On Sacrifice

I want to hold you and kiss you and make everything better. Knowing that I can't fix things for you or help in any significant way--other than to offer my unconditional love and support--makes me feel like a terrible partner. But this isn't about me. I know this is my blog, and I can talk about my feelings all I want. I can say that I feel inadequate, that I wish I could give every penny I had just to make things right for you, that it hurts me so much to see you hurting that it's causing me just as much physical pain as missing you does. Maybe even more. Even if it seems selfish of me to talk about my own feelings in this situation, I know that the feelings themselves are the most unselfish kind I have ever experienced. I'm thinking so much less about myself these days, but not in a bad way. I'm making sure to have enough to cover my needs and plan a little ahead, but for the most part, all I want to do is help, comfort, soothe, and heal. This is the nature of the person that you thought had vanished a long time ago. But now that I've gotten that out of the way, for real, this isn't about me.

I promise that one day soon you will not have to worry about these things ever again. You will be able to relax--to not have to think about it every minute of every day. There are so many more things I want to promise you, if you will let me. I struggle with saying certain things here because I don't know what's appropriate and what's not, so I'm being intentionally vague.

So maybe it's better if I stick with my own situation in such a public domain. But your situation is my situation too.

The words are getting stuck. They want to force themselves out, but I am afraid. I'm not entirely sure why, but I am.

I'm afraid and nervous. I'm confused. I'm hopeful. I'm kind of excited. I don't really know how to handle all of these feelings at the same time. I am trying to focus on the positives in my life and look to the future, but the negatives still need to be addressed before that future can be fully realized.

I had a phone interview this evening that went very well, and I have an interview next Friday for a position that's actually in my field. Both opportunities are in Morgantown. I've looked into short-term/month-to-month rentals starting as early as the first week of September because I won't hesitate to move should I be offered either of these positions. Part of me wants to make the move anyway and do what I have been doing here should I fail to obtain either one: get anything in the meantime and just start saving for a better life, continuing to look for more relevant employment. I'm leaning more and more towards that. I'm feeling the urgency. I'll have enough to make the move and to be comfortable for about a month, and that should be more than enough time to get some sort of job, even if it is as miserable as the one I have now. I feel like this pain in my stomach would lessen a great deal if I could take that step towards independence. It'll be scary doing it alone, but I know that I have to, at first. I need to be the one that can provide that security of a place to stay and food to eat. It's my turn, and I don't want to fail.

I'm crying because I still want to give you everything and cannot. Sacrificing is hard, but not being able to sacrifice when you desperately want to is even harder. A lot harder.

I still have a lot to say, but I need a break. Otherwise, this is going to get even more repetitive.

THIS IS FICTION, AGAIN. NO TITLE YET

***NOTE***
This is a work of FICTION, though it is based on some events that happened in real life. I wanted to play with the scenario in a creative way. Some of these things happened. Some did not. Please do not make assumptions about which ones are which. Treat this ENTIRELY as a work of FICTION, and try to appreciate it as such. Thank you. Also, I get that it's corny and hastily written. That wasn't the point of the exercise. So back off. :P
***********

He sat with a fistful of shattered glass and broken promises, smoking the last of a pack of cigarettes he found a few hours before realizing he had no choice but to question his own sanity over the last several months and possibly years. He still considered himself a scientist, even though he hadn't seen the inside of a lab in about as long as he had ever worked in one. But he never mentioned this. When people asked him what he did for a living, he usually avoided eye contact and tried to delay responding with "nothing" for as long as he could. And every time he had to answer the question, another piece of him plummeted to the Earth, like a meteorite or confetti or that dead body in the movie Con-Air.

He wondered now whether that had anything to do with his current situation, but for all he knew, the broken glass he left behind could have been the work of a would-be burglar he had caught in the act, and the inevitable struggle would have rendered him a hero instead of the mental patient he learned to define himself as. If only he could remember how or why it started, he might be able to convince himself that his mind had a perfectly rational and reasonable explanation for choosing to abandon him on the most important night of his life. As he choked on the toxins making their way into his respiratory system, he glanced down at the white bracelet on his wrist. Some part of him believed that he would never be able to remove his ivory letter--not until he solved the mystery of what happened on the 5th of July.

