I don’t know what to call this
Today is a sad day. Since the hospital visit, I've learned how to separate the days: the good ones are mostly productive with a lot of goofing around and funny videos. The sad ones are just… sad. There are tiny parts that are beautiful. Moments where I forget that sometimes I feel my life is fucked up. I can't get a grasp of it. I don't know how the days roll into weeks and months and I'm still here. Alive. March 31st, 2024. 123 days since I last tried to kill myself.
I’m happy most times when I compartmentalize. My life is beautiful by all standards, and I’m doing well for myself, but as I told my therapist, there’s this ache. It echoes and echoes and echoes, and I don’t know if it would ever be filled. She says everyone feels that way sometimes, too, and I want to believe her. I want to believe her so much. And I also want to ask: when everything feels suffocating and you can’t breathe, what do you do? How do you deal with the echoing? Do you ignore it and hope it goes away with time?
I don't know.
You know, I lie on the floor a lot. When I’m having episodes, and I’m home—because I’m almost always home—I like to lay down on the cold tiles for a few minutes. It helps me calm down and remember that I’m alive and that whatever my life turns out to be is up to me. It reminds me of the good days. The really good ones where I don’t have to try to be normal. I laugh loudly and have a quick and witty comeback, and I feel good. I feel really good. Scratch that, I feel on top of the world.
But right now? Right now, I feel sad. I’m streaming Longer by Jamie Miller for reasons I do not know. Except that it’s stuck in a loop in my head, and it keeps bringing up flashes of memories. Memories of home. And of the girl who was brave enough to pack up 18 years' worth of her life and move to a new city to start afresh. Maybe the first year was so stressful that she didn’t pay much attention to how much she missed home. But maybe it wasn’t, too.
The hurt, the longing, the anger, the sadness, the grief, and the knowledge that she would never get her life back showed up in her poems. Her stories. Her conversations with people. It showed up in how she looked at herself in the mirror on most days—fear. And that fear was strong enough to keep her going; smashing milestones after milestones and sometimes making herself proud. On some days, she almost forgot that her life could be painful.
Group therapy at the hospital taught me about the power of the mindset. My mindset has undergone a huge shift, but I still feel like this sometimes. And it has been frequent since I got back from the hospital. But I understand grief, and I understand healing. And I know that we might never fully heal, but I hope that someday soon, it hurts less for me to think of these things. I hope my chest doesn’t tighten every time I think of home.
I hope that… I can live a life that is not painful. A life that doesn’t have me in tears on days I’m not compartmentalizing.
