January 21, 1967 – August 16, 2024

Your birthday is soon, and I miss you. I have missed you every day since you died. And almost daily I have wondered why you never shared your middle name, Samantha — it really suits you. Such a small and inconsequential thing to find out after you’re gone, but it sticks with me for whatever reason.

You changed my life. Who the fuck gets a job from Reddit? It was so bizarre that I was worried it was a scam. But it wasn’t. Thank you for that, Tracy. You changed my life for the better.

You were, hands down, the funniest person I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. Many of your quips and stories live on in perpetuity in the work chat archives. Sometimes I remember something you said and go searching for it because reading it in “your” words, as it were, makes me feel like you are closer. It also usually makes me cry. You were so smart, so fucking tenacious, so genuinely generous. You were unapologetically you. You always encouraged me. You told me I could accomplish anything I put my mind to, an often hollow phrase, but I believed it coming from you because you never said anything you didn’t mean.

I’m glad you’re relieved of your suffering, both physical and mental. Nobody should ever have to feel that much pain, and my heart breaks that you did. I’m proud of you for making it so long, to 57 years old. I think you were in pain for that entire time. I’m proud of you for holding out, for trying. You were so fucking brave to live and die as you did, and I hope you finally feel free.

I’ll close with something I wrote a few days after you died:

In times of loss I always ask myself, what happens to the space that someone occupied when they are no longer there to fill it? And I still don’t know; there are probably a million answers to that question. Right now it really hurts and I miss her.

 

Maybe it shouldn’t be, or doesn’t have to be. I tried my best to make it non-traumatic, but in these weeks that follow these are the words that ring in my ears. I did my best. I tried to be positive. I tried to let go. My body surrendered, but my heart never did. I’m still terrified of the feelings.

It was Easter. I was anxious to get it done with the second I hit 37 weeks. I had spent weeks, months, trying to numb the emotions I felt and ignore the ever-growing reality in my uterus. When I arrived, nothing was open. I mean, everything was open because it was a hospital, but there weren’t any people to check me in on any floor, and there weren’t any patients around for routine appointments or procedures and I felt like I was lost. I tried to conceal the lost look in my eyes as I went from the first floor to the third floor to the second floor to the fourth floor to the second floor, and back to the third floor. I found a laminated sign and a phone in pre-op check in and I called it. Someone answered and it sounded like he actively had a scalpel in someone’s body. I explained I was scheduled to be induced but couldn’t find a receptionist or a way into the labor and delivery department. He sounded more confused than me and repeatedly asked if I needed an emergency c-section. I went back down the ground floor and asked a security guard where to go. He told me there was a buzzer in the L&D department by the double doors and they’d let me in. Back up I went.

They unlocked the doors right away when I pressed the buzzer. I walked down the long hallway and found a nursing station with 10-20 people in scrubs sitting around chatting and looking at their phones. The first person I made eye contact with said hi and then went back to her phone. I told another woman I was scheduled to be induced and she gestured offhandedly, “Oh, she’ll help you over there” to yet another woman. I remember exactly what she looks like. She was pleasant but had no idea what she was doing. New? I don’t know. I didn’t care. I felt numb and dead inside. I had set my alarm for 7am but been awake since 5am and was trying so hard to feel excited, scared, worried, anything, and just felt nothing. I felt like it took her forever to check me in. I was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t ask for the hospital stay co-pay upfront. Benefits of having someone who has no idea what they’re doing?

The first care team that was on shift fucking sucked. The nurse told me I had gained too much weight. I wanted to chew her out, but I was trying to be positive and shit so I brushed it off. The midwife, after finding out I am bipolar, gave me a long talk about postpartum depression, told me a social worker would be meeting with me as soon as my baby was born, and said it was weird that I seemed so calm. I just wanted her to get off my fucking bed. She was sitting by my knees and I didn’t like how her face looked. The nurse asked me what my baby’s name was (no name picked) and who would be there with me (“Why is nobody here with you now?!”). She asked for my SO’s phone number and when I said, “Hold on, let me check” said she was surprised I didn’t have it memorized. Okay, bitch. She filled out some kind of cheesy card/chart thing that was going to have my baby’s footprints on it once baby was born and asked me what foods I craved while pregnant and what message I’d like to put down to my baby. My heart was closed up. To the first question, I said that I just craved everything and anything, and after she pressured me I said ice cream. For the second question, I said I wasn’t in that headspace right now and after she pressured me I said, “I’m so excited to meet you.” I wanted her to get the fuck out of my room.

