Struggling With Life

I don’t think this ever stops. I think it takes control ever so slowly without you even noticing. Eventually, you’re caught up in this mess and it’s terrifying. You try to escape, but it’s too late. You can forget it for a while if you distract yourself. Nobody really considers the fact that, once your distraction stops working, you’ll unknowingly and unintentionally fall back into the same patterns you previously took comfort in.

It’s inevitable. You’ll go to bed one night without dinner. You’ll wake up one morning without eating breakfast. You’ll make one meal all day, maybe. You’ll sip coffee like it’s what’s keeping you alive, and you’ll smoke cigarettes as if you needed them to breathe. You’ll catch yourself scoffing at food. You’ll hear those long forgotten words dance off your tongue, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

You aren’t even trying. It’s the ancient battle between the urge to want and the need to not. Only this time it isn’t much of a battle. This time you’re hardly noticing the pain and protestation coming from your little belly because it’s a mental mindset that’s forcing every inch of you to believe that you really aren’t hungry and convincing you that you have no appetite.

You give in. You pour some more coffee, smoke and smoke and smoke. You wake up in the morning and your eyes sting from the hours you spent crying instead of sleeping. You wake up and move cautiously so that you don’t irritate the raw skin of your forearm hidden responsibly under an oversized sweatshirt sleeve. You go to the bathroom and stare blankly at the vacant face in the mirror. Dark shadows surround your eyes. Your face looks more pale than usual. You know you’re losing weight again because your face is thinner. You look dangerously intense and it almost scares you as much as the way you find yourself struggling to breathe and the way standing up nearly means falling down.

It scares you the way being weak at work and feeling dizzy behind the wheel of a car do. It’s an unsettling certainty that the unknown is ahead and it will surely be unpleasant and horrible. That isn’t necessarily true, but it feels like it to you.

Twenty-seven is the number of times you dragged the tip of that razor blade across the already scarred up skin of your left arm last night. Twenty-seven times, with the exclusion of the word ‘cunt’ carved into your upper arm. Twenty-seven, not including the five petty scratches from the night before that just wouldn’t stop bleeding (not to mention the four accidental ones on the tip of your thumb from hastily disassembling your disposable razor).

It gets to the point where you hate yourself so much it hurts. That’s easy to live with. When the people you love hate you too, that cuts deeper. It says that every worry you’ve ever had, the lingering sense of worthlessness and the constant self-hate, it’s all justified and reasonable. When those people can leave you the same way you’d leave you too, if you weren’t stuck being you, everything becomes much clearer.

The disgust you feel towards yourself becomes monumentally profound. You’re no longer any form of okay. You forget what happy is and how smiling works. Everything feels distant and unimportant. You want nothing more than to lie in bed and sleep for days. The thought of facing the world as this unlovable creature is daunting. It’s exasperating. Human contact makes you flinch. Communication makes it hard to breathe. You tremble at the sight of your shadow. Your hands don’t cease shaking. You’ve become your disease, and nothing more.