The police told Benjamin that his husband found him lying in a pile of the collected remains of every glass surface in the apartment--from the TV to the coffee table to the vase that held the flame-colored roses meant to cheer him up on a particularly lousy summer afternoon. He didn't remember much of that conversation, or the one where his husband threw him out of the house for good without so much as a pair of shoes or a can of soup. Ben couldn't blame him. He cooperated as much as anyone could have with police officers with an apparent moral obligation to contribute to the degeneration of what little sanity or emotional stability he still had tucked away inside of him. He didn't know there were so many ways to call someone worthless in such a short amount of time. They must have a training on that at the academy, he thought. However, he refrained from making any comment at all because he, quite wisely, assumed that a mental institution was a far better place than prison for someone like him.

He survived his stay in the psych ward by writing letters to his husband--letters he could never send thanks to a hastily-filed restraining order that prevented him from making any contact whatsoever or calling 67 Hadley Street his home ever again. He wrote the letters mostly as a way to process his own feelings. The confinement drove him crazy, which sounds a little ironic considering the nature of the facility, but Ben wasn't the kind of man that liked to sit still. He was an avid runner, cyclist, weightlifter, and recreational athlete that had once had quite a promising future in athletics, until he decided to stop pretending to be a woman some years beforehand.

So he kept his pen moving when his body could not. He wrote until the cuts on his hands would start to bleed. And then he just kept writing, not seeing the use in clearing away the blood running down his fingers and pooling at the very point where pen met paper. Every word was still visible behind its rust-colored pond. The darkest ones seemed to be the most real.

You'd think that there would be more to Ben's story in the hospital, but in truth, he was tired of being on medication for problems he wasn't even sure were real anymore. He had begun to question his own reality in the weeks prior to the incident. He felt less and less like himself until his mind must have just let go completely. This was the best explanation he could come up with, and eventually, the doctors stopped trying to force the pills down his throat, and after some more time, they stopped coming to his room altogether. He was on his own, and he had realized that from the beginning. When he was no longer afraid of the withdrawal symptoms and could stop replaying his fantasy of blowing his brain matter into a Rorschach mural on the bathroom wall, he signed himself out of the hospital.

Two hours later, he stood 51 feet away from the very bottom step of house number 67, where he could still hear his 3-month-old puppy crying from behind the red brick walls. He knew he should have walked away at that point, but the thought of living without his dog--even on the streets of East Cleveland with winter approaching--was another razor-sharp shard of broken plasma TV resting ever so gently on his brainstem, having already pierced the skin, just waiting for the right moment, perhaps a twitch of panic, to make contact with the place that made him breathe. These were his thoughts, not mine, by the way. That's just the way he was. Everything was either dramatic or non-existent. No wonder.

At 33 feet, he saw his husband's car--or ex-husband's, maybe, since he wasn't really sure what the situation meant, though he probably should have been smart enough to figure that out, being a brilliant biologist and all. It was too late to run. He had already been seen, and fear of getting flattened by an F-350 with the redneck pride flag printed across its back window urged him to move even closer to the man who was more likely to have him arrested with each additional foot he advanced.

"You shouldn't be here."
"I live here..."
"Not anymore you don't."
"I just need some things."
"You can have your shoes. But you can't come inside."
"I...I can't leave. Please talk to me."
"I have nothing to say to you. Ever again."
"I just...Baby, please. I can't. Please talk to me. I can't do this."
"I don't care where you go. That's up to you. But you cannot stay here."

He didn't know what else to say. His mind was stuck in an infinite loop of can't-won't-scream-cry-panic. His knees forgot what they were designed to do, and he hit the ground hard, catching himself on more fractured glass than pavement, reopening wounds he thought were well on their way to healing. He lifted his hand to see that he had tiny pieces of mirror embedded in his palm, and at that moment more than any other, as his husband walked past him into the house without another syllable, he felt like eating his own reflection. One shard at a time.

