Notes for N

A small, small man with a massive temper. The bigger the anger, the smaller the man seems. Over and over he said let's not let ego get in the way, which I took to mean we both have to bend. But ego isn't my issue and it never was. Now I clearly see it's his. What derailed it all was my depression, the antithesis of ego, the atomic bomb aimed against the self. We were collateral. Now, he sits in the dark like Gollum and harbors an unwarranted hatred against someone else's disability as if anything bad ever happened to him. Stubborn and angry and vile, like a jagged creature, this anger sits and seems to grow and all I can do is laugh at its existence. If depression is a thief by nature, anger is pathetic because of its misplacement.

I went to sit in the sunshine and learned to forgive in between the massive waves that rolled my body. The long, slow months of torment, the tormenter being my own mind of course, where every second I spent dissecting and stitching back up every moment where I could have done or been better, those months they ended and those tortuous and insidious thoughts just washed away. Mostly, I forgave myself. Incidentally, I forgave him. 

Then, finally, a response and finally, some closure. A small man with a mighty temper. An angry man with no reason to feel wronged. A pathetic thing calling others names. A big love turned sour, turned putrid, turned rancid, but not in my mouth. And in my stomach, in the sweat on my brow? Nothing but pity for this sad, small thing that I used to call lover. Once you see past the bravado and the masculine rage, once you know that there was nothing truly done against them, once you see in your hands the medical reports and the MRI scans that searched to see if the breakdown caused you any brain damage, and then see some sad small man asking for a pittance for a trip you never should have been on, then you see why ego is their problem and not yours. And then you forgive. Like the waves washing away marks on the sand. And you pity, because they choose to sit in such a transient state like anger.

I used to think he was the one that got away, but now I know he's the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. It sounds resentful, maybe even bitter. But it's not. Hurt people hurt people, but hurt people also cannot be understood by people who have never been hurt. Else, we end up here. He is small because he's never been cowed by big feelings. So when they happen to others, he takes it as a personal affront. Ego, he said. Ego, I now understand.

I was supposed to have spend the summer in New York. The love I feel for that place is something he never could get. Instead I spent my precious place between semesters schlepping around in a country I disliked with a man I didn't understand. It was fine. It was a time. I wish it never happened.

The first time I saw him, my thought was "That'll do." Then for months he hounded me like a bat out of hell and I honestly thought he was a pest. I disliked him. I thought he was shallow and stupid. I won't get into it again how I fell into that honey trap, but let's get back to how I crawled my way out of it.

Entitled, small, angry men. 

Bali was good for me. Sounds corny as fuck, but it was. For a while, a long while, there was this creeping feeling that I got where I worried that I would never be able to feel joy again. I imagined it like a massive centipede, its synchronous legs moving in waves up from my ankles, to my tailbone, then up my spine until it wrapped like a scared critter around my neck. That was the fear. What if the psychosis took away my ability to feel joy? MRI shows no brain damage from the episode. Okay, then why am I still without this key emotion?

Then I took a trip. Paid for by a friend, better than a friend. A person that I should have stuck with instead of letting this insidious man into my house in April. And joy crept back in. Wind and sun and sand and surf and joy. The breath I took when I finally realized that I was still capable, oh god I still hear the sound in my throat.

I get back, I get blue, I bounce back, I get better. Then I forgive and get told I'm a fly with no life by an angry and small man. I get blue. It's a crying shame, truly, that I can't even process this depressive bout without having to think back to him. I deeply resent that this hurt of mine, this illness, has been linked to this man, both in memory and in medical records. Something so personal, so mine, has to be shared with another. 

His anger made me feel sorry for him. Months later, he seems to be operating under the impression that I want him still. No, what I want is my illness to be just mine again. I don't want to share it anymore. I want to pry apart July and segregate it so I can find the pieces of myself I lost. I want to delete him and his horrors and take back my life. How difficult it has been to recover from this horrible low when I have him as a weight around my throat? I want it gone but it's been impossible to dissect the whole mess. 

The ego thing, let's get back to that. Months later and hearing someone say their eyes are so special, that they're owed your silence. The curtain pushed back and I saw the pedestal he put himself on and it made me laugh. He was so angry and I was just laughing and laughing. I'm not going to read this, blah blah, so much anger. I imagined him as a red-faced baby with a huge head filled with hot air and ego and I laughed. All that indignance, that entitlement, that ego. I feel bad for him. How sad to be so small, so easily affronted, so convinced of one's victimhood.

