Listening to HTRK on repeat and aching. I don’t even know for what. The times I feel nostalgic for were characterized by such a deep despair; what is there to miss? I look at everything I have around me now and it’s so glorious, so positive, so meaningful…. and all I want to do is throw it away and lay with you in a dark room watching the walls fall down on us until we suffocate.
There’s a huge disconnect within me that I wish to explain away with mental illness diagnoses but that wouldn’t do it justice. The only thing that has kept me alive this long is an indescribable urge to not admit defeat, but when presented with a chance at happiness, a chance to not constantly have to battle the voices in my head telling me to give up, I want to run back to the darkness. Understanding what bipolar really entails has offered me a framework for my thoughts and decisions from as early as I can remember until today, but there’s still a piece missing. The edge of the cliff is always SO near to me, and whenever I get close to it I choose to turn around and go back to safety, but that safe place never feels safe. I’m constantly ping ponging.
My mom, who quit smoking 30 years ago, told me she craves cigarettes ever single day. I made an oath to myself when I was in my mid-teens that I would never physically self-mutilate again but the urge has never subsided in the slightest. I made that oath in a rare moment of spiritual strength, but the rest of me fucking hates myself every moment of every day and I only feel comfortable when I’m in pain. So, I found other ways. I built walls that turned into perverse mazes in my mind locking me into psychological suffering. I associated emotional pain with comfort, and positivity with discomfort. I made bizarre rules for myself that have kept me alive and physically intact but destroyed me on all other levels. All I want is pain.
You represent a lifetime of suffering. Some of it you actively inflicted, but most of it I created in my mind. What am I without it? Empty. Desolate. At least when I’m in pain I know who I am and know how to keep moving forward. Take away the pain and I am a lost, stranded toddler. I don’t want to find my parents and go home because I’ve never been home, I prefer the chaos and sheer terror of being tiny and lost in a throng of people. I hate admitting this. I need to redefine suffering but I don’t want to. I want the familiar. I find ways of justifying the pain I inflict on myself… I tell myself my fortitude in the face of suffering is what has kept me alive this long, and that if I give that up and tell myself I can be happy everything will fall apart and I’ll walk off that cliff.
The worst part is the disconnect between my thoughts and emotions. I can look around me and see beauty and recognize how blessed I am, but I feel absolutely nothing. I don’t know how to “fake it ’till you make it!”, it just sounds insincere. I don’t feel anything when I look around me. The only time I feel is when I’m still and close my eyes, and then it’s all pain. Ah, the old familiar friend. The darkness I’ve intertwined with my identity to such an extent that I’m scared anywhere I cut will just cut me, and that would break the oath I made to myself, and then I’ll cease to exist.
Being bipolar is spiritual warfare, but it’s hard to see that because we oversimplify and categorize everything as either hypomanic/manic or depressed, and don’t look at what happens in the space between those two extremes. I’ve had to start examining that link this year and I keep stopping at the same point: I tell myself I want to be happy but when offered happiness, I walk away. I spiral into darkness, and spend days or weeks trying to think of the most efficient way to harm myself that won’t end me. The darkness of depression feels unbearable, but my hypomanic outlets are pure destruction. I feel invincible, unstoppable, untethered, glorious, until the inevitable come down and then I allow myself to swing back to the heaviest depression.
I don’t know how to stop.
I'm tired, let's wash away 