He sat and allowed himself to bleed and cry until his body had had enough of these things, and around the same time, the screen-door skin of the house seemed to rupture, spewing out crimson bags of shoes, medicines, clothes, and the inevitable glitter-glass that covered everything on the property, inside and out.

Blood-red hands, blood-red bags, and blood-red eyes walked up the street, attached to a man whose body and mind should have stopped betraying him years before, if life were to be fair in any fucking way. (Again, his words. Not mine. Maybe he should've written this instead.) He didn't know what to do, where to go, or when he would ever find a place to call home again. But, for whatever reason, he walked. It might have been pure instinct at that point, his neocortex having shut down almost completely for the second time in an all-too-brief-yet-never-ending span of time. But had he not taken those first zombie-like shuffles away from his past, he would have never tripped over the chance to find his future.

Benjamin continued to bleed for a long time after that. I'm told that he and his husband are back together again and that they have a 3-year-old daughter named Annabelle. Ben's hands are permanently scarred, not only because of the initial disaster and the subsequent reinjury, but because, for a long time, Ben picked at his wounds until they bled just as fiercely as they did that very first night. He did this every day for quite some time, often without realizing it. And the day he stopped ripping away scab after scab was the day his husband finally called.

Tears fell to the pages of Ben's tattered journal as he listened to the song to which they danced on the night of their wedding, and before he hung up the phone--on what would be the anniversary of the death of their old life together--his husband didn't ask Ben to come home. He said that it was time for both of them to go home.

Sixty-seven minutes later, you could hear the makeup sex two blocks over. (What's another few dozen kids in therapy, right?) It was hot and sweaty and filled with all the best kinds of screaming and way too many different kinds of crying. And that's being discreet. I could have also told you about the biting and the scratching and the broken headboard and the various bodily fluids that ended up defying gravity in the end.

Marcus looked at the scars all over his partner's hands (and body), following the trail from one to the next with his lips, like he was sucking the venom out of a lethal snake bite.

"Your scars make you so much more beautiful," he said to Ben.

Ben smiled with tears forming in the corners of eyes that seemed to have aged a dozen years since the last time they shared a bed together. He spoke softly but with more conviction than he could ever remember: "So do yours. I'm just sorry that I had to be the one to give them to you."

"You never have to be sorry, Ben. I don't blame you for what happened. And it's like we said: We're both more beautiful for having these marks, whether they have formed on the body or the soul. I wouldn't trade these scars for anything." As he said these last words, he moved his hand right towards his partner's heart, just above the place where a new scar would one day form. And he knew he would love that one too.

"Do you really mean that? I mean, you know my mind wasn't in the right place when it happened, but that doesn't mean I am not responsible for so, so much pain in your life...And I can't promise that I won't cause you more pain."

Marcus paused for a long time after that. He breathed slowly, never breaking eye contact with the man whose stormy seas had made him such a well-conditioned sailor. "I never expected you not to cause me pain. That's kind of a given with marriage. But you were gone for a long time--long before your episode or whatever we want to call it now. I lost the man I married, for whatever reason, to a shell of a person that needed life support in a way that I just couldn't provide. It was killing me too, and saying goodbye felt like they pulled the plug on me instead. I felt like I said goodbye over and over again every single night when I had to crawl into this bed with nothing but an empty space next to me...It never stopped smelling like you."

"What made it stop?"
"What do you mean, Ben?"
"I mean, like, how did you know when you stopped having to say goodbye? How did you--"
"How did I know the man I married had finally come back to me?"
"Well...yeah."
"You found it again."
"Found what?"
"Your smile."