Now though, I realize I owe him nothing. The axe he tries to hold over my head means nothing. His anger means nothing. He has taken way more than he ever deserves. Charge by the hour and he'll be neck deep in debt to me. But I forgive. I'll always forgive. He will always choose to be angry. But he is so small he will never realize he has no right to be angry. I wish we never met, but I still wish him the best. He needs that, since he's the fucking worst.

 Perspective is everything. I got my right eye re-Lasiked back in July, but then the milky clouds of depression started setting in, blocking the view. Hindsight is 20/20 and so is my vision now. For the first time in months, this morning I woke up and felt like myself. Not wholly whole, but contained within my own walls at least. The day didn't feel like a day away from the loss, but a day away from the fall. Dreadfully, on the other hand, it also feels like another day towards what could be another spill, leaving my brain all over the floor.

Jesus what a weird summer. All my senses were firing off at full throttle. First, it was positive and I felt so alive. Sure, that was fun. But was the end worth it? Topic for another day. 

I'm terrified of my own mind now. I'm checking all the boxes to get back to myself. Exercise. Meds. Therapy, so much therapy it's burning through my finances. Seeing friends. Being productive, keeping busy. Trying out new hobbies. Focusing on quality sleep that never comes. It's getting better but there is this gnawing that keeps me up, wondering when it will come back. Why fight so hard to be the person you want to be when you can lose it all at the drop of a hat? I'm trying but it's incredibly more difficult to gain back your sense of self when you feel like a ticking time bomb.

The mental effort it took to pick myself off my bloodstained floors and go from self-harming, suicidal, and in an actual mental health facility to, in a week, attending classes and reading hundreds of pages a day trying to digest corporation law terms and Supreme Court decisions, it was no easy feat. In a way, I'm proud of myself for once again getting through it. But mostly, I am scared that it's just a matter of time before it all fall apart again. I fall apart again. Am I resilient in the face of a crushing disease or am I a wobbly Jenga tower just waiting for the next turn to collapse? Before I used to pride myself on how I picked myself up, but now I feel like a fall risk, a disaster waiting to happen and there's no way to escape or avoid it since it's my own mind that holds the gun to my own head.

This time was the worst time. I have never felt so low in my life. How can I trust a mind that broke so cleanly, that broke from reality, that betrayed me in the most fundamental way that what I was perceiving couldn't even be relied upon? My emotions, particularly the sadness, those have always been problem children. But my memory, my capacity for logic, my sense of what is real. Those never left me. I could always know what was happening and even if I couldn't control the reactions I had, I was at least sure things were real. This time, I fell apart so completely that all my systems exploded. My nervous system. My support system. My self-care. It was all gone. And the worst part is I can't even remember half of how I lost it all. Even when I can remember things, they're tinted with doubt. Did this really happen? Was this real? What the fuck?

I've stopped counting the days as the distance between when I lost the relationship to now I see it as space from when I lost my joy. But looking forward instead of backwards, I've started counting them to see how long I can hold it together, to try and notice if there's any pattern to this, some succession of years where I can predict it coming back. I can't go through this again. 

 What do you do when your brain steals away what your heart wants? Start a civil war, of course. For two monthis I've been plagued of war flashbacks of my own behavior ruining the best partnership I ever had before it could even really start. There is no end in sight and there have been significant casualties. 

On one side of the battlefield is a battalion of What ifs. Armed with hindsight, they take their aim and shoot at every opportunity I had to have acted better, held on to things that mattered, where things could have had a different outcome. If I had acted differently, not hallucinated, not felt like a red hot wound and ruined everything? Power weapons of psychological warfare. On the other side is my diagnosis. The war cry: what if what, what if I didn't get sick? What use it is to live in the trenches of blame and shame when medically, you weren't fit for battle? But the battle was started by the brain when that should have been a time of extended peace. Back and forth they go, my heart in the middle of their territorial dispute, aggrieved and wounded and bleeding. 

What do you do when your brain robs you of who you are so quickly, like a thief in the night, to the point when the person you love doesn't even want to talk to you? Death bells ring for both the person your brain let you be and the person your heart wanted most. In three weeks, everything was lost to the carnage and horrors of war. There is no point chasing ghosts, but what if they haunt you?

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Cold shadows are cast long over where I used to bask in the sun. That was all that was won in the war of my mind and my love, the indifference of someone who used to be crazy attached to me. In the struggle to rebuild, reparations must be paid but the price is too high. Stop saying please and sorry, it falls on deaf ears. Ears that couldn't care less if they never hear your voice again when all yours want is to hear just one more "babe". Or the way your name rolled out of their mouth. Or anything, just anything. I would take hate over this any day.

