ever since grade 7, my mom has been chalking up my erratic behaviour, claims that i don't 'feel real' and nightmarish attitude to hormones. hormones, hormones, the natural expected social script of hating your mom and everything, wanting to rebel, hormones, academic stress, doing too many extra-curricular activities, hormones.
i'm sure plenty of people who have had a mom will know that it's so annoying, isn't it?
i'm pretty sure that not every 12 year old cried literally every waking moment of Jesus camp, begging incessantly to use off-limits camp phones just to hear her mom's voice. I'm almost positive they didn't skip out on planned activities in pursuit of an elderly lady from the trailer park beside camp who 'understood' her, listened to her teary admissions and gave her shoots of lavender. I'm pretty sure not every 12 year old broke into tears at the culminating camp concert while preaching of God's glory because she saw her mom in the audience but couldn't hug her just yet. I'm pretty sure not every 12 year old wanted to go home and never come back at the mid-week camp parent concert. I remember crying through everything. people say that, but I was actually that kid who was silently bleary-eyed at dinner, choir... even while learning sol-fa at theory or examining the cycle of fifths with a genius 7 year old who really knew her shit. i remember laughing through tears at the absurdity of it, when people asked what was wrong. "oh, i'm just homesick. haha!". what was really happening was that i was experiencing the first crippling bout of depression of my life and being forced to recover from an eating disorder i was convinced i didn't have.
now, i'm sad to say that i'm the same old kid. only now instead of a weeklong summer camp, it's my entire life that i want to run home to my mom from. i live 'on my own' now. but i'm a mess. a fucking mess. i roll around in fetal position (because it's the closest an isolate can get to being cuddled) crying, dreaming of sprinting off my rooftop to a euphoric death, wishing my boyfriend knew just how fucked i was that i couldn't rub up against his hairy, naked body each night like a cat. to be fair to myself, it's been over a week since we've shared a bed, and after about 4 days, i start to feel an emotional headache similar to that same home-sickness i suffered so drastically at camp. almost a biological drive that makes me anxious, frantic and ultimately gnawingly empty when left unsatisfied.
Everyone feels like their story is unique; that no one else can understand the complexity and almost beautiful formula to their pain. and I know this is largely a cliche; that we all think we're the crazy ones, the ones who truly see and truly feel. and that's because, to us, we are. and i think this alone makes our feelings valid, no matter how erratic or possibly even deluded.
I've been to psychiatrists and i've struggled to decide what i want to have, what i want to be, and what i wanted to treat. because there is no fine line and there is no boundary. some days you have everything.
some days you have nothing.
illnesses i have lightly grazed, flirted with or fully had include (in somewhat chronological but more likely concurrent order) obsessive compulsive disorder (more obsessive; less compulsive), anorexia nervosa, rumination syndrome, bulimia nervosa, depression, (whispers of) bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder.
I've even been fine. but that was my own diagnosis, and only for short but unsustained periods.
i really do want to be fine.
i want to regulate my own emotions, be my own master, but i know i have to forfeit this power if i want to reclaim it.
i know in my core that i am ill.
that these relationships are all wrong, that missing someone so powerfully, dreaming of them for 2 full years, to the point of full-on depression, is unhealthy.
but that's the problem; i can't simply stop.
i can't stop using food as a crutch, as a drug. i can't stop bringing back up fatty, starchy, sugary foods to experience them again, and again, or perhaps to dispel them into the sink or toilet. I can't stop indulging in suicidal thinking, either literally or in terms of certain 'lives' i assume within my larger one. i can't stop feeling lonely, empty, devoid of any purpose, to the point where i can't sleep and can't stop thinking about how stopping every activity in my life (the good ones) is the only way i can really be true to myself. myself being no one. i can't stop feeling manic, feeling infinite, and then wanting to drop out, cut off my family, disappear. I can't stop crying in public or spurting out comments, always inappropriate, or hurting people.
it just seems there's no promise i can make anymore.
it's not that this is me, or the primary me, at any rate.
it certainly isn't and there have been long periods where i've almost thought depression or disordered eating had eluded me for good. i have gotten awards, taken on leadership roles, felt loved and accepted, achieved things that have made others envious. i have been an overachiever; someone who people have looked at and written off as someone that no one ever has to worry about because i'm just automatically on the right path to the right place, plodding along and staying true and being a good kid. i've been that kid, really and truly i have.
it's just that some of us really are sick. we aren't just doing this for attention or exaggerating the ups and downs of normal life. some of us really do feel alienated from everything in a big way; to the point where we cannot manage our emotions or cope with the simplest facts of reality.
and no one has authority, evidence or perspective to tell me that my problems aren't real. feelings, no matter their source or their context, are valid. and deserve, if not to be answered to and pursued , then to simply exist without condemnation.
i absolutely understand that every 20-esque human faces a ton of shit and has their own never-ending existentialist crisis of a life. i get it. i see that. but that doesn't make us all exactly the same. we are not all swept up in the same reified epidemic of apathy and quick-fixes and bingeing on everything. maybe we are, but it's more intricate than that.
the notion that unwell people have that they need to somehow prove the validity of their case by taking extreme measures is absurd.
to have or not to have?
i'm coming to realize that the choice is not mine to make.
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