Missing Happy

It's hard to keep a positive spirit when, on your average day, it feels like you are being incrementally and slowly suffocated by a viscous black ooze--like melted asphalt stuck to the bottom of your shoe on a scorching summer day. On the worst days, you can feel it filling your lungs, hardening in your stomach. Trapping you inside. But you still have to keep going. You never know why. Maybe it's like drowning: We struggle to breathe not by choice but by instinct.

On better days, like today, I sit somewhere between misery and anhedonia. 

I'm going through the motions, but I don't feel like I'm really here. Everything, my whole being included, has lost its purpose. My life in is present state has no meaning, and trying to create meaning has been the biggest challenge of the last several months. I feel more trapped than ever. I feel more hopeless than I ever imagined I would. Failure, missed opportunities, stories about what might have been, wasted potential--these are the words whose images torment me all day and night. My heart never stops racing. I never get a break. And it feels like I never will. 

People keep telling me the same things. They say that I need a better attitude, which is probably true, but I've grown too cynical for that to come comfortably or easily. I'm suspicious of every near-good feeling I have, for an actual good feeling is hard to come by these days. I'm not sure I remember what that's like, though less than a year ago, I certainly knew. People also say that things will get better, that something has to work out eventually, and on and on. But I also know from experience that things don't change unless you make them change, and not every story has a happy ending. If life were fair, and we were compensated adequately for the trials we have endured, my suffering would have ended a long time ago. I'm not naive enough to believe that luck will be on my side. I seem to be the only one who understands that the longer this goes on, the harder it's going to be to get out of the situation(s), 

I've been floundering for years, and each day wasted adds to the misery of the next. I have started to fear that this is the new me. I feel like I have lost the person I used to be entirely. I'm losing the fight. I really am trying. But I am not succeeding. 

I've been to the hospital four times since September for psychiatric issues that progressed beyond my or my fiance's ability to handle them. And I really only left the last time because, upon admission, I was essentially assaulted by several staff members. (That's a story for another time and place. I'm not quite ready to reveal those details yet, as they still make me extremely uncomfortable.) It's hard to trust anyone. But I still keep trying. 

Even though I know that we don't necessarily get what we deserve, I still can't stop asking myself what I did to deserve this. Why can't I just be happy? Why does every inhalation feel like a stab to the stomach? And how in the world does anyone else live like this? And will this be forever?

And it might be. That's what terrifies me the most. I've tried almost everything, aside from ECT, which scares me. (Headaches and memory loss? No thanks.) If nothing works, the best I can hope for in life is damage control. What kind of life would that be? What kind of life is the one I am living now? 

I am almost never okay. Even less often am I happy. I don't know how to keep doing this. And the burden I place on those around me is getting to be too much for them to bear. I can't stand being around me. I can't stand how pathetic and whiny I have become. I can't imagine how my fiance feels, especially since he has his own problems to worry about. Real problems. 

I've shut myself away from most of my closest friends because socialization scares me more and more. I'm afraid to leave the house most of the time. I'm afraid of doing things by myself. I couldn't even walk to the hair salon at the bottom of the hill alone today. Things are starting to get much worse, even though they may appear to be getting better on the outside. I'm an expert at pretending to be okay. Since I can't actually be okay, I suppose it's the next best thing. I try to smile for him and show him that I love him every day. But I wonder if it will be enough. Some days, the other emotions overwhelm that expression. 

I am continuing to lose myself. I am again faced with the prospect of several days without him around, and I have no idea what to do with myself for 20 hours out of the day. And sometimes, I am paralyzed by my emotions. I am restless and apathetic at the same time. It's when I scream on the inside without being able to move all day. It's where I am headed at this very moment. 

I feel so left out. So left behind. This isn't me. This isn't my life. 

Yet, somehow, it ended up that way. I want to escape all of this more than anything. 

