I was going to call my dad tonight, because it feels like a crying sort of night. But I forgot though that I don’t have a space to myself here and it’s freezing cold and windy outside, so I have nowhere to go to call him and instead I’ve been lying in bed running through the conversation in my head.
The phone rings once or twice, because that’s usually what happens. He says “Hello?” and I say “Hi, dad.” and he goes “What’s up, daughter of mine?” And I say “Are you busy?” and he says “I have a little bit of time/I was just in a meeting/I’m about to go do an operation” Which usually means, yeah but you called and when you call I answer.
This is about when I start to tear up, because I think about how stupid I am as a daughter to need this much help when my parents have already given me the world, and I wish I could tell him the things that are really on my mind. Instead I settle for “I don’t know what I’m doing here/I want to transfer/I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” And he’ll tell me to give it more time, to not worry, that I don’t need to know. I can hear the patience in his voice from 1,000 miles away, or at least remember what it sounds like. I can’t even call him, but the silence somehow finds a way to be patient too.
I tell him about the way I’m always having to deal with the things people say. I’ll ask him why people are so mean to me, why they always single me out, why I always feel like everything is revolving around me when I don’t want it to. I’ll ask him if that makes me narcissistic. He’ll say yes.
He’ll also tell me I’m a “very intelligent, very successful young woman,” and that that makes people more abrasive towards me. That always makes me feel better about myself, as untrue as it is. He’ll probably tell me he has to go after that. And I’ll say okay, thanks for talking to me. He’ll hang up and I’ll be alone again.
I’ll lie there wishing I could tell him the whys and the reasons but I never could. When things are good, things are fine, but when things are bad, I feel like a shell of a person. I feel like I am here, like I don’t matter here, like I don’t matter back home anymore, like I no longer matter anywhere. I feel like my irrelevance swallows me up whole, and all I need is for someone to reach out to me and, on most nights, no one does. I have to actively seek out help. When I feel I could barely lift a finger I have to extend out an arm, so that maybe, just maybe, someone else can catch me.
Is this what depression feels like? I have always wondered. I stopped thinking I had a clinically diagnosable disease because a lot of the time things are swell. I often wonder if it’s not a chemical imbalance, if I don’t have a disorder but instead I have grown accustomed to other people picking me up. Maybe after all this time, I really have learned helplessness.
I have learned to rely on other people to feel whole, and most of the time other people exist to do a lot more than make me feel whole. So I remain burdened by the weight of that constant feeling of being unwanted, in every room, by every person who looks my way. Those days, I want to recuse myself from the world, to slip into that place where I listen to flatsound or lana del rey and think about how baseless and dumb and utterly uncalled for my sadness always is.
“Lana Again,” I always think to myself. I wish listening to lana del rey didn’t immediately remind me of a time in my life that felt very similar to now. When I had some of the best times, but the bad ones were almost unbearable. I remember my father on the porch in the dark while I sobbed, my father driving the car the back way to Boulder while I tried to make him understand how damaged I felt inside. How can you convey a loss of your own body without saying “his hands” or “his fingers,” without letting your father know about how disgusting you felt. How do you ever learn to take ownership of your body when it has been taken from you time and time again?
I did not tell my father about the hands. I would never. I only tell him that sometimes, I want to call Kati. Sometimes I feel like Kati made the right choice. Sometimes I really do feel like this is the only universe in which I am alive. In every other version of the world I did not make it here. I have this weird feeling like, there is not a universe in which both Kati and I live past seventeen. I can’t even imagine what she’d say to me if I could call her today. I can’t remember the sound of her voice. All I can do is lie in the dark and think about where I’d rather be, and I sink further into the comforter when I realize I can’t think of anywhere at all.
The only place that comes to mind is a world where I am not walking through quicksand. One where being happy is effortless, and not detrimentally fragile, and where all the planets don’t have to align for me to feel okay. I want a world where I am not waiting for other people to hurt me, where I am not afraid to admit what I want or how I feel or what I think, where I am not afraid to try my hardest. If there is another universe in which I am alive, I hope that that version of me is living in all these ways I can not.
Contrarily, this is the version of the world where I can survive. And I’m very good at surviving. Surviving and being alive are two very different things, and sometimes, in this universe, the only way I survive is by not being alive. I wonder if it’s worth it.
So, this has ended on a very dark note. I don’t have much else to say, and I have a lot of work to do. Tonight, it’s starting to look like survival will be a large hot chocolate and the mindless sound of a keyboard.