Warning for self-harm.
Back here again. Living with one eye green and the other blue, monsters swirling inside my skull. Daring myself not to sleep, encouraging bad habits because they make my actions seem normal. Make me forget the past and future so I can pretend the present is all that matters, remove action and indelible consequence and make matters right because they are simply as they are when I make them.
Let’s begin again. I squeeze the skin of my shoulder, bicep, trail my fingerpads over the goosebumps there and find the ripest, clench my fingers around it and squish. Almost always nothing comes out. When I begin it is easy, the ripe ones raised but otherwise unextraordinary, normal against normal skin – I do not care. It feels good to ruin, to destroy, to make white worms crawl out from the flesh neath, to compare the size to the last ones I found. Acne, it is called, but what is this anyway? Raised bumps that go away on their own, rarely the hard knot that also leaves by its own grace – none I find I let go on in peace.
I mutilate my face.
I am back here again. Verdant leaves of thoughts caress my face. I have been dreaming on the fly again, wishing I could write what I do not think, think what I do not write. Imagine an atheistic preacher who wears a heavy cross with rosary beads strung on kangaroo leather, bought over the internet for the cheapest price he could find for something that would not look like its origins – perhaps the memorabilia will make his faith come true, and he will never have to work again to prove his faith to himself. His god should arrive at any moment, his faith should be unskewed and solid in his body now that he has this anchor. I have a necklace with my name on it. Why am I not myself?
I am sitting cross-legged on my bed. I am on a couch, reading a book I was told was good. I am standing before a crowd I belong to by technicality, wondering why I am not standing in their midst. I am sitting at my computer watching lights flicker by, aware and not aware of the incessant sound of clicking that all not watching but listening through the door know means leave me be, I am indulging. How I wish it did not mean that, but it does.
I am beneath the covers. I am reading what I will regret reading in the morning. I know I will not stop.
I am in the bathroom mirror, picking at my skin. The flesh puckers red, swells up with blood: pus spurts out from the skin beneath my fingers, sometimes, but more often than not it is the dull pain and nothing more that greets my questing. I attempt anyway. I know this hurts me. I do not care. I repeat the mantra I learned to tell myself: This makes the problem worse. Is a small bump or a large red welt preferable? Turn away from the mirror; turn off the light; walk away and put on a shirt; you will thank yourself once the urge has passed. I do not listen to myself. I once thought I would make an excellent agent, back when I was a child and believed working for the FBI, CIA, whatnot would be cool; that they picked people because they were special and not because they were obedient. My reasoning – for I did have some – was they would love me for how I can remove memories from myself. If I do not wish to remember, then I will not. I can speak and hear and repeat back and remember none of it. Selective removal of self, surgical removal of the mind – noninvasive procedures of thought. Depersonalization, dysregulation. As a child I was like this by default, forgetting; I have long worked and been trained to have it the other way around: remembering all I can, absorbing each day like a hungry sponge. Outside of academia, on break between college and graduate school – more college, how can they teach us in a year and an internship everything there is to learn about being a doctor of the mind? Sans doctoral degree – I am always second place. Applied to the doctoral program, was told politely that I did not make it. Asked if I wanted my application sent down to the master’s program, was accepted. I get B’s in my courses no matter how hard I try. Maybe it’s because I don’t follow up with my professors on things I believe I should have received full credit for. Maybe I believe I deserve it. When asked what I thought my grade should have been, in a course ungraded save for a final assignment where we were asked what we should receive for the quarter, I listed C+, with the reasoning that I had only done the assigned work on time and the discussion boards to the amount required and attended the classes that were held. Average, nothing more. The professor gave me a B+ and did not ask me if I was okay. I should go to therapy. I do not have depression, nor do I have anxiety. I do not have a problem with compulsive gaming, nor general unhealthy dependance on escapism nor fear of driving nor sluggish, depressive paranoia that I will never amount to anything. I am not afraid of being an adult and getting caught up in the flow of taxes and rental agreements and utility payments and scrawls on cheques and filing papers and filling out dues and identifying bills among spam and calling people and writing emails that could be two sentences and a thank you but will be four paragraphs and a sincerely until I am withered and broken and on life support and having forgotten all my dreams because they died when I stopped having time to miss them when they were gone.