The other day, I felt like I had received a sign that I was on the right track as far as my plans were concerned. But those plans are ridiculous to me now. Medical school after all this time? How will I pay for it? How will I even be able to take the test and do well? How will someone like me who has nothing to show for the last four years of his life ever get accepted anywhere worthwhile? It probably isn't even possible. I'm drowning in debt as it is, so no one would give me money. It hurts to even think about this because that's pretty much what's preventing me from moving in any academic direction with my life. Am I going to be stuck getting 400 dollars a month from disability and wasting most of my life being in and out of hospitals? Who wouldn't be miserable in my position? All I want is something that gives my life meaning and purpose. And I know what that is. I know what's missing. I just can't get there. And nothing else is going to make me happy. That's the price I have to be for being as ambitious and stubborn as I have been. 

My life certainly didn't prepare me for this. I want out of this game. 

I can't remember the last time I had a decent day. It feels like all I know is pain. But I keep struggling. I keep going. And I am not proud of myself for that. I can't be. 

I'm losing my grip on everything. And I am terrified of the next time I can't handle something. Things seem to escalate each time. There is nothing more that I want right now than to run away. 

Things can't continue this way. I just don't have the strength for it anymore. My life has broken me. I really am just a shell anymore. A warm body. 

Today, I just really miss being happy. 

Quiet Time

Today I've oscillated between being full of energy and drive and being so completely engulfed in my own anxiety/misery that my brain decided being asleep for 17+ hours was a more appealing option than staying awake and resolving whatever issues it's been having. In the last several months, I've noticed that I have been falling more quickly from a generally positive state to a rather miserable one, and the fall has been getting harder and harder to resist. I'm running out of energy to deal with this, all the while still fighting increasingly debilitating anxiety and the prospect of maybe getting one meal a day for an indefinite period of time.

My brain is all over the place anymore. I can't finish anything I start, and sometimes the anxiety I feel about having to do something completely overwhelms me to the point where I don't even begin whatever it was I had planned to do. Big or small, it seems that any task is enough to roll this snowball downhill, and it starts the instant I open my eyes every morning and doesn't stop until I pass out from exhaustion, long after lying down to attempt sleep.

Mere annoyances have become triggers, and triggers have become automatic switches that send me from zero to meltdown in about as much time as it took you to read this sentence.

I've more or less lost whatever it was in college that kept me so focused and able to be so productive and functional. Granted, I wasn't the best at coping then either, but I thought I had gotten past all of this. I only know part of the problem, and I know nothing of the solution. My brain is already several steps ahead, and I really can't trick it into doing anything once it gets going in a certain direction. I don't know how to bring myself back. Most of the time, it seems completely illogical that any of these skills will work for me--since I know how they work or what the ultimate aim is--so I get more upset when someone tells me what to do to calm myself down, refocus, etc. I just don't work that way, and I need to find things that really DO help. Maybe some of the issue is that things that help other people actually make it worse for me, or they make it more likely that I will exhibit some sort of behavior or have an outburst in the future. I've never really had a good chance to analyze myself because once I am removed from the situation, the feelings get locked away.
Every now and then, I am able to access that information and translate into words, often poetically, and I gain a little more insight into the puzzle of how this lump of cells in my head works. Unfortunately, that little bit just isn't enough most of the time.

I was able to get a decent workout tonight, take a nice long walk home, and sit here for a little bit before the noise came back into the picture. I feel close to the words I'm writing, and the silence I've had has been helpful. My head feels a little less like a whirlwind, and I don't feel like I have eight TV sets to watch at once in my head while trying to navigate my way through the day. (Maybe just two right now.)

So it's clear that I'm depressed and that I have been for some time. It's also becoming more clear that it may not be depression alone, which would explain why medication hasn't ever helped that much. Severe anxiety, ADHD, bipolar depression, and the big one, of course. It's not surprising, but I always thought they were all part of the same thing. But now I realize that the reason I have never really been completely okay is that, at any given time, I am dealing with one or more of these things. Sometimes, I'm just fucking anxious. And sometimes, I just can't focus. And I'm talking can't focus long enough to finish brushing my teeth or get something out of the fridge, in addition to the more important tasks of everyday life.

I am unable to do this on my own, and I don't know where to start. And even if you told me, I probably wouldn't get to doing it anyway, which has become quite a problem for me.

