I sent it in, but i don't expect anything

From The Vault

Ever since the day I can remember having my first conscious thought, I think I have been trying to convince myself that my family is normal, that I am normal, that this life I am living is not fucked up and everything is fine. I have been trying to tell myself that my life is going to be one big fairytale and everything will fall into place.
The thing is, it is not. Nothing is fine and my family is far from normal.
How do I know this?
In truth I don’t. I don’t know how other families work behind closed doors, I don’t know that the person next door is not as fucked up as me, all I have to go off is that stupid clichéd Hollywood movie, but I know that the life I am living is not at all normal. The situations I have seen are not normal.
I’m 20 years old, but I should be 80, I’m a definite ‘wise beyond her years’ type, an over thinker, a perfectionist, a dork, a loser, an optimistic girl who just happens to have to take a small pill every single day to make everything okay. You know, that one little pill that comes from the box labelled everywhere, “do not stop taking this medication abruptly unless advised by your doctor”, “prescription only medication”, “antidepressants”. People think that one word sums me up, they like to believe that I am only that word, that because it fits into a part of who I am, it is all I can be. it is a word I loathe, a word I try never to speak, a word that pretty much haunts me but is everywhere I look. Depressed, I have depression.
People like to believe that it means that I am sad. I am not just sad, there is so much more than just feeling sad that follows that word. It means something a little different to each person that can say they suffer from it.
I have spent the last God knows how long in therapy sessions, trying to talk everything out. It’s like trying to apply a verbal bandaid to everything. Some days it can feel like it is working, other days it feels like all I keep doing is talking shit and going nowhere.
I haven’t lived a traumatic, horrible life. I don’t have a sob story. If anything, my life has been nothing but easy, save the few awkward teenage moments, or an occasional character building moment.
I was never abused, never raped, I never witnessed anything truly horrific. How then can I explain this? When did it start? What caused me to be like this?
That day your parents yell at each other, screaming so loud you can hear it vibrate through the walls, you lay in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling waiting for it all to end, maybe that was the day it started.
The day your uncle called you fat, maybe that was when it started.
The Christmas you found out Santa wasn’t real. Could that have been the beginning?
Truth be told, it could have happened at any time. There is no way to go back and be sure that it started on x day at x time. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never know. No matter how much I talk, I will never get to that place of clarity. I will never see the beginning and I will probably never see the end. It’s almost like groundhog day in my head, a cycle of rinse and repeat emotions.
Sometimes I feel like a fake, I feel like I don’t deserve to be like this, that I don’t have the right to feel this bad when so many have it worse. Let’s be honest for a moment, my life is pretty fucking good. I’m not starving, I’m not being abused, I was never raped, I don’t have any children or responsibilities save two monthly bills. It’s not like everything in my life is horrible and has been horrible, therefore I am depressed because I have been through and have to go through so much. No, my life is easy and yet here I am, surprisingly still standing, barely.
How is it that someone who has so much less than me can struggle to remain alive but be going through life with a smile, yet I am here barely able to stand on my own two feet because of this overwhelming brick that sits on my chest?
I feel like I spend every day taking these pills, going through the motions, cruising through life, not experiencing anything truly. I feel like I am missing out, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to make myself get ‘into’ life. As if life is this ship that you jump onto and cruise away into the sunset. No matter how many internal ‘pep talks’ I give myself, no matter how many times I relive the ‘Rocky’ ‘Eye of the Tiger’ moment, I don’t seem to be able to get anywhere. I’m this girl stuck on repeat in a sucky made-for-TV movie.
I guess I am feeling like a talentless musician waiting for a big break so I can make it big. Only problem is I hate being in the spot light, and can’t for the life of me do anything other than feel like a worthless pile of shit.
Some people would tell me to shut the fuck up and stop whining, others would ask me how I have managed to make it to where I am. The answer is I don’t fucking know.
