darkness.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
i spend much of my time in darkness. inner darkness and outer darkness. everything is colored by the darkness inside of me. everything is touched by it. most things are absorbed by it. i don’t really know how to explain it, but i will do my best.
the darkness inside of me has been there for a long time. since i was about 16 years old. it could have been there longer, but the time i really remember realizing it was when i was in high school. it didn’t start out as the blackness that it has become. it started out as a dulling of color in my world. a graying out of things. a hazy curtain that dropped slowly between myself and the rest of the world. my first serious bout of depression. i was sixteen years old, i had just been sent back to boarding school for my second year there. i was a junior in high school, but i should have been a senior that year. i was held back a year when i was sent away. i don’t think it would have been that big of a deal, but one of my roommates that year was a girl named kim, who i had gone to high school with before being sent away. we were in the same grade, or we should have been in the same grade. i don’t know how she wound up at the same boarding school in colorado springs, but she was there, and she was my roommate, and she was a senior. she was a pretty girl, and her being there made things really hard for me. it was like my old life and my new life were colliding and i couldn’t deal with it. i slipped into depression almost without noticing it. there were other more complicated reasons for the depression, but kim was the impetus. i wound up trying to kill myself that year, and was sent home for a month. it wasn’t a serious attempt, but it was. i mean, i didn’t cut myself very deeply, but i don’t really think i knew what i was doing, otherwise i would have been successful.
regardless, i got sent home and that’s when the darkness enveloped me.
there were many things that happened during the month that i was home. i was treated like an outcast. my parents were furious with me. they sent me to my brother’s shrink, dr. white, who tried to drug me. when i refused to take the drugs, he was an ass to me and threatened me that if i didn’t behave the way he wanted me to behave, he wouldn’t let me go back to school. i think he realized that i would be more trouble than he wanted to deal with, because with only one session left before i was supposed to go back, i put on an oscar worthy act and smiled and told him what he wanted to hear, and he let me go back. many years later, after my brother jumped to his death off of dr. white’s building, the man was indicted for molesting boys at the california youth authority, but i digress.
the darkness was managed by medication for a while, and then kevin died, and the darkness took over again. and again, i became suicidal and was hospitalized. i lived in the darkness for a long time. self medicating with food and drugs. and then again, anti-depressant medication. a strict, almost fanatic controlling of what i ate (causing me to lose a ton of weight and keep it off for a good chunk of time), and falling in love with julie sent the darkness away. it stayed gone for five years, and then julie left me, and i was plunged back into it. i have to say that this time, the darkness was the darkest, and the despair and hopelessness at it’s most intense. and i have been there for almost six years now. there were brief periods of hope when i was seeing nomi, but then she dumped me and i haven’t been able to escape from the darkest depths of myself since then. i have been deeply suicidal for so long now. i know that i will eventually kill myself. and it might not be for a while, but i am certain that when i die, it will be at my own hand and not because of accident or natural causes.
i am holding on right now. holding on to sandra, and holding on to java, expo, nicky, and pj. but i am holding on in absolute darkness.
and everything that touches me. everything that i hear see and do is absorbed by the darkness. for example, monday, i was having a pretty good day at work. all of my consultations were going pretty well and customers were pretty ok, not too mean or whiny. and then my manager called me into the office to tell me about a horrible survey i got from a customer, saying that i was a horrible technician and a rude person and the worst person at the genius bar and they wished that they could have seen someone else, but they got stuck with me.
and suddenly, the whole day was destroyed. any good feelings i had earlier were gone. completely absorbed by the darkness, and all i could think about was what that customer had said and what a horrible person i was and how i was the worst technician on the team. any time i have any good feelings or any peace, the darkness eats it. and the darkness is always there to remind me of what a failure i am. it is always there so i don’t forget every single horrible or embarrassing experience that has ever happened to me in my entire life. it is there to tell me that i am a worthless piece of shit, and that no one wants me and that no one wants to hear from me.
and at the same time, it is like a security blanket. keeping me safe inside of myself. telling me that this is almost over and that soon there will be nothing. it is there, protecting me. i don’t know how to explain how it protects me, but it does. it is there to remind me that all i have to do is just be brave enough, just be strong enough and i can make it all end. i am trying to be brave and strong. i am trying to get to a place where i can make it be over, where i can close my eyes for the last time and never have to think about the darkness again.
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