The noise is coming back, and my heart is starting to race again. No reason, really. But I guess that means I'm done for now.

Cell phone post

This probably isn't the best idea. I just got finished writing a few pages by hand, and of course, it made things worse. I only ever write about the same things when I feel this way, which also makes me feel like my writing is suffering.

I really do feel like I am losing it. I'm a capacitor. And I can't hold any more energy. I'm overloading, and I need an outlet. But I need enough structure to stabilize myself before I can release this energy in any way that would be productive. 

For the last several weeks, I have been holding it all in. I snapped once or twice, but I haven't been able to really get anything out otherwise. I hold myself together because I fear the response I will get, I fear upsetting others, and I fear that, one of these times, I just won't come back. 

I just want someone to hold me in a way that makes me feel better. But anyone touching me at this point is jarring. Things are getting worse. And I need to stop lying to myself about it. 

I'm making myself sick with all of this. 

I need things to stop. Or slow down. I can't keep up.

I felt like I was really getting somewhere at the start of Christmas break or maybe halfway through. I am going out of town to visit a friend this weekend, and I don't know if I have the energy for that. Almost nothing in my life is restorative. Time alone doesn't exist. Control doesn't exist. I am trapped just as much as my brother. 

I cannot leave when I want. I have almost nothing to my name. I feel isolated. And right about now, I feel hopeless. But I'm here. And I guess that's what matters to everyone. Not how I feel or that I am losing my ability to function independently. Just that I am here. 

I love my family more than anyone will ever know. It will make it that much harder to leave. I would love to be able to spend time with them, but it's not even quality time at this point because I spend so much of my free time running away, hiding in my room, hoping to recharge at least a little. But I only get enough to just keep the power on. 

I love my family. But this is going to kill me. And I don't know what to do. Or maybe I'm just making excuses because I don't have a good reason for this behavior. Or these feelings. 

I really, really, REALLY don't want to have to have these fights with myself every minute of every day. The last two days of work have been seven hour battles with myself, on top of having to deal with a room full of severely autistic children. 

I just want to be calm. Anxiety isn't quite the word anymore. I feel like it is just pain. Anxiety, depression, fear, anger, etc. It's all the same at this point. And it's always there. I wake up to it, shower with it, get dressed with it, work with it, and fall asleep with it, when I can. Pass out with it might be more accurate. 

I am shaking trying to hold in all of this nonsense. My head is pounding. My stomach hates me. I feel so much trying to escape. I feel weak. Off-balance. Dizzy. 

And I feel like this is all I do anymore. 

Home Improvement

I'm prepared for this to be excruciating. My heart is heavy. My brain and body are equally troubled, tortured, and are becoming useless. No one ever wants this, of course, but I still feel the need to say that this is the last place I ever wanted to be, though I may have suspected it at various times in my life. Still, it's one of those things you never actually think will happen to you, like a heart attack or cancer.

I will interject with this random thought before continuing: I will never be normal. I just want to be capable. Regardless of success or failure, the latter is necessary for me to be (happy).

I don't know where to start, or how. I don't know why I am hurting so badly or why it happened at this particular time in my life. I am tortured by the fact that I need to know everything, all the time. That fact alone is not something a lot of people can quite comprehend. It's hard to understand pain you've never felt before. I suppose it's even harder to understand pain you've never let yourself feel before, for whatever reason. Maybe it was intentional or maybe it was self defense. I've been thinking a lot about last summer and how I could not see what was happening, and I have no idea how I am supposed to feel yet. There's a letter I never answered, and I am not sure I ever will, but the fact that I went back to refresh my memory should tell you something about the way your words have affected me and probably always will, whether I like it or not. Don't take that for any more than what it is.

For the record, "I told you so" is not an appropriate response.

I've slipped into something I haven't been able to control. I deleted the word "can't" from that sentence, so maybe even this is a start.