After two hours of I-don’t-know-what, the midwife came and gave me misoprostol. The midwife told me to prepare for a long stay and that inductions usually take 72 hours at least. I told her my baby would be out in 12. I was being sarcastic, but the look in her eyes made me think that she thought I was crazy. I wasn’t right about 12 hours, but it sure as fuck didn’t end up being 72 hours. They tried strapping me into the bed with a fetal heart monitor but after much complaining I got the nurse to attach some shitty bluetooth device onto my belly so I could walk around and go to the bathroom. Every five minutes the bluetooth would cut out and everyone would come running into the room yelling at me to get back into bed. I hated it. The midwife checked how dilated I was and her hands hurt me so much I started second guessing my desire to not have pain relief during labor and birth.

After several hours they told me that I was having contractions, per the fetal monitor. I couldn’t feel anything. I was trying so hard to be positive but all I could be was dead inside. It was either nothing or immense pain. In my heart, at least. At some point, after my labor partners had arrived, the midwife attached a mechanical dilation balloon thing onto my cervix. The pain was immense but I breathed through it and squeezed the hand holding mine. It fell off twice. The procedure felt like it lasted forever. After she said it was “done”, I felt warm and wet and asked her what happened. She looked kind of confused. I stood up and stuff poured out of me. She professionally said, “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen” as my water dripped out all around me on the floor. She asked a nurse to test the liquid to make sure it was my water breaking. It was. She was unapologetic, or embarrassed, or uncaring, or maybe all three. She seemed undisturbed. I was trying so hard to be positive and brushed it aside. I mean, my labor partners were more upset than I was. All I could think was, good, maybe the baby will be out of me soon this way.

In the middle of the night, after the second dosage of misoprostol, I started having contractions. They were painful but I could handle them. I had someone with me but they were fast asleep. I wished they were holding me, but they weren’t, and I was afraid to ask for help. I breathed through it, sleeping in several minute increments. The bluetooth fetal monitoring device kept cutting out and I felt my blood pressure rise as everyone kept rushing in yelling at me for being out of bed each time I had a contraction.

The next day is a blur. At some point in the late morning, my contractions stopped being regular and they gave me an IV of Pitocin. After a few hours, the contractions started breaking me inside and out. I had so much support from my labor partners, but every contraction felt like the world was ending. I tried to psych myself out in the most positive way possible, breathing deeply and repeating my mantra, “I can do this” as I felt my body closing in on itself. After what was probably a couple hours, but could have been as little as one hour or as long as eight hours, I was peeing in between a contraction and looked in the mirror and thought to myself, “The only way to get this pain to stop is to kill myself right now.” I was horrified. I asked for an epidural.

By the time, I had a nurse who I liked and a midwife that I didn’t hate. The nurse anesthetist came in to administer the epidural and the nurse held my hands and looked into my eyes and told me not to move and to keep breathing during my contractions while I had a needle in my fucking spine. Those three minutes were sheer hell. The only thing keeping me from screaming was the hope of imminent pain relief. After the epidural was assembled, or whatever, the pain didn’t immediately go away but I felt a million times calmer. I laid down on my back in the bed and waited for the blissful numbness to hit. I pushed away the feelings of failure I had for not being able to handle the pain, and tried to feel joy and appreciation for modern medicine and the pain relief it offers… but I still feel weak and guilty for not being able to handle it. I should have found a way to keep my blood pressure low. I should have argued with my OB-GYN about being induced early (after all, my only motivation for agreeing was that I hated being pregnant… what kind of mother would I be if I couldn’t even handle carrying my baby to term?). Whatever. I was so fucking tired and just wanted it all over. I tried to open my heart up but it was still locked shut and I gave up quickly.

The next couple of hours didn’t suck so hard. The nurses and midwife told me I was having very regular, strong contractions per the fetal monitor but I (blissfully) couldn’t feel a thing. Then I started shivering. I was fucking freezing. They decided me and baby were showing signs of infection from my water being broken too early, gave me an IV of antibiotics, and took away all but one of my blankets. My heart was still closed up but I knew the end was near and the excruciating pain I had from Pitocin and no epidural was still so fresh that I was riding high on the pain relief.

