Here I am

CW: mental illness, suicide, self harming behavior

This past week or so I’ve been building towards something, and I haven’t been able to tell what. I struggle to get up off the couch every day. Can’t respond to emails from friends. Daily headaches, overeating, craving for cigarettes and beer (I only allow myself the beer). Wading through self-hatred and emptiness and the kind of dread you feel when you really stop looking forward to anything.

But I have felt too like something is on the tip of my tongue.

It took me till today, when I was frustrated to tears by sitting in a room with H for two hours until he finally fell asleep, after a morning where a bad online interaction brought me to tears, to find what I’d been looking for. I’m depressed. Again.

Twenty years ago I attempted suicide. That sounds like a long time, but only in outside time. When you decide to live alone with a mostly-secret you really never leave its side. Dark carcass I’ve been carrying around. Or sometimes at night with my eyes closed — a small, night-black slip— as for a boat, one I can be carried under.

My dreams are full of bodies, lately. I’m sure all of us have these limb-full, crowded dreams right now. People holding H for me. My arm touching someone else’s, fat under skin milky cool, foreign, wanted.

I tried to starve my body, shear myself of it. I was an above-average success story, 20 years ago. Got into every college I applied to, won prizes, scholarships. Got to college and melted down entirely. I had no life skills, a traumatic and economically at-risk background, and undiagnosed depression and who knows what else. At the most elite college in the world I was pressed until I shattered.

The weeks before my attempt were full of drug use, staying up all night, skipping classes. Sleeping around, shaving my head to the skin 3am one night a few hours before I had to walk through the cold yard to go to section and do a presentation on Frida Kahlo. My high school best friend crawled into my bed one night and I punched him and threw him out; another night we did mushrooms and picked up shards of light with our hands. I lied to the freshman dean about being drunk at a party. I smoked cigarettes in my dorm room.

My dreams of studying with Helen Vendler, Jorie Graham foundered— I couldn’t manage to regularly attend the upper level Vendler class I was allowed into, and I didn’t get in to Graham’s workshop (my high school best friend did, though he went on to a Harvard MBA, and I’ve never forgotten). I couldn’t make it to morning practices for the water polo team I was recruited for. No one seemed to notice, or I didn’t notice them noticing.

The night I did it was a relief. I read from the children’s book At the Back of the North Wind, and like the main character bundled up in his hayloft then unmoored in the huge sky, I curled up in my dorm bed and emptied a bottle of trazodone.

Before I passed out, I called my friend D, who carried me to the student health center. I was finally being taken care of. A sort of elation, laughing with nurses about the black charcoal shit I took in the ward a few days later. I didn’t stay long enough. I remember lying to the psychiatrists. Being out was more important than being better. And I just put it behind me. Convinced everyone that it was behind me. Never called it a real attempt. Never believed it was a real attempt. For someone with no boundaries I capably compartmentalized it practically out of existence.

But the little slip is always waiting, the boat is always there, coffin-dark resting place.

I didn’t post here last week like I said I would. Because I can’t write about anything else, in any other way, but I’m supposed to be a poet. Because I can’t write about anything else in any other way but I’m supposed to be furthering my poetry, here on my little author page.

More than that, I’m supposed to be cultivating joy, gratitude. I’m supposed to be fomenting anti-white supremacy. I’m supposed to have gathered up the shards of my life like light and made something from them. I’m supposed to offer you beauty, joy, strength, wisdom. I’m supposed to be doing anything but living in this muddied up little boathouse of depression, holding myself under. Repeating myself to myself. But here I am, here I am, here I am here. I am.