My brain may be afflicted with psychological cancer but my heart has been cursed. A weight sits on it that could make Atlas flinch. Cursed to be distant, cursed with an eternity of indifference, all as punishment for not holding it together for one month. A lifetime of remembering that brief moment in the sun. A forever number of forevers of holding on to a handful of memories until they're smooth like river stones but stab like knives. A heart full of blame that only aims inwards. My mind fell apart and in the aftermath, I couldn't find the one thing my heart wanted most anymore. There's no coming back from indifference. It's an eternal damnation to your soul. First, they don't feel sweet anymore because you've soured into vinegar, then they don't feel anything at all because you've continued decomposing and have now completely disappeared. I can come back to this, but part of that is accepting he'll never come back. The civil war culminated in an atomic bomb. 

 My world was larger before and it was mine, wholly mine. Now it's the result of some equation of loss. Then someone came in and it was the Big Bang and I folded into myself at the worst time, causing some stellar catastrophe and the worst implosion, so now all that's left is a void where everything used to be. Everything was just the fucking worst. A light has gone out in who I am and my soul is finally something I believe exists because what else could be the source of this ache I feel?

Here are my days: I can't leave the house still, barely seeing the sun, barely breathing anything close to the deep lungfuls of air I used to gulp down. Joy is a distant memory. I spend hours and hours just consuming media mindlessly because if I pay any mind to anything then I just feel the ache.

The tarot cards read you'd meet the One but I think they were talking about me meeting you. Some mystic miscommunication. The One who fucked it up and got sick. The One who can't even speak to her father or friends anymore because of such deep-seated anger for mucking things up when they were already so muddled. The One who carries shame on her shoulders and it weighs so heavy my neck cracks every time I try to move, but it could also be because I can only sleep on the couch despite the bed not even being a foot away because the memory of your body once occupying it makes it now a No Occupation zone. The One who lost the One.

Sleep can't even be an escape since for the first time in my life, insomnia has become a friend. A fiend, a foe. But I now know it intimately. We dance every night with the aches and every morning I wake up just devastated. Then I try again. Do tasks, life maintenance type things. Nothing big but it feels insurmountable, the effort needed to do what used to be easy. Possibly due to the medication, possibly due to the devastation. Then the anger comes again and I can't even reach out to my father in fear he may misinterpret it and cause more harm to go out into this world of mine already so filled with hurt. So I sit in it and remember that goodbye came even before then, that the loss of affection and attachment was due to my own unraveling, my unhinged behavior. So the anger turns inwards, cause Jesus why couldn't you just keep your shit together for a little bit? Some part of my brain kicks in and recognizes it's a disease, possibly even feeling resentment at having to go through the journey alone when he knew it was getting so bad for me. Then I press play on Netflix or some dumb true crime fodder just to quiet it for a second because this is a cycle that will repeat over and over throughout the day and I need a break. Get just enough reading done to passively participate in classes, but not enough and I know it. Leaving the house only for necessities, confined to these walls I can barely pay for now. Confined with my misery as the warden.

When sleep does come, it's fitful and filled with images of your face. I can't escape the ache of loss, the grief. Time has passed but it's getting sharper, not duller with every hour that separates us.

But who knows how long this will last. The Joy was momentary and now I have to remember for longer than I knew it. Perhaps this too will pass but at the moment it doesn't seem possible and my world is too small to accommodate anything else. I miss who I was in June, but perhaps that's the only version of myself I successfully did kill. 

 I've never been the subject of someone else's fear before. I've also never felt so much anger at those who care for me or so helplessly lonesome. Blame is a trinket that's easy to misplace. That was an easily learned hard lesson from that night, but digesting it now, really chewing on it the last few months has shown it's a many-layered jawbreaker that I can't help by gnash my teeth against. Who am I to put this crown of anger in my stomach on? The people who cared for me in such misguided ways, ultimately hurting more than helping by ripping apart the one thing I wanted most? Myself, for having a brain whose scaffolding collapsed? Or again myself for having cultivated a life where these situations could even happen? I'm playing a constant duck duck goose game of blame and anger and shame and guilt and it is driving me up the wall since it's just me at the end of the day holding with arthritic hands seams of my sanity together under this immense burden.

Forgiveness I can grant upon myself for falling apart. A medical condition. A diagnosis contained needly in a clinical abstract of my confinement. A treatable illness with specialized doctors ready to swoop in. Forgiveness I cannot allow myself to feel for becoming a monster to someone I cared so much about, even if I know I never wanted any of the Big Bad to happen. But when you know someone out there fears you, it sstarts to seep into your own bones and I'm beginning to fear myself as well. No matter my actions, my intentions, my being in and out of consciousness when all those damn great machinations decided to throw themselves into gear, was it not still just my presence, my being, my existence that caused anything to happen? How do you live with that guilt that someone else was caused so much pain, caused to be fearful? How can you process the loss, the anger, the loss over the people you are so angry at for acting like such idiots? I have no clue but every moment I feel more and more like a monster hiding under the bed, a creature of nightmares, than a girl and it terrifies me just as much. 