To the people that tell me to shut up, to not let myself be the victim, to ‘think positive’, to ‘make the change’ to better my life, all I can say to you is that you really have no idea. I have spent many nights trying to explain it to myself in simple terms, but honestly, unless you have been to these horrible places, and felt these insane emotions you will never understand. There is no bandaid solution to this problem; there is no way to turn off this negative cloud that follows me around.
I see myself as a failure, I’ve been in and out of university, in and out of work, and every time I get something good going I tend to fall apart at the seams. That or something happens to throw me off the rails. The stupid thing is, I am not a failure. I may have failed some things in my life, the odd test, a subject, but it doesn’t make me a failure. I’m still standing here breathing; I’m still getting out of bed and trying to push through everything to make this all work. That has to count for something right?
The only thing that I can say has been my constant companion, through the good and bad times would be music, and for the most part writing.
Music has that stupid ability to be able to sum up your emotions, your day, your desires in one melody, in one lyric. It can be anything from a ridiculous pop song to a classic. No matter the artist, no matter the title, any song can speak to any person at any time, and luckily for me, it was there when I needed a companion to help me not pick up the knife, or to stop me from swallowing the pills.
I’ve managed to come so close so many times. There are too many scary moments to relive and count. The thing is, I’ve survived through them and I can’t help but think I am better for it. I’ve hit rock bottom and climbed back up. One of my biggest fears is that one day I won’t make it back up.
"You sit by yourself, back against the wall, wondering how it came to this. What stupid little thing made it all come to this? How did it get so bad?
You were a happy child, always smiling, always laughing, but what everyone didn’t know was that it was all a cover. Every day was spent trying to make sure that everyone didn’t notice the dark monster eating you alive slowly.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because it has all lead you to this moment anyway. This deep dark moment, you’re sitting alone, pressed against the cold wall. Tears stream down your face, like they are trying desperately to get back to the earth, to get away from you.
Isolation is a one way street. The cold hard fact is that you put yourself here, you isolated yourself from everyone. But they wouldn’t understand would they? They don’t get it do they?
There is no comfort in this, sitting alone, crying to yourself, again. It’s pathetic, you’re pathetic and you know it.
Insecurities plague you like the flies in the summer; it’s hard to see a life where you’re not fighting to reach that pedestal that is always out of your grasp.
Your arms grasp your legs, pulling them against your heaving chest. Tears continue to run down your cheeks as you sob, like a child, desperately hoping for everything to just go away. There has never been a moment that you have wanted to be able to shut yourself down like a computer. You’re over thinking, over anyalysing, and there is no escape, the horrible truth is you can’t turn it off. You have to listen to every thought swarms around in your head, making it worse.
If it would leave you, if you could live without it, wouldn’t life be so much better? Wouldn’t you be able to live so much easier?
Right now everything is a struggle, a fight on a daily basis. Some days it is so bad you can’t even get yourself out of bed, other days you can’t eat, and then there are the days where you are so detached from everything it’s like you were never there anyway. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t see yourself living like this anymore; it’s just too much to take. Nobody wants to have to give themselves some stupid fake pep talk before they do simple every day things; nobody wants to be so unmotivated they can’t stand in the shower. It’s not living.
It begs the question; would everything be better if it was gone? Would it be better if you didn’t have to do it anymore? Surely the world would be a better place without you, there is no one who would miss you right?
Here you are, dejected, isolated and alone, crying to yourself, tears of pain that no one knows about, that no one will hear. Here you sit, gasping for air as your lungs and throat burn from crying, in the dark thinking of nothing but dying, trying to remove that invisible brick that is crushing your lungs and making you feel like you can barely move.
There are so many different ways you could do it, so many options. You could go for your wrists, you could drown yourself in the bathtub, you could jump in front of a train, take all your medication, it’s scary to think that all these things are running through your head. It scary to think that at the drop of a hat you could list a possible way to kill yourself. It is scary to think that every time you see a train approaching the station you watch as it gets closer and then think about how easy it would be to jump. The thing is, every time you’ve let the train go past, you haven’t jumped. Was that the right choice?
