#3: i wore pink overalls at my wedding
(not a metaphor, taking my power back, & turning 30)
Trigger Warning: Self-harm
My fingers unfurl and the expectations I once held for myself hit the floor with a thud so loud I’m convinced my early 20’s can hear it. The way ahead is much more clear than it used to be.
I love this photo: three women I admire and model myself after. When I look at it it reminds me of everything I have to look forward to. Unless I don’t, then that will be that. But if I do, I know where I want to go (which is here: where I already am). The point being, I am not overthinking this one. I want to write, so I will continue to write; I want to grab hold of it all and gulp it down like a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice until the last of the drops fall on my chin and I smile the biggest smile and laugh the fullest laugh.
Here is where I am and it’s where I want to be. I am happy with here.
Here wasn’t always where I wanted to be. It took a proper diagnosis, dosage of medication, therapy, and a complete overhaul in the way I interact with my day, people, thoughts, and surroundings. I couldn’t have planned it out and I couldn’t have seen things more clearly. I do not blame myself for what I did and didn’t do, or for how long it took.
Before now, I wasn’t satisfied with here, and instead of drinking the fresh squeezed orange juice, I would scream and scream and throw it across the room with a boiling anger, while pulling at my hair and smashing my fists against the floor until I could see blood and stars and my vision went all red. I would shake and move violently. I would rock back and forth. I would alternate between crying and laughing and humming and screaming again, over and over until my face was swollen and my hands were bloody and my house was in chaos: reflecting back to me what I felt inside, and was unable to make sense of.
I love metaphors, but aside from it being fresh squeezed orange juice, this was not a metaphor. This is a scene carved into and out of my life over and over as the reality of what I had done dawned on my and shame pulsed like fire through my veins. And it was that shame that had me scrambling to prove myself to myself and those around me. What is also true is this: people have been hurt by my actions both physically and mentally. What did 23-year-old Chloe do with this information? She internalized it. She would emerge from her manic state with red eyes and a heart filled with guilt. She would also stay silent. She would dig for answers in places that only held more questions. She would create new worlds for herself to try and escape into. She would run and run and run and she would love big and fiercely and stay loyal to her ideas.
I say all this because I had, and have always had, access to the happiest life, but I could not reach it, and I was never going to reach it for as long as my brain kept me here. And it did keep me here. I would cycle up and down and up and down. Early on, I would push family away and I would work my way back, trying to prove to them, and myself, that I was ok
It was my wedding day, I was 29-years-old. My nose was still numb from a surgery I had recently had. I was standing alone on the Mendocino coast in California. The wind pressed against my face. The grass brushed against my legs. The sky was clear and blue and cold, and earlier this week, we went to the house my grandparent’s built. We spread my grandpa’s ashes. We talked about him. We all did. We were together and that was all that mattered.
But here, eyes closed and the salty ocean spraying somewhere down below me, I was not happy. I could not be happy. Nothing in the world—not even my favorite place with my favorite people—could make me happy. All these years and it was still the same and I was still here. When I was alone, I would cry in my room. I would tell my partner and he wouldn’t think I was crazy, but I did think I was crazy. Only a crazy person would pretend to be happy in their happiest place with their favorite people, right? I would ask this over and over to myself and to Adam, my partner.
I do not blame myself. I did the best I could with what I thought I had.
For my wedding I wore pink overalls and took off my shoes as soon as my feet hit the grass. We were in a big old house with a thousand rooms and our voices filled all of them. The night before my wedding I went for a walk and cried, and then I came back inside and started crying again, so I went up to my room and curled up as small as I could so that no one could find me. But then I heard myself asking for my mom and then I heard myself talking about how I couldn’t be happy no matter how hard I tried, and soon, the shame trickled out of my body and I sat up. I sat up and said that I didn’t want to have speeches tomorrow and I didn’t want to wear the outfit I had chosen. I wanted to wear my pink overalls. I wanted to not wear shoes. I wanted to wear my white lacy shirt. I wanted to not wear makeup over a face that was still drawn and tired from the months of not eating enough. It showed in my cheekbones and eyes and in the smile that I tried so hard to keep on.
I did pull back some of my power when I spoke my fears out loud to my mom. I did feel a little braver and a little closer to myself. In that moment, I also decided that I would do exactly what I needed in order to get to tomorrow. So I did. I pulled my pink overalls over my feet and up my legs and around my shoulders. I tied my hair back. I put on some earrings and I looked at myself for a long time in the old smudged mirror before turning toward the door and putting on my shoes to walk downstairs to greet my wonderful family.
I did the entire day in the best way I knew how, and I will always love that day.
This was the moment I knew that I wanted to ask for help. I didn’t seek it out right after (it took a manic episode a few months later), but I saw the potential of what could be if only I stopped grasping for it, and I knew that I would no longer be afraid of myself and what might happen if I let go of some of the control. I wanted to live entirely and completely, and I wanted to do whatever it took to get there.
Here is where I am and it’s where I want to be. I am happy with here, even when I’m not. Even when I’m trying to get somewhere else.
Also, words like Crazy and Manic and Spaz and Bipolar and Schizo are often used when describing someone who is simply having a bad or off day. I would like to ask that we no longer use these terms in this way. I say this because I have done this many times before (I use an example of it in this post—when I call myself crazy). I say this because saying such things diminishes the severity of these conditions or state-of-being. It makes them smaller and smaller and smaller until they are nothing.
And they are not nothing. They are something that you can feel and hold in your hands. They have texture and they take a big and monstrous shape. They are something that can consume a life and take a life when we are not careful about making sure they don’t get smaller until they are nothing.
My eyes are heavy and my heating pad is placed on my stomach and I am in Ohio, organizing my things for our flight back home, where I will see family and celebrate my 30th birthday. What a thing to be here right now, with this feeling of wanting to be here, not there. And thank you for being here with me, too.
Talk soon,
Chloe
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