I kept telling the midwife that I felt pressure and pain and an urge to push and asking her to check how dilated I was. The fetal monitor showed signs of distress, either too high or too low of a heartbeat (I can’t remember), and she refused to check my cervix because of the risk of additional infection. After however long, maybe an hour, I told one of my labor partners that it was too much and rang the bell. The midwife came, looked into me, and seemed shocked to say that the baby was already in the canal and it was time to push.

I don’t think I felt anything emotionally. I don’t know if I was high or dead inside or tired or what, but I just felt blank. Within a minute there were what seemed like a dozen people in the room ready to help me deliver. My SO was on a smoke break and ran up just in time. Some woman I hadn’t met yet was at my left, directing me on how to push. I gotta say, it felt unnatural as fuck laying on my back with my legs pulled up and a bunch of people staring into my vagina.  I wished I had been strong enough to not have an epidural and give birth in a more… wholesome position.

It was all over so fast. At the time it felt like an hour, but they told me it was less than 10 minutes, possibly even less than five, and when I look back on it I don’t think I pushed more than four times so it couldn’t have been long at all. After two pushes the midwife told me I could feel the baby’s head crowning if I reached my hand down. I did, and it felt slimy. But I also felt my heart open up a little bit.

He was finally out. He looked so much bigger than I had expected for 37 weeks. They sat him down on my lower belly and he peed all over me. Not like a tinkle, but like a massive pee. I giggled. I think I held him for a minute or two before they took him two feet away and checked him for what ended up being an hour. When I had envisioned this moment in the months prior, I thought I’d be outraged that the baby wasn’t placed right on me right away, but when I came down to it I didn’t care. I knew everything would be okay, finally. I could still see him. My labor partners stood at either side of his little box and stared lovingly at him. I reveled in how good I felt not having another human inside of me and watched them examine him and lower his temperature.

Finally, he came into my arms. I didn’t feel immense earth-shattering love like I had expected to feel, but I felt hope. So much hope.

This is my third attempt at a sentence. I don’t know how not to edit myself. Shame permeates every part of my being and I’m so exhausted from it. I view every decision I’ve ever made as a mistake and spend an inordinate amount of time every day building up the case against myself, the case for Shame.

Lately, all my fuck ups feel like they’re taunting me. It doesn’t help that, in the past couple years, my grave errors have become more abundant. I think I used to keep myself on a tighter leash, or, at the very least, used to be so busy trying to stay fed and housed and alive that I didn’t have as much energy to focus on the utter shame I feel for being fucking alive.

I have no idea how to relax. If I have something to do on a certain day, I just wish I could stay in a dark room all day watching NCIS. If I have nothing to do a certain day, I spend all day trying to silence the inner dialogue of, “I want to die.” I can’t fucking win, and I’m not even fighting anything. There’s nothing trying to fight me. It’s in my fucking head. I’m pulling one end of a rope to try and “win”, but all I’m doing is falling back further and further and further.

Nothing I do is okay. Nothing I don’t do is okay. I’m fighting against shit just because I think I need to be. I think I deserve to suffer. I tell myself that life is suffering, and use this to fuel my anger at being alive, but the sad truth is that I think life is full of so much meaning and beauty but I just don’t deserve any of that. It’s easier to be angry, to close my heart, to always find something wrong. I’m terrified to open my tightly clenched fist and try to feel any of the beauty that I see around me.

At some point, this tug of war against invisible forces must stop. At some point, I must stop fighting.

The impulsive, aching parts of me want to walk away from all of this out of spite. My ears are ringing from men telling me what I am, what I am not, what I’m capable of, and my soul throbs from the unfairness of having every mistake I’ve made held before me as an indication of my worth like it’s my fucking judgment day.

I’ve been trying to practice patience. But I have a limit. The strong woman in me says that it’s my right to put up boundaries and to be sick of being trampled, but the broken little girl in me says it is all my fault. I am pathetically insecure in my beliefs of what is “right” or “wrong”, I can’t hear my own intuition over the noise of my dysfunction. I miss solitude. I miss my home being as I left it when I went to work that morning. I miss hearing only my own voice, instead of all this motherfucking feedback.

