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[nearaceln]

It was a terrible day. Everything that could go wrong, did so, in proper fashion. The new medication seems to make it harder for me to hide my emotional response. I find myself in peculiar places. For example: At my desk, where my boss has only seen me cry perhaps twice, I began sobbing silently. Hard enough for my makeup to slither down my cheeks, to taste enough salt to feel as though I was drowning at sea, to have a severe bloody nose- they’re so commonly stress induced these days. I thought taking out my nose ring would help. It didn’t. Now I’m just slightly less cool to the angsty teenagers, and still bleed from my nose like that kid on that popular Netflix show.

I pulled it together as much as I could. It was harder, as I was trying so desperately to find something willing to drag me away from the madness that kept occurring. Pre medical studies have a way of ripping your soul from your body and laughing about it. Every day there is a new complication, a new challenge, a new ridiculous rule or payment of a ridiculous fee. This doesn’t even touch the difficulties of the studies themselves. To admit you’re not good at something and force yourself to learn it anyway, hurts. It is pouring salt and tequila into your own wounds and demanding you swallow it down. So often, it comes back up.

After picking Sam up and eating some form of dinner, which lately looks like whatever I can keep down, I tried to take enough of my meds to calm the panic attack. It doesn’t work most nights, and it didn’t last night, either.

So, it was a dark night. I refer to them as dark because I can’t find another word for it. These nights resemble horror movie scripts. They feel like broken, twisted bodies crawling toward you. They sound like a shrewd screech. They feel like the early beginnings of winter, frost playing on your eyelids, blurring any sense of reality. One where I keep hearing scraping at the borderline of my brain, whispering from the tree line that no one would miss me if I were gone. If I just ran in there, curled up in the wood. The hollow of a tree. It murmurs a promise that I could find sleep there. I would just have to give some fragile, already tattered parts of me away, first. An offering that wouldn’t mean anything, since the world is taking from me so much anyway. It tells me that quiet would finally be real. That the hours and days would finally stop melting together - maybe they’re saying all together - I am too tired to care.

Take the days. Take the secrets. The broken parts of me. Take whatever it is you need. The truth is, while the world may tell you to fix the broken parts of yourself, I never will. Some things stay broken. Some things are meant to always be. Regardless, at the end of the day, they’re still just broken bits of you. If you focus on them too much, they’ll start breaking you, back.

To be clear, I do not suffer from schizophrenia. The voices I hear late at night are my own. I don’t know if that’s better, worse, or if there’s any difference at all, really. I suppose it makes it harder to respond? I would imagine it more difficult to tell another voice “no”, but when it is your own, reassuring you and asking sweetly for you to dissolve into yourself, how do you tell it that you cannot dive into the labyrinth that exists there? I don’t. At least not last night.

I wake with muddy feet. I do not feel better. I smell of earth and moss and sea salt. I have no more, or less, answers than when I arrived last night. Perhaps that is the way it will always be. I swallow my morning meds with caffeine, a ritual I’ve also no intention of ceasing any time soon. I try to remember last night. I wonder the next time that I will be the ghost haunting my own body. Wonder if I have finally given enough. That is the only thing I can answer with any form of certainty.

The trees. They will want more tonight, they always do.

[nearaceln]

The medication that my psychiatrist recently started me on, meant to aid in my depression, has caused my chronic insomnia to worsen to such an abhorrent degree that I find myself missing the former 4-5 hours I was getting on the prior medication meant to help the depression. The night shifts I work at my job probably don’t help much, either, in the soft defense of pharmacological distributors.

It is an odd sensation- waiting for a pager to go off, hoping it doesn’t. They don’t warn you that once you start, you will hear phantom pages for the rest of your goddamn life (seemingly; will correct if I ever stop hearing beeping that is not real).

I love my job. Well, I love my field, and I love what I do. The fact that my job has to exist is a cruelty. Peoples suffering could never make me happy (okay, perhaps a select few of those who have hurt me deeply. But those suckers have it coming and are unrelated to the folks I help treat).

