Reread old blog posts from 2007:
It’s all milling around and if I try to ignore it all I feel empty. I feel nothing. If I try to sort through it, I get this sinking feeling. I am equally divided between exact order and complete chaos.
***
oh mom call me, don’t you have some sort of mother intuition? Please oh please. Ask me what’s wrong! I need you, I am not ok.
***
I don’t WANT to feel like this; disgusting, ugly, helpless. But I do. I hate how it’s so hard for me to figure out how to pull myself out of these … lows.
***
Reread old blog post from 2014:
Breathe in. My lungs feel like ice. Underneath this skin is corruption. A tangled mess, burning and icy all at once. I cannot recall a time when I felt this empty. This sullen. This cold.
The air is heavy.
Detached. And very unable to land any reasons for this. It is quite peculiar to feel like this without a specific event to have caused it.
My eyes are deadpan. No one can read me. I am expressionless, this smile is forced. I can hardly stand to be this distant and glacial.
I can no longer separate the disparaging noise in my head, it sounds like my own. It is my own. I created all the noise, every last decibel. Optimism is lost somewhere in 2013, which already seems like a decade ago.
***
There are so many more words curated in previous blog posts detailing deep places of depression. Detailing sinking in feelings like quicksand. Detailing hopelessness.
I can no longer tell myself that this struggle isn’t real. It’s existence has been long-standing and harrowing. The lows historically exist; lurking in the darkest hours of the night repeatedly.
When I emerge, for long periods of time, I promptly forget it ever happened. When darkness returns I tell myself I am exaggerating the depth of despair.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I started going outside in the dark, alone, tucking myself behind the backyard wall so no one could see, knees to chest, eyes full of tears, praying to the stars. I’d start here:
Star light, star bright,First star I see tonight,I wish I may, I wish I might,Have this wish I wish tonight.