationships have become more and more fragile and fragmented. It’s so easy to cancel a date, so easy to keep messaging “Let’s get together sometime,” telling yourself that you’re doing your part to maintain the relationship, and just never actually show up.

I have no idea what we’re all supposed to do about this. I do know that this is very, very bad news for all of us, and probably the main contributor to anxiety and depression. Uncertainty = anxiety. When the world is telling you that your generation is a failure, when the job market is telling you that your hard-earned skills are useless, when advertising is shitting on your values and repackaging your most precious emotional experiences to sell you laundry powder, what truth and worth is left in life except the love and trust that we have in our relationships? And how are we supposed to feel when it turns out that we can’t trust each other to be there when we say we will? How many of us can honestly say that love exists in our relationships – even in the ones where it did exist before?

the fucking laundry powder

I’m tired of getting over it
And starting something new again
I’m getting sick of the beginnings

By the way – it should go without saying that I rely on my girlfriend for human company and that I’d be totally isolated without her.

I think this is why having a significant other has become virtually a necessity in our social landscape. It’s evident simply from the sheer number of articles discussing why you don’t need a significant other – why must you deny it if the pressure wasn’t so strong to begin with? – and if it affected you so, it must be something you feel internally, too. I’d even go so far as to say that the pressure to have a significant other is a personal desire that is projected onto others as an external, societal pressure, so that you don’t have to face the fact that it is something you desperately want. Nobody shames people for not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend – that just isn’t a thing that happens.

SO’s are a necessity now because the monogamous romantic relationship has become the only type of relationship wherein one person can be reasonably expected to reliably be there for the other; it is the only relationship wherein it is acceptable to demand to be a priority, to demand that the other keep his or her commitments and not make excuses. This is something that most people seem to have become uncomfortable in asking even from close friends and family members. There is the fear of being labeled “clingy,” the shame experienced in the perception of having fallen down the list of another person’s priorities, and the pride involved in the unwillingness to admit that you value their presence enough that your feelings were hurt by their absence – if it is apparent that they don’t feel the same about you, how could you admit to the way you feel?

I can’t call you a stranger
But I can’t call you
I know you think that I erased you
You forgot me but I can’t forget you
And I won’t replace you

There is this need to keep up the illusion that our own lives are filled with exciting experiences and opportunities. Our real relationships are sacrificed at the altar of the illusion. Why should you feel bad about someone failing to show up at your apartment for a quiet night in, when you could just as easily go over to four clubs in one night and meet a dozen hot strangers? Maybe: because you and your friend missed an important conversation about your problems, your fears, and your plans, and instead you wrecked your liver with shots, your lungs with cigarette smoke and your eardrums with a hundred decibels of awful DJ’ing; and you met a dozen strangers who will never mean anything to you, and that you will never see again apart from the next nights of irresponsibility and running away from the pain of disconnection (if that).

I feel like I may have asked too many rhetorical questions in the course of writing this.

I’m procrastinating about my paper right now. I know this is the only ticket to getting out of here. And even then it’s more like standby booking than sure seating. But still…

When I think about this disconnection, I think about you. It makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, and the things I’ve described are true even if I had never met you… but the truth is that I think about this because of you and the hope you gave me that things could be different. For a short while, they were. It was all the difference in the world.

And now you’re gone. Yes, you’re still around. But your face is like a bolted door. And you don’t smile anymore. How do you do that? How do you close yourself off so completely? How did you learn not to need anyone (except your girlfriend, I suppose – though I suspect you could get by without her just fine if you had to)? I want to know, because sometimes this pain is almost more than I can bear.

The truth is that need you in my life. And this is as absurd as any ridiculous crush I’ve ever had, even if I now only want you as a friend. Even more absurd – a crush people can understand, but to want a friend so desperately? How much of a loser can you be?

You don’t have to tell me
If you ever think of me
You don’t have to tell me, I can still believe

Hayley Williams

Reality will break your heart
Survival will not be the hardest part
It’s keeping all your hopes alive
When all the rest of you has died

– 26, Paramore

• Ten years ago, I was in my carpool on the way to school, not quite awake, when CrushCrushCrush came on the radio and changed my life forever. From that moment on, music became one of the few things that offered me an escape, from feeling trapped inside the weighty loneliness+sadness combo that’s always been with me for as long as I can remember.
• I learned to play guitar and I tried to learn how to sing because I wanted to be like Hayley and turn sadness into something beautiful.
• I dyed my hair with red streaks in the summers and finally dyed it fully red in the first week of freshman year at college. It stayed that way the whole time I was in that university.
• I didn’t hear from them for so long. When Paramore came out it sounded so bizarre and somehow mostly meaningless to me that I thought it was all over.
• After years and years, my girlfriend puts their new album on Spotify while we’re making breakfast. “26” comes on, and suddenly I’m the kid again, knocked out of a lonely daydream by a voice saying she gets it, she still gets it.

