(no subject)
Sincerely, this time. Not as a setup to something else. Not in order to steal wiser words from wiser men. Not in order to cower and toady and prostrate myself before some imaginary tyrannical higher power, and employ my semantic terrorism to make me look like the victim, when I am not.
I apologize, to you. To any of you who've had to see me or talk to me - to you who have been patient, and forgiving, and tolerant, and who - I fear - have had to see me at my worst, and not even been given the courtesy of being told what you were seeing.
The past week has been one long downward stumble, I'm afraid. Monday night was fear, and panic, and mad hope tainted with the reality that was despair, and vanity, and everything else stuffed into one brain, but since then, in spite of big, glittery, words I used to deny obedience to said demons, in spite of my unwillingness to buckle under, and in spite of the fact that I insisted I would not give up, ever -- I haven't stopped falling.
I'm not sure how to describe it, entirely. It's like darkness, only it isn't. Because when all you see is darkness, it sort of stops being darkness. It gradually just fades, and somehow, that's worse than gazing into some mysterious abyss, some dizzying oblivion you find yourself toppling over because the little voice in your head that always whispers to you in situations like this -- the one that says "jump" when you're standing on a height, or "run" when you're at a crosswalk and you're idly wondering what you'd look like plastered across the front of a bus -- somehow got through to you. It gets to be just a vague, foul-smelling, gray; an endless, rolling, expanse of forgettable mediocrity that's all you see ahead of you, an expanse that makes you terrified and dreadfully, hellishly, aware that if you were to look behind you, somehow you know it's all you'd see.
You're cold all the time. You know you must be eating, because you're alive, and you're Italian, and missing meals is tantamount to highest offence to you, which really does explain that baby fat that won't go away, but none of it lingers. You take long showers, shivering and chattering and trying to scald and steam and curse and hate the lingering doubt out of yourself, because it's the only time you feel warm.
You sleep all the time; or it feels like you do, but you're still tired. Always tired. And sometimes having the small, weak, shameful part of you hoping that you can go to sleep and not get up again, and realizing how fucking lame that sounds and what a fucking emo kid you've become; but you still sleep. There's shadows under your eyes, and tears of gratitude when you can curl up and forget everything in a flood of death metal and layers of blankets, even when you know you've slept all day, every day, because it's the only thing you can think of to do. It's the one thing you have control over, the one feeble defense you can mount before panic reasserts itself and squeezes on your heart so hard you stop breathing.
You can't remember what day it is. You can't seem to drag yourself to do anything. But even the burning shame of this doesn't last; nothing does. Everything dulls and seems quiet, even the music, and all you - you, in your self-disgust and loathing and weakness - all you want to do is sleep. You're not sure until when, or why, or how you can possibly try to go back after this, not when everything you've done so far only ends in the flush of humiliation, and the niggling jabs of uselessness, wordlessness, worthlessness. And all you want to do is cry or scream or savage something, but you bury yourself in something, you try to get warm, and you sleep - and it goes away, for a while.
You dream about drowning, and can't shake it when you're awake. You're ashamed and miserable and embarrassed, because this is a concrete burial of your own making. You have no one to blame but yourself. Nothing but your own stupidity and irresponsibility and endless moronic convincing of yourself nearly as effectively as you convince everybody else that everything's fine. That you aren't walking a razor-fine wire that suddenly isn't there. That you aren't trying to camouflage yourself as a walking cliché, as a noisy archetype that's safe and sane and normal, wrapping yourself in the color and the smiling and the booze, when you feel like one massive gaping wound that must surely be staining the good rug, and who should really quit being so selfish, and crawl into a corner to die politely, and let the normal kindhearted people you're clinging to and dragging down WITH you get on with their lives.
And I'm sorry. I... I haven't been able to even try to write it down, I haven't been able to say it, and I've been trying to cover it up, rather badly, I notice now. Because I didn't want your attention, and I didn't want your pity, and I didn't want you nobly rising above your disgust to try and pull me out of the freezing, slimy, hell I'd dug for myself when I knew all I'd do would be pull you down with me. I don't KNOW what I wanted. I still don't.
But most of all, I suppose... I'm sorry to you, Dad.
My father suffers from clinical depression. And I always hated him for it.
I hated him for not being strong like me, or like Mom. I hated him for giving up. I hated him for being immature and juvenile and for - when he was diagnosed with being sad - for not pulling himself out of it, and leaving me to have to be a grown-up when I was only in high school and when I needed him the most, when I NEEDED to know that things would be okay after he and Mom split and he was gone like a thief in the night and all he left was a card and a Game Boy on my bed - leaving me to have to emotionally support him when when I wasn't ready yet and how I could go on silently resenting him - I hated how weak he was, how willing to throw money at a problem instead of being existential about it and dragging himself kicking and screaming into the light, as I always imagined I would do. I hated him for trying to put his damage on me; because I swore I wasn't broken like him. I wasn't crazy like the rest of the family. I was going to be like my brother, strong and alone and as distanced from all the insanity that was them as I could get. I'd scream it to myself. I wasn't going to be like that. I wasn't going to be like them. Never. Not ever.
But after three days of this... after three days of thinking I'd hit rock-bottom and finding there was further to fall, of sleeping all the time, of staring but not seeing -- after three days of being too worthless to even find the necessary motivation to drag myself off a sofa, three days where even panic couldn't move me the way it did before...
I can't explain it, I can't reason with myself, I can't do anything! The wordless frustration, all the inevitability, the futility, everything that builds like a tidal wave and crushes you beneath it and you CAN'T do anything -- the helplessness, God, the hate! The huge, unbelievable, loathing for yourself that nearly chokes you and makes you cry and want to just smash yourself into nothing, to get rid of yourself, or bury yourself somewhere where no one will have to see you!
I didn't understand. But I'm finding now that I'm as weak as he is, or that he wasn't weak, and I still don't know what's wrong with me. Hell, maybe this is pointless. Maybe it ISN'T even depression, maybe it's just me being a lazy asshole. Maybe I'm looking for blame where there isn't any.
But something is wrong.
And for that, I'm sorry.
I'll be better soon. I promise.