Life wasn’t supposed to be like this. You weren’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to get easier, you weren’t supposed to be another statistic, and you weren’t supposed to be someone who died so young. Yet here you are.
You never thought that you’d be the person who was the suicide risk; you never thought you’d be the person so desperate, so depressed that the only solution you could see was ending your own life. How pathetic is that?
You can imagine it all now; everyone apologetically dressed in black, standing around remembering what you used to be before all this. They’ll remember when you were young, when you were carefree. They probably wouldn’t know that most of it seems like it was a lie. Time will pass, and eventually they’ll forget.
So everything has come down to this moment, this one lonely dark moment. Is this the time when you call it quits? Is then when you walk away and say I tried? Is this the end of the story?
You’re so tired, sick of fighting everything, sick of not being able to sleep, sick of not being able to get away from your own thoughts, sick of feeling so useless, so stupid, so alone, so sad, so helpless, it’s not the life you wanted. It’s not a life at all is it?
But giving up now would be too easy; giving up now would mean that all the months of hard work would have gone to waste. It would mean that opening up to a complete stranger and spilling every little minute detail of your life in 45 minute blocks would be pointless. It would mean that the last 20 years had been a monumental waste. The next 20 could only be better right? The next 20 just might be worth living for, right?
It’s just hard to see anything getting better; it’s hard to think about life without feeling this way. Everything just feels hopeless and there is no getting away from it. It is a sinking feeling, deep in the pit of your stomach, taking you over slowly. It’s a brick weighing down on your chest and there is no escape.
Family creeps into your head, their smiling faces, childhood memories, everything that would make what you want to do hard, suddenly showing you the way that you disappearing might affect people. Suddenly it all doesn’t seem so easy to end. Suddenly you have people who would miss you, people who would be disappointed by you, people who you will be letting down, and it dawns on you that you’d be letting yourself down the most.
You continue to hug your legs, your tears have stopped and your eyes are drying. Tiredness is overcoming you, but still you sit there. Still you feel helpless; still you want it to end.
You sit there and let the time tick by, the time that you can never get back, but the time you don’t want to have. Slowly you fall asleep and your darkest moment fades away, you’re most vulnerable moment ends, you got through it. But it’s a battle every day, because your biggest fear is that one day this moment will come back, and maybe one day you won’t be able to turn it down."
Writing is a therapeutic outlet, I feel so genuinely sorry for those that don’t do it. It can be self indulgent, poetic, one word, a story, a sentence; it can be anything that helps you get out whatever it was that needed to be released. Since being diagnosed with depression, something I find so stupidly difficult to say yet it is so easy to write, I have written something every single day. I have kept journals; I have written whatever it was that was in my head, even if it wasn’t anything that would make sense.
Those two things are the friends I had at 4 o’clock in the morning when I was crying so hard I couldn’t make out any objects, when the blade was pressed flush against my skin, when I had the pills in my shaking hand. They were there when I was so close to giving everything up, when I was so close to being self indulgent and selfish, when I was feeling pitiful and helpless.
I have scars on the inside and outside of my body, scars that only I can see and scars that I can share. They are from every moment in my life, every sad moment, every happy moment; they are catalogued so I can never forget. They are there so I will always know where I have been, where I have come from, who I am, and just how I got to where I am. I need this constant reminder of who I am, because I can so easily find myself getting lost in the crowd.
As for normalcy, I’ve given up on it. Nothing will ever fit into the ‘normal’ category anyway. I am a loser, a dork, a whiny girl, a selfless idiot, an optimist, an over thinker, a perfectionist, I am depressed. The best part of it all is that I am me, there is no one else out there that is the same, no one. There is no copy and I am just as important as the person on my TV, I am just as entitled and I am just as ‘normal’. I’m not afraid to show my scars and I sure as hell am not afraid to share them.