I do not need therapy.
I am sitting on my bed. I have followed the pattern from before. I have music playing incessantly in my head. I have eaten approximately four hundred calories in the last twenty four hours, and will not eat again until the morning after a bike ride to accompany my roommate to work and back again up a hill. I hate wondering why I am alive where that invisible timer will click over to thirty six. I have read until my mind was little more than grey fuzz keeping my body afloat in the cotton sea that is my memories, and I am submerged and drowning.
I have no reason to be miserable. I had a professor once who had had a rare brain cancer, a slow-growing type that does not metastasize easily. He told us that after the surgery to remove it, something he discovered of the human condition was that he could simply choose to be happy or sad or elated whenever he wanted. Yes, situations could compel him to feel a specific way, but anyone — anyone, he realized, even without the surgery (as the surgery had simply made it easier to do this) – could simply choose to be happy or unstressed or content with life. Nobody has any rules telling them they have to feel bad about things they have no control over. I will tell you a secret: I discovered the very thing he spoke of when I was twelve, or maybe fourteen. I chose to feel happy for a whole week. And it was beautiful, ecstatic, like MDMA. And with that I discovered the counterpoint to the argument that one should feel happy all the time: while it feels good, nonstop contentment makes Consequence leave the room. You have no way of being punished for bad behaviour, and you do not learn from mistakes. You hurt others, too, by refusing to play by the rules – refusing to show anything but what you bring to the world, not letting the world affect where you are in your mind – you become a ghost, a wraith, a spectre drifting through a world that sees you as infinitely strange because it cannot affect you in the ways it knows how. But as I grew older and worked into the routines of showing what I did not necessarily feel when I was depressed or apathetic or bored and could not show so, I wanted to experience it again. It is a child’s question: if you can be happy, why shouldn’t you?When I was a child, my answer was that it made the world not want to interact with me. Now, as an adult, the true answer: Because it feels good to feel bad, as then you feel justified in your behaviour.
I mutilate my skin with my fingernails. I sink the edges into the doughy pore-flesh of my face and scrape layers of dead tissue away until I dig down to living, and keep going. Filing down a lump that I could not squeeze the juice from. On one side of my mind I am screaming, no, stop, you are hurting yourself, you will look far worse in five minutes than you did before you started, and all the other side has to do for me to keep going is say, fuck it or just one more, for it knows — no I know, for I am myself – that once I begin I will not stop until damage has been done and I am unable to find further spots that satisfy me. You sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term consequences, says that side of my brain, and the other says, That is correct, and I do not change my behaviour because knowing a fact is different from utilizing it to create change. I do not need therapy.
I will go to bed. I will dream. I have evaded my fields of the mind as of late, but not as of always. I simply forget, or do not log them down. There is so much I must do before I leave for graduate school. I want to snowshoe again. I fear I will not have the endurance I did when I last did it, and will embarrass myself when I am a mile in and want to go home. It is many hours of driving to get there. What a horrible thing that would be. Worse, it could turn out that the experience is no longer special, and we went all that way for nothing. I am miserable. I have been for a long time. Therapy will not help me.
I remember when I wrote of a time that my own reflection in an unexpected and polished-to-invisibility mirror frightened me, and I confided that writing to a friend and they sent it to my therapist of the time who wanted to discuss it with me. I wish they had brought it up naturally somehow — ”Do you ever fear your own reflection?’ and then explaining how they knew after I answered in partial. I no longer shared my writing with my friend after that. She was not a friend. She was my mother. She is my housemate. She is all of these things. I fear people finding out because it is frowned upon in American culture for teenagers and young adults to live with their parents until they are situated, until they have a job that pays well enough that they can transition without going steeply into debt and pain and a whirlwind of bills and lifelong terror of living anywhere else because then they would have to abandon their current knowledgebank of the American financial systems and learn a whole new way of being. Freefall without parachute nor safety net. I am ashamed of my fortunate situation and I do not know if I should feel that shame, and refuse to ask or reveal and watch the reactions of anyone else for fear of regretting knowing. I wish I could confide in someone I trust and have an open and safe response that would not have the looming threat of hurting me where it hurts most. I do not need a therapist.