Tonight a young-sounding 19 year old called. She was tearful, sniffling back something she didn’t want to (but also did want to) talk about. I won’t explore the content of her story, as it isn’t mine to tell, but I can say that the way I have learned to handle these calls is to tell the audience the things I wish someone would have told me, in this case, at 19. “It isn’t your fault. You did not deserve that. Not any of it. You sound bright, and kind, and even if you aren’t always, you still don’t deserve that. You are a person deserving of respect, kindness, goodness. I know we forget it sometimes about ourselves, but for a moment imagine you’re speaking to a friend. Would you tell them they didn’t deserve goodness? No. Of course not. Because it isn’t true. I am so sorry that those things have happened to you. It is not, however, a reflection on you. You’re here in spite of that. That is a power. It is a strength.” She asked “how do I fix it so I can sleep tonight?” And I rattled off some ideas like journaling things that make her happy. I added, knowing 19 year old me would think “this is bullshit”- “I don’t mean some cliche shit about your life, the world, or the future. You can write about that if you want. It’s your list. I mean…the sheets you picked for your bed. The way the first bite of an apple tastes in the fall. The sunset. The smell of coffee. The feeling of finally getting to take your bra off. Your makeup off. The view at the top of a hike. Your dog. Your favorite nail polish shade. Your favorite socks. Words you like the sound of. The meal your mum cooked the best. Your grandmothers hands. That stuff.” She conceded, and wrote some of a list that she planned on finishing. Before I let her go, I reminded her “you are only 19. You have not even yet met everyone who is going to love you - your kindness. Your heart. Your intellect. Your drive. There are so many people out there who will listen to your story and care about it. And the things that happened, they don’t define you. Your strength in calling tonight, does. Your willingness to be vulnerable, to stay alive, to write a list with a crazy lady on the phone. That’s you. And, for what it’s worth, I think it’s wonderful. So, while the world waits for the right moment for these people to arrive, you remember to call this line whenever you want. Seriously. I can be your temporary. And it won’t bother me for one single second. You’re not alone. I won’t let you be.” She ended the call by thanking me for my time and kindness, said she was feeling better, and that she was going to try to get some sleep.

As I hung up my phone I thought of the version of myself from a decade ago. She was so lonely. She lived in a one bedroom flat, had no friends, studied and worked, kept her head down. She would never believe that a future version of her could be anything different. And yet, here she is. Rather, here I am. Awake with crippling insomnia, still lonely at times, always keeping my chin up toward the sun.

I think of the home that I have built. I hear my husband snoring, finally resting. I look over at him. His mouth open slightly, brows furrowed, hair messy, one arm beneath his head and the other outstretched. He looks, in this moment, like I imagine he did as a young boy. I wonder what he needed to hear when he was; who didn’t say it to him; who did.

I have many dogs. Eight, to be exact. Having this amount of them means that at any given moment in my life I could easily reach out and Pat a dog. What a therapy I have unconsciously given myself. They sleep soundly beside me, so used to my insomnia that they only stir when my husband wakes up. Pavlov must have been right - my mental illness has conditioned not one, but a pack of dogs to not even notice the weight of a body being lifted off the bed, the sound of a door opening, the start of a car. I think of the life I have given them, and I know they have felt nothing but kindness. That alone seems intangible to me. A child of abuse grows to be an adult filled with enough trauma to make sleep a concept only read about, never experienced. An adult who worries at every moment when something will break; who hopes it is not her. An adult who knows how to hand out both cruelty and kindness equally well. Skilled tongue in both causing injury and kissing wounds. I choose kindness. Perhaps, just to be the opposite of my parents. Isn’t that what we all grow up wanting to be- just not our parents? Or perhaps because I know what it feels like to only be offered cruelty, and how small acts of kindness are but a candy you find hidden in your grandmothers purse after being told you cannot eat anything but cauliflower (By the way, I still hate cauliflower, mum). How you can suck on it for hours. While it doesn’t ease the belly cramps, it warms you. It keeps you alive for another day, hoping for another strawberry wrapped gift tomorrow.

I go pee, and I look in the mirror. I usually avoid this. My own reflection bothers me. I try to conjure the 19 year old me to tell her precisely what I told the girl from before. She doesn’t arrive. She died long ago. She resides in ashes throughout my bloodstream. Perhaps we are all made up of the versions of ourselves that could not survive.

The sun is coming up now. I look out the window of my home. Pet my dog (one of eight). Brush my fingers along my husbands forehead, try to comfort him from whatever nightmare is plaguing him. Admire him and the life we’ve built. My chin tilts toward the rising Sun. I have survived another night, and will survive another day, and I will once again choose kindness. If not for those in my life now, for the little girl residing in my veins who never had the chance to receive it.

-Ace