A mother told me that her baby was *wanted*, that she hoped and prayed and tried to make this known to her child as the child grew. In the same breath that mother told me that if the baby had had Down Syndrome she would have abandoned it at the hospital at birth. I’m exhausted from the dissonance of hypocritical advice.

I never know what your mood is going to be. Whatever I do, it’s not enough, or right, in your eyes. At first I argued, defended myself. When that proved futile I started running away. But then you threw that in my face on top of whatever you were already “mad” at me for, and whatever small relief I’d feel from distancing myself from you temporarily became overshadowed by the bullshit that spewed over me, from you, when I’d return. Now I’m trying to be patient. Trying, probably failing. Why? Because THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU. I am not about you. My pain is not yours to capitalize on and my joy is not yours to burst. How am I supposed to be patient in the midst of being beaten down? All I can think of to do to fix this is run away for good.

I wish it felt like enough that I know my strength, my history, the loads I carry and my ability to keep moving forward. But when you’re moody, somehow you manage to take that away from me. I’m filled with anger towards you, and disappointment in myself for letting you hurt me. It’s a never-ending cycle and at the end of the day, it probably is my fucking fault. I have no social conflict resolution skills.

Don’t worry, I have just as much disdain for myself as I have for you. I’m an equal opportunity hater.

What would my therapist say… stay put and be uncomfortable, because as much as I feel as though I’m being crushed to death, it really is in my head, and I won’t be crushed. I actually agree with my therapist. I’m just overwhelmed by injustice and hormones and withdrawal and disappointment and the fucking heavy weight that is being alive. Fuck me, maybe I’m not strong. I suppose I mostly resent people calling me weak without actually identifying what *is* weak about me. Nobody likes to be misunderstood, misrepresented, misinterpreted. But I don’t have to take this shit on. I choose to listen to their opinions and I choose to accept their negativity. It’s a choice.

This is unfair. Being alive is unfair. Why the fuck am I bringing this curse upon someone? I probably am unfit. I never thought I’d be unable, or unwilling, to control my urges and my addictions and my outlets for the sake of a new being. And yet here I am, just as impulsive, if not more impulsive, than I’ve ever been… except this time I’m not the only one hurting from it. It makes me sick to feel, think, type out, but not sick enough to change anything. Because it all feels futile, and like a fucking waste, and I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m trying not to run. At what cost, though? When can I just give up and run away from this illusion? I’m tired of making mistakes and I can’t think of the last right thing I did.

You are in pain, and you are a hypocrite. You push people the way you despise being pushed; you don’t want to hear the truth, you want to hear an answer you have predetermined to be correct, and you won’t stop until you get it.

I was doing so well for a week or two and now, once again, I want to melt away and I blame you for that. I’m tired of the same sorry story, the same patterns of dysfunction, I’m tired of your demons.  I have enough of my demons. Yeah, in a perfect world, we’d help each other slay demons, but lately you’ve been drowning in them and refuse to let me help. I watch, helplessly, as you hurt yourself and hurt me, and I cannot do anything about it.

You didn’t let me sleep last night, and you don’t care. You were so caught up in your bubble of dark desires that it blinded you to the light that is our love. You set up roadblocks in your own path, ask for my help, then dismiss my help. You can’t keep fucking doing that. What you do affects me.

I want nothing today.

Today, I give myself permission to sit around and feel sorry for myself. Pathetic? Yes, especially when I type it out. But I need a break, a break from telling myself whatever I do is wrong or not good enough, a break from examining my broken edges and filing them down into pretty little rounds. I’m tired. My brain haunts me during the day, and tortures me while I try to sleep. There’s no relief.

If I don’t give myself permission to do nothing today, the hypomania will bubble over and I won’t be able to stop what happens. I’m scared. Every day for the past month I’ve fantasized about looking you in the eyes, to see if you know, if you understand, just how deep my love is for you. But you cannot fathom it. You’ve never been able to. You spent years telling me that I have no idea how much you care for me, but I did know. I don’t know anymore. You lump me in with the rest of your baggage, like everything we’ve been through together, all the words, all the unspoken words, mean nothing any longer. I’m drowning in pain.

I want to be content with what I have, but I never am. Will I ever be? That’s the worst question to ask myself. Today, I won’t ask. I’ll just be.

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.