Transition does not automatically solve all of your problems, for those of you that seem to think unwavering happiness is the natural end to the course of events in the physical process. What I have come to find is that I am just now beginning to deal with problems I could not confront before. Your body tries to respond to the most pressing threat, and so does your mind. Transition was something that needed to happen in order to move forward with my life, and that means enjoying life as well as dealing with its unpleasantness.

It's become clear that I don't know how to do the latter very well. I ended up where I did because every coping skill that I have ever learned has recently failed me. Because I believed (and am still fighting against the belief) that my life--my job, my ability to deal with stress, my ability to be happy, my financial situation, etc--will never any better and that I will be stuck in this place of depression, anxiety, and limited capacity to function...forever.

I struggled to get myself out of bed every morning for weeks upon weeks, maybe even months. And that was until I just couldn't do it anymore. So I didn't. And I quit my job. But I had already checked out of doing things that make me happy because everything I love has now become everything I fear. I am stressed by everything, saddened all the time. Sometimes there is no reason, and this is something that I can't stand.

I spent three full days in the crisis center because I really didn't know if I could trust myself to be alone with me, and I really couldn't take another day of being home. I didn't move from my bed for almost two days, and I barely ate anything at all while I was there. I kept turning over the thought that this is how my brother might feel every day of his life, surrounded by people he cannot connect with and unable to do anything on his own. This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and it's only going to get harder. But it might get better. I'm hanging everything on that one little word, and everything in the logical part of my brain is telling me that it's a really stupid way to go about living. But clearly that part of my head has been sucking lately. Or maybe logic just doesn't have anything to do with it.

It's obvious that I can't hold a job right now, no matter how much I want to and no matter how much I need to have money. Sometimes I still don't really believe that this is who I am and that this is what is happening to me. The fact that I can't have a job right now is just one more thing that makes me terrified that I will never get out.

But when you are isolated for three full days, you start thinking even more. And that really sucks if you already think in overdrive all the time. But it's not something I was able to avoid. So I barely slept and I didn't sleep at all during the night. But I thought, and something in my realized that I needed to stop waiting for the people there to make me better. I needed to make the first move or I wasn't going to get anything out of being there. And I wasn't going to get out of there period. I could barely speak when people tried to talk to me, and I couldn't breathe or look at them, but I did what I had to do during those last 36 hours or so. I did it all because I just wanted to go home. And maybe that sounds stupid because you would think that I would want to get better. But going home was part of that. The fact that I WANTED something...That meant everything. That I was doing something in order to achieve something I wanted, and that must have meant that I thought enough of myself. That I thought I was worth the effort. And no matter how miserable or useless I feel, I need to keep thinking about that. There's a part of me that does want to be here, and it's the same part of me that wanted to get out of that place so badly. It's that part of me that wants to want to do things that used to make me happy. It wants things. I want things. I don't always know what they are, but that's everybody, I suppose.

I am terrified about the decision I might be making. It's something I had in the back of my mind, and when someone else made the suggestion when I hadn't even mentioned it at all, I knew I had to think about it again. PA school. And I'm still thinking. But another thing that's really tough for me, which I learned or rather re-learned over this past week, is believing and trusting that I don't need to know everything or do everything or have everything today or even soon.

I am allowed to be unsure. I am allowed to be unfinished.

I am 23 years old, with two college degrees, a beautiful transgendered body, a boyfriend who loves me for who and what I am, a clean and well-organized bedroom (thanks to the boyfriend who loves me), who is going to nationals for drag in a few months, who is going to go back to school, who is going to make big things happen in this city I've learned to call home, who is not going to let depression, anxiety, fear, pain, or a different way of thinking stand in his way anymore.

Now all I have to do is believe this. I will make this real.
I am allowed to be unsure. I am allowed to be terrified. But I will not allow myself to lose this fight. If I can bring myself to think that my body deserves to live, then my soul should have that same chance. Obviously, it's going to be hard. Here it comes again, and I think it's fucking ridiculous how it appears again and again throughout my life. It's like it should be a tattoo or something.

Nothing worth having is ever easy.