I'm Not Ready to Die Yet
I've written briefly about this before, so forgive me my moment of self-indulgence, but what I've been thinking about for the past week is how little time I've spent wanting to be alive. My entire 20s were spent desperately clinging to life when I often didn't want to. I vacillated wildly between wanting to die and not feeling capable of living, which are not quite the same thing, and I was on so many different medications and tried therapy so many times and it's a miracle that my body didn't fuse with my couch. Elijah and my mom did a lot to keep me going during that time, from bringing me food when I had no interest in feeding myself to managing my meds and rationing them out to me when I couldn't be trusted with them to giving me reasons to leave the house and exist in the world.
My early 30s were better, quite a lot better, but they still weren't great. I had to do so much work to pick up the pieces of the past decade and try to assemble them into something I didn't hate. I was in consistent therapy with the same therapist and I was properly medicated until I finally felt like I wanted to try living life without antidepressants and stopped taking them, and I no longer felt my whole being screaming for death, but the thing about the passing of the storm was that I then had to clean up the wreckage. I had to basically rewire my brain and learn new ways of thinking about myself, my place in the universe, my relationships with other people, and my health, both physical and mental. I had to figure out who I was if I wasn't constantly self-sabotaging and self-loathing and refusing every good thing because I knew, deep down in the marrow of my bones, that I didn't deserve good things. I had to forgive myself for the mess I had made and for the reasons why I made that mess.
It was and is the hardest work I've ever done, and I'm proud of myself for how far I've come with it. I love myself now. I know my worth. I want to live, even if I still don't always know how. I want to seek out people who treat me well, kindly and gently, rather than people who reenforce for me all the reasons I'm right to hate myself. I want to be in my own body and I want to treat my body like something deserving of tenderness and care. There are miles more to go, and sometimes that makes me feel so exhausted and hopeless that I want to give in to the part of me that is still in there, that still believes it would be easier to just decide not to try. Because it takes a lot of trying to exist, even now, after all this work. It probably always will. It's not easy to be a person who feels things so intensely, who has experienced multiple traumas and whose brain often wants to eat itself alive. It's not easy to have skin so thin that the entire world hurts my feelings every single day.
But it's possible. There's so much more that's possible than I knew or believed when I was younger. My life might not look like I want it to, and it might not look like I think it should based on how other people's look. My therapist hates it when I talk about how things should be or what I should do or how I should feel, but how am I supposed to avoid comparing myself to everyone else when the internet exists? Anyway, that's not what this is about. My life is my own, as yours is your own, and all we can ever do is try to make it something we don't hate, in whatever ways work for us.
For me, clinging to the little things is all that works. Seeing horror movies in theaters and spending quality time with people I love and writing and reading a really great book and sometimes buying myself a little treat, like new perfume oils or the bedding I just got, and seeing live music. I don't get to go to movie theaters nearly as often as I would like to, and before last week I hadn't gone since last summer when I saw Talk To Me. I went to see Longlegs last Monday, and while it wasn't a favorite, it was reasonably entertaining and Nicolas Cage gave a wild performance and I loved the ending, and just getting to be in that space again made it worth it. It's difficult for me to force myself to leave my house sometimes, but I have to remember that I feel better when I do, if it's for something I love.
It's also been a very long time since I last went to a concert. A little over two years, to be exact, when I saw Penny and Sparrow and briefly ascended to heaven. I've been so fortunate to get to see some of my favorite bands of all time live, most notably Penny and Sparrow but also Hozier and The Mountain Goats, and, farther back, Iron & Wine and Andrew Bird, and somewhere in the middle, Chance the Rapper and Regina Spektor. But a combination of being poor and ticket prices increasing and not knowing people in person who share my taste in music means the frequency of these shows has lessened.
Spotify does a really hurtful thing where it sends me notifications about concerts from artists I follow, and that's how I know that Childish Gambino will be in Oklahoma City in August and I won't be there for it. That one stings, but it's nothing compared to learning that Anderson .Paak will be going on tour this fall, specifically to perform my favorite album of his, where most of my favorite songs of his are from, an album I own on vinyl because I love it so much, and once again, I won't be there. He's not coming to Oklahoma or anywhere near enough to try to convince someone to go with me, and even if I could somehow do that, I doubt I could afford to fly to any of the tour locations. This is an immense betrayal from the universe. A significant subsection of my sexuality is Anderson .Paak talking shit about how great he is, and learning about his existence is the best thing I got from my last romantic relationship. I deserve to see him live. One day I’ll get to, and I’ll also get to see Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce and Jukebox the Ghost and Gregory Alan Isakov and Frank Ocean and all my other dream concerts, because there's time and I'm allowed to hope for and have good things for myself.
All of this is to say, in a very meandering, absurd, roundabout way, that things are very bad in the world but not so bad in my brain, all things considered. I'm still extremely heartsore and tired and scared about the future of the country and dissatisfied with a lot of things about my life, but I have a life to be dissatisfied about, you know? That hasn't always been a guarantee, and if I feel frustrated about all the time I've wasted being crazy and if it's hard to forgive myself for the things I've subjected myself to, I can use that. I can't go back and redo the lost time, and getting stuck in a loop of what ifs about how it could have gone does me no good, but I can use those feelings to fuel what I'm making now, which is everything I wish I had had then.
I've found a lot of pleasure in domesticity over the past couple of weeks and I'm not really sure how or why. It's usually a Herculean task to get me to do the dishes or vacuum or do any of the other little recurring tasks that are required to keep a home functioning, and now I seem to have energy for them and find them actively meditative. I want to get out of this house and out of this town and out of this state, but I can't spend the time I'm forced to remain here ignoring the fact that I still have to be a person and do person things. This is the lesson I'm currently trying to learn. Nothing is perfect, and refusing to do anything until it is just means that I never do anything. I have to start somewhere, and I have. I'm now able to walk for 30 minutes at once instead of having to break it up into smaller increments. My sink has been free of dishes for days at a stretch. I'm 5 books ahead of schedule for my reading challenge. These are very small things, but they add up to a sense of wellness I haven't felt in...maybe ever.
I think this is what I'm saying. It's an uncomfortable note to leave you on for the week, but it feels appropriate. Many years ago now, I read a book called The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, and in it I found this poem that I still think about regularly. It's what I've been trying to get at, but better and in way fewer words.
To my friend, Jerina
By Lucille Clifton
listen,
when I found there was no safety
in my father's house
I knew there was none anywhere.
you are right about this,
how I nurtured my work
not my self, how I left the girl
wallowing in her own shame
and took on the flesh of my mother.
but listen,
the girl is rising in me,
not willing to be left to
the silent fingers in the dark,
and you are right,
she is asking for more than
most men are able to give,
but she means to have what she
has earned,
sweet sighs, safe houses,
hand she can trust.