I have written nearly two thousand words this night. Two hundred more to go. I have feared for months, despite my writing during that time, that I have run out of ideas; that I have become like one who only says ideas and never continues or commits to them. Tonight I am writing to create content, nothing more; I am writing to get ideas off my chest, nothing more; I am writing to prove I still can, nothing more.
Here is the fact: It is right to live with one eye blue and the other green. I hurt myself because it feels good while knowing that I will be ashamed and disappointed in myself in the morning. The counter to the counterpoint from before is that misery breeds no future joy, and this life is the only shot at existing you have so make the most of it, and happiness feels better than depression. There are no laws saying you must feel misery in order to learn from your mistakes. Be like a dancer when you stumble, and rise gracefully once more. To stumble and intentionally crack your shin against the sidewalk to have a broken leg that will hobble you for months and years does nobody any good. Joy in living and in existing is the goal, and you are welcome to it anytime. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, dream often and record them for the sheer pleasure of knowing you did and looking back and seeing how all those tiny pebbles of dreams have piled to become a fantastical mountain of I did this while I was sleeping, and look at how beautiful it is up here. Alpine wildflowers of fond memories, soft tundra moss of nightmares spun by fantasy reminiscing on old haunts and worries made understandable by time and narrative. Knowing you came up with this somehow. It is a beautiful cycle. Midnight. 1:50 AM. Solstice.
I am no priest, but I wear a necklace with the name of my god on it purchased months ago in Hawaii when I faced a similar dilemma as I do now and which I have always had and which I will always experience: I am having a hard time writing. I think I am out of ideas. My old stuff is way better than this new thing. I have no new ideas. I can’t write anymore. I am spent. My writing career is done. I have a ring, too, but my ring is one bought for me by a dear friend who taught me the meaning of community and safe joy in being. Taught me to love my community and soft platonic love for another. I wear the ring and am reminded of the joy. The necklace was bought in desperation and irritation at myself, hatred for my ineptitude in a time when I should have been relaxed and happy. For as long as I wear it, I will be unable to move on. It is not the sole factor here, but its very presence is a reminder of how I once felt and is a roadblock in the miles of tyre-paced tar keeping me from entering the flow of writing. For creativity happens when self-check and self-criticism are inhibited; like someone examining their own daydreams, while this necklace is still on I will always notice myself entering a creative state and immediately assess myself to see how I did it, how I escaped the pit I have fallen into lined with jagged glass shards and pottery sherds – and thus I am stuck once more.
The necklace is not the source of my problems, but it is one. And writing is my therapy, for now.
Now, this night, before I sleep –
I get food
I put on my testosterone gel
I generate the momentum needed for tomorrow, so I may live life by cooking my own meals and accepting love for myself no matter what happens, whether I receive my wishes true or not I will thrive—
and now,
I take off the necklace.
…
and I am so much lighter without it. Nameless and free.
To bed I go. For sweet dreams and strange nightmares alike, for which joy is but another factor to move like an arm or a leg. I will love myself tonight, with one eye blue and the other green, and know that existing in contradiction is okay. Not everything is fixed immediately in life, and that that is okay. I will hurt myself again tomorrow, but the anxiety ebbing should help, and over time I have been getting better but have not realized it. Maybe I will even pick up German again. My thoughts come freely, and I do not question how I entered the flow state because my necklace is off and I am a serpent swimming the waters of a mangrove swamp and I shall dream beautiful dreams of kaiju and three headed fish and duro-crabs and I will be beautiful and strange and myself, and the tattoo I stole will be there with me too to remind me that I am an eternal firework and not to fear for the moments between blasts of colour and sound, for a quiet time is when I am gathering more for myself to shine all the brighter next time around.
I love you. Good night, and sweet dreams.
I was given the name Stygian Blue by a friend from Maine whom I will never know or speak to again from the distance that has come between us, and not just in space.