There's the selfish side where it's about me and these overwhelming feelings. But more than anything, it's the guilt and the shame to have hurt someone else. I don't want to be this creature but I am to at least one person. Doesn't matter anything else, in the end. Doesn't matter if I had a hand, doesn't matter if I tried, doesn't mattter that I hate it all so much it makes me want to vomit. It happened. That's all. Worse than anything I can feel about myself is this burden knowing harm was caused on my behalf to someone who didn't deserve it. I deserve no solace for righting the wrongs that never should have happened. All I get is this cold emptiness of knowing I made someone scared. I suppose that's the punishment and it's only just.

It's been two many months

 There persists this acute ache that I can't shake off, no matter what I try to do. Which is hilarious if you see me in person, since all I do is shake. The trembles and tremors have spread from my fingertips to my core, which is where I suspect the ache resides. Side effects of the meds. Main effect is I don't try fastening a garrot again and suspending myself from the pipes I so tantalizingly left exposed in the house renovations. But the side effects are I shake. I can't work. Can't sleep. God, I miss sleep. Typing this is blissful torture, since the shakes and the aches in my hands are the worst, but somehow all the ache inside me gets better when some words spill out. So let them spill. I'm already a puddle on the floor, what else can we add to the mess I've made?

School has been damn hard. Very difficult to focus on the words I need to take in when all I want to do is vomit them out. Side effect is maybe I don't get to be who I want to be in my life, but then again I'd be alive? The scales are balancing but maybe they aren't for justice. Main goals, unintended consequences.

I keep looking at before and after pictures of natural disasters. Deeply relating to the loss. The before and after. All the time that ticks by now is just the after. All I was before has been wreaked havoc upon or something wreaking something and I'm left in the wake. Picking up the pieces is the primary task, but things keep dropping since these shakes keep coming. Horrible violent convulsions of the mind and the body. Unsteady and unsure of who I am anymore, where before I was so very focused, so secure. Maybe the ache is for that comfort in myself? Maybe that ache is for what I lost? Maybe it's guilt? Maybe it's anger. Maybe it's fear, this terrifying fear that grips me in the night when sleep won't come that I'll never get back to who I was, to what I had, to anything even remotely like before. That I can't rebuild. Fallen to ruin, permanently, yet stuck living out the main effects. Likely, it's grief for it all.

Coming of age

In those films where the sweet child turns into this brooding new entity, I struggle to find things to relate to. I don't remember any transition. I don't remember any marked period. What I remember is being a child and then not being a child and realizing this so suddenly that I was not prepared to stop the fear from coming in through the doors. 

I often fantasize about my childhood. It wasn't a particularly good one, but it was mine. I also don't remember a lot about it, some suppressed memory bullshit probably. Perhaps the biggest thing I miss is not having people care for me and baby me, but having a self that I could turn to. Some identity, some assurance of who and what I am. When I was sad and young, I would cry. Now I cry and hate myself and hate myself for crying. Now some boy thinks I'm a monster, which is the cruelest thing to do to someone suicidal. Now, I get suicidal. 

When I was a kid my arms were smooth and soft and the skin was only marred by the occasional knick from playing in the garden and climbing trees. Now, I can't remember what it even was like to have no red lines running vertically up and down from wrist to elbow. And the raised ones, oh god they hurt when I stretch my arms out. And they itch. And they ache. And those are just my arms now. Not like when I was a kid, but at least for this one thing I do remember when the Before became the After. And the After stayed the Present and the arms have bled into the hands and if surface and aesthetic damage was bad, wait til you hear about the nerve damage. Never had those problems as a kid. But I suppose they were just lying in wait, patiently letting the years pass until it was time.

I hope to whoever that there's no After this After. I have run out of space to cut and run out of pain to bleed.

Baby steps

 So I got out of the psych ward, sat in the dark since the electric bill was inconveniently forgotten about, then I went out with my dog and fell asleep while these two brothers who make me laugh with their dumb accents went out to drink. The dog got hamburger bits, I got sick to my stomach from the damn vape pens. I spent way too much on dresses, new dresses, dresses I'll have first dates and new memories in. Cropped my hair so short you can see my scalp. Then today, today being day 2 since my release, I got a tattoo. It's a patent drawing of a Gatling gun. Been wanting it for a while but finally decided to pull the trigger. All in white. Then I had a job interview for another position in the United Nations.