MJM

Caring for someone who’s depressed means you’ll always second-guess yourself. I should have encouraged her to be strong and maintain her workload / I should have told her to relax and take it easy. I should have made her go out and meet her friends and do what used to make her happy / I should have let her rest. I should have been there for her more / I should have given her space. I should have made her seek professional help / I should have let her choose what she wanted to do

**it’s weird, I walked this way and I feel it all the time with the same name, but I still don’t know the right thing to do for you and it’s all that’s on my mind now. I love you after all, and I wish I had protected you; I’ve completely failed in that respect and I’ll always be sorry. Give me another chance to be the person I should have been for you all your life (and rarely ever was)

I love you. I love you. I love you. Live through this, and you’ll see that you have a life beyond their eyes and beyond everything they think and say about you.

What It’s Like These Days

The statistics aren’t on my side. At least 25% – 50% of people with bipolar disorder attempt suicide. It’s like having cancer, the way it takes over your life, how you try to live in between the surges of disease in your brainbox.

On my wall I have a corkboard with the business cards of people I met when I was full of idealism and hope. It keeps falling off and scattering pins everywhere.

In the morning I’m so disappointed when I see the sun behind the curtains and realize I’ve lived to face another day. I would’ve been grateful to stop breathing during the night.

I don’t like writing about this here. I hate most of the novels written about bipolar disorder. They’re self-absorbed in a way that goes beyond the introspection of other writers, other artists and dreamers. I never wanted to be that way. But I’m fascinated and repelled by this illness, how it warps everything that I am. It’s hard not to pay attention to something that’s taking over you like this does.

I’ve lost almost everyone from my life. It didn’t happen right after my manic episode, which I would have expected, but sort of gradually… I don’t like myself, and I suppose it must be difficult to like someone who doesn’t even like herself.

I live for those visits with ____. The only times I ever feel safe anymore. My isolation is almost terrifying in its completeness.

I don’t like writing about this at all – but I’ve told myself – someday, when I’m brave enough, I want to write about all the ways I’ve made life horrible for the people who have tried to love me – like a part apology, part love letter, part confession –

To say thank you and I’m sorry –

To send some words on the wind and hope it finds them again somehow

I guess this is practice, because it’s really hard.

Random thoughts

People of ancient civilizations told each other myths because they couldn’t explain the world around them. Things that are now as prosaic as rainfall or the coming and going of the seasons were so mysterious, their origins so far beyond understanding, that the only way to console their ignorance was to tell a story…

* * * * * *

The origins were almost always traumatic. The murder of a family; a failed experiment; the death of a planet. In each case, something was irretrievably lost; something irrevocably gained. Their stories are long, but not encapsulated neatly between the covers of a heavy book – they span decades and leap between universes –

– and can always be rewritten as the mind and pen see fit.

Whereas my destiny seems trapped in stern lines.

* * * * * *

I think my country is dying. My regard for our leader and for myself followed practically the same trajectory. I loathe him / myself. I’m not sure what significance that has, or if it has anything to do with anything, but it’s a fact.

I think my country is dying. I never really loved it but I never hated it as much as he seems to hate it.

* * * * * *

Someday I hope my suffering and confusion could seem, too, as prosaic as the rain.

Well S***

“True peace comes from accepting the worst.” – Lin Yutang (?)

– Ever since I got out of the hospital, I’ve been steadily morphing into this person I don’t recognize. There wasn’t any specific point at which I realized I was different. It was slow but sure. On each successive morning I’d have less and less motivation to get out of bed. Until most of my time was being spent there, only getting out for the bathroom or food.

– Now I don’t know who I am. Even the doughy face in the mirror looks unfamiliar. I keep thinking back across my past, wondering who that person was, who thought and did so many things. Which is why I’ve been reading so much of my old messages and my journals. It’s sort of entertaining, but leads me to no answers. I look at a typical day. “work in the morning.” Work? What work? What did she use to do? Why did this make her happy, and not that? Why did she hold on so long? Why did she give up? She’s a mystery to me.

– In this mood everything seems meaningless.

– This morning my mom picked up half a dozen empty chip packets scattered around my room. The other night I saw Nick Vujicic at Araneta with her and my girlfriend. I thought he looked tired and wondered why he wouldn’t have prosthetics.

