Alone [manxman]

eighteen:: when you re-acknowledge the problem.

[ Sincerely, Yours by Ameer Vann]

EIGHTEEN: when you re-ackowledge the problem.

I woke up with resolution sitting on my chest. If my life was a best-seller, this would be the part where I -as the main character- would go through some sort of internal monologue. Maybe instead of the list being a suicide pact with myself, it would instead be a list of all the people that actually mattered in my life.

In that story, I'd have fixed my relationship with everyone around me, went to some therapists office and unloaded all my past conflict as I sprawled out on an other-worldly comfortable couch. This would somehow eradicate any future depression and I'd be cured to move on and maybe fall back in love with my soulmate or whatever the fuck.

But this wasn't a best-seller, my novels rarely reflected my own life and there was no all-knowing psychs or a magical pill that would... fix me. I was stuck in this limbo for the rest of my life, tethering between some artificial contentment and feeling everything all at once.

I wasn't the protagonist in some 13-year old girls' favorite young-adult novel and I would be like this for the rest of my life. It was just up to me what this was and what being like this would mean.

After my talk with Wren, I had a little air left to breathe. It made me feel... better, even if it wasn't much and not having to pretend to be okay actually allowed some of the tension to disperse. My head felt a bit clearer even if my chest was just as heavy and for the first time in a long while, a different perspective actually had some sort of effect.

Him caring enough to make sure I was okay sparked some hope in a place I thought it had already died and I had finally taken it upon myself to start writing again.

I'd forgotten just how much it helped, journaling out my feelings, hadn't done it in so long, I forgot it helped me cope. Maybe I needed to cope, maybe these thoughts that were swarming around would be easier to decipher when put on paper.

So I did.

I wrote poems, excerpt, some autobiographical stanzas. I wrote about everything wrong in my life, what I'd done, what others had done. I wrote about all the shit I never had the courage to face but would creep up at night once I thought they'd disappeared. All the pain, all the pain I'd inflicted all written down on paper and once I started I couldn't stop.

The first time I'd been able to string together events on paper, I found myself writing about college... how everything was so fucking hard all the time, how having a job and balancing school and my mental health all on my own felt like an impossible task. How it got so far and so deep that living somehow felt harder. I wrote about how living up to others' standards will never be easy and I shouldn't want it to be, I shouldn't have wanted to be perfect because I knew it would drive me insane.

I wrote about how insane it felt to live in my own body, how freaky it was that I was always trapped in there. I wrote about how isolated it was when the only friend you had was your depression and they didn't want you to succeed. I missed myself.

But I shouldn't have wanted to be who I was before the medication and the therapy because he didn't exist anymore.

I wrote about how he didn't exist anymore, about how sometimes realizing that put this feeling that who I was now was so tremendously worse... how one mistake turns into many mistakes and then you're sitting alone in a dorm, broke, and lonely with only your mistakes to keep you comfort.

And when those mistakes tired, I turned to meaningless sex with guys that I'd treat like shit, I wrote about how I treated everyone else like shit and I tried my best not to equate that to my mother. I tried my best not to blame my trust issues and insecurity and every fucking issue with love that I harbored, on her because it felt easy.