– There was once a doctor with a promising career ahead of her who got thrown from her bike in a car collision and sustained a serious head trauma. The diagnosis was permanent brain damage. She was never the same afterwards. She would forget things, be unable to process and remember things. Exactly like how it is for me during these times. She wrote: “How many suicides are stayed by exhaustion so profound that physical action is impossible?” Eventually she came to terms with her condition. I wonder if something similar will be required of me. It’s been three months. Everything ended that night my mom picked me up at my dorm and had me drugged and imprisoned.

– My old journals. I was always with someone. My actions don’t really make sense to me now. Why couldn’t I be happy?

– At the hospital, I was pretty active. I read, drew in colored pencils, wrote, watched movies, sang karaoke, and pestered the doctors for my release. But I was already starting to be hollowed out. The night I was getting out, I could hardly believe it. I was saying and doing whatever I thought they wanted. I said I was sorry for the things I posted online. (I wasn’t.) The maid had packed skimpy clothing. It was cold and tight. I was so happy to be leaving. About two or three nights before that, a young woman had gotten admitted. She was nice and pretty, and she had a small son, and I felt sorry for her, so I tried to leave her some food and magazines. The nurses took them away. She was ranting and raving down the halls when I left.

– In there, I plotted escape. At the end of the long hall was a fire exit. One night in bed, I told myself that they probably left it unlocked. After all, if there was a fire, they wouldn’t let the crazies broil alive, would they? I imagined an episode wherein I made a skirt of one of my sweaters, shucked the hospital uniform and slipped out of the fire exit. My heart thudded so wildly inside my chest that I couldn’t sleep. This fantasy ended the next morning when I walked down the hall, ostensibly to deposit laundry into the basket that sat next to the fire exit, and gave the bar an experimental push with my arm. It was locked. I suppose the nurses were expected to be quick with the keys in case of fire.

– I no longer expect remuneration for the abuse that occurred there. I’ve received no support whatsoever, no apology.

– I’m living like a dog in my parents’ house. One that’s been beaten and then coaxed back with food and favors. Oh, and the threat of homelessness. Or – not a dog, more like my cat, who’s interested in nothing but food. Whatever time isn’t spent forcefully ingesting tuna from a metal bowl is spent lying on the nearest patch of floor. She doesn’t appear to have a favorite spot or anything like that. Whatever’s convenient.

– I’m not “Trinity” anymore; I think that’s only who I was for the past year, between the time I broke up with A and now. That was an interesting time. The records are interesting. I had so many thoughts. But nothing finished.

Doubt

Creep past the hours, like the shorter hand on a clock hanging on a wall of a schoolhouse somewhere. We wait for the bell, and we dream of somewhere else. – Daydreaming, Paramore

This isn’t so much a prison of the body as of the mind and heart. Something about this place fills its inhabitants with dull despair and irrationality. It’s like Kansas – everything is gray.

This is the place where my ____ was stripped of his dignity and worth. Where I made up my mind to die, not so very long ago. Where my ___ ‘s narcissism reigns supreme.

I try to send my mind on journeys from this place, like a tower prisoner sailing paper airplanes out of a barred window. But I never get very far.

 

 

I can’t seem to find the conviction that I blew up the internet with, still less long ago. (My small patch of the internet, anyway.) Or even the rage. After weeks of forced worship at the altar of the holy trinity of Lamictal, Seroquel and Solian, I’m as dull, desperate and irrational as every last miserable inhabitant of this place.

I have news that an ex-lover of mine is now with another ex-lover of mine. I don’t know how this news is supposed to make me feel. I suppose it’s only natural to feel uneasy. Perhaps at this very moment they are exchanging the sordid details of exactly how awful I am in bed. Perhaps they’re so in love that they’ve completely forgotten I existed. It’s hard to say which makes me feel more uneasy.

This is like a sort of purgatory, where I’m being purged of everything that makes me alive. My hopes, my plans, my self-esteem.

About three years ago I decided here that I had lost my mind and I was better off dead. Not having managed that, I decided then that I was good for nothing but menial labor and the most simple tasks for the rest of my life. So I left the University.

The other day, almost all the people I’d known there graduated.

They’re all done and ready to move on with their lives. They managed the pressure without cracking up. Perhaps I’ve been wrong about the pressure that I so angrily wrote about. Perhaps there’s just ever a handful of us unlucky ones.

I’m doubting things I was so sure of just one, two months ago –

That I’m a good writer –

That my life’s heading somewhere –

That I’m in control of where it goes –

There are so many things I could write about, pieces I could submit – about the lake – somewhere nice to eat – about what I went through to get a prescription for Nordette in 2013; what it was like to grow up bipolar and gay; what it was like to have a relationship with an older woman.. oh, so many things… but… I don’t know where to start and how to structure them –

It’s like setting out to a different room, and always forgetting what you were there for the minute you step foot inside.

Always.

Here, anyway. In this place of doubt.