Ratatatatatatat. Off she goes, spinning and running headfirst into the whatever the hell is next. The mind that never stopped was forced to pace the Makati Med hallway for the better part of two weeks and what do I get in the end?

I'm alone.

I had told my dad, that day, that I was going to kill myself. Hang myself. And he let me go home. Then he changed his mind and had a team of beasts steal me from my home, tie me down, and stick me where the sun don't shine. It's literally a fucking basement, there's no sun. My circadian rhythm has been all sorts of fucked (hence also falling asleep when the two boys were trying to be gracious hosts, but they love the beagle so it's fine). I told him also, that this, this choice he made, meant our relationship is over.

I'm already lonely for Christmas. For holidays and birthdays. I had one person in my corner always and now I can't stand to look at him. So I'm alone. Mind is getting better, I suppose, and the soul hurts less with each breath, though it still stings like a motherfucker. But there's nothing worse, absolutely nothing, than being sad and alone. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, and that just so happens to be myself so there you go.

Ratatatatatata. Gatling gun Ally continues screaming into the nothing. I want to avoid saying the void but then again, there I just said it. 

While I have no real scientific proof to back this claim up, I'm honestly beginning to believe there exists a real link between my orthostatic hypotension and my indecisiveness.

Let's lay out the evidence.

When I sit still for too long and then stand to rise to any occasion, all the blood drains from my head and goes somewhere I can't trace it to. It leaves me when I need it most (there's some deep sadness to mine in that comment, but I don't want to play into my own stereotype of sad girl too much more than I already have). Depending on the severity of the episode, my vision can swirl or simply vanish. But when the lights go out, it's not quiet and comforting like nights back home in Davao. There's nothing to see here, but everything is here. Rather than crickets, it's my own eardrums humming, humming, making they're own sort of music. Who knew tiny bones could be so musical? Who knew you could be made to feel so unwelcome in your own body by your own body? I like to think of my little glimpses into the darkness as sneakpeaks into my own skull. Something like a private tour I've gate crashed and now I can see my own inner workings. The buzzing of my brain cells firing off electric signals to each other.

But then my veins and arteries start working and the blood comes back and I come back to where I was, which is just me standing. It wasn't that great of a feat.

In terms of my lack of fortitude to make real solid commitments, here's what I've got. Listen up. Lend me your ears.

I've never been good at choosing restaurants. So please, don't ask me where I'd like to eat because first of all, let's start with do I even want to eat? Next, such a weighty decision (pun intended) is one I cannot make for another. The pressure! It's the 'pass-the-aux' of social commitments. This inability to commit to things, especially when my decision could affect others, leaks past menus and into every other aspect of my life. If I lived alone on a desert island, I'd be happy and I'd know my daily itinerary. But as sad as it is true, no man is an island and I exist in connection with millions of other people. In Metro Manila alone there 12? 16? How many millions of us? How can I commit to anything, how can I decide anything? How can I move past the fear that any action could butterfly effect and destroy something, someone, or everything, everyone? How can I forgive myself when I do destroy? 

Clawing my way back

It's been a hard damn couple of weeks.

Food, let's talk about food. My family would send me soup every day, all I had to do was go down to the lobby and eat it. The eating part was the hard part. Elevators helped with the first part. See, eating and I have a long and complicated relationship. An off and off again love affair. It's not so much that I dislike it, but I can't stand what it represents. If you eat you live, and well, living is a concept I continue to toy with, unable to commit. I'm a flighty, avoidant consumer. If I put this in my body, then my body will continue to exist and I'm still not fully sold on the idea that that's a good thing.

But we're trying. Hot damn, we're trying. Plural since it's been a team effort getting me back from the absolute hellhole breakdown I've been in the last few weeks. If I could list the things I've lost I'd run out of space. So let's just keep it brief and say everything. 

Hubris now. Let's talk about hubris. Damn, I was so confident in myself that I had it all figured out. On track to be a lawyer, damn good one at that, working high level jobs, high level competence, high level output. High level functioning depressive. Sneaky fuck, that illness. It crouched down and found me when my nervous system was all on fire with excitement and threw a plastic bag over my head. Suffocated me, suffocated the life out of me.

So if I'm so non-committal to the idea of living, why try to hard to get back from the dead? Good question, no answer. Maybe I just have nothing else better to do and I'm not that skilled at murdering myself. Many attempts, zero success. I need to find a new line of work, something else to put my brain to use with. 

Fuck these weeks have been hard. I don't think I've ever felt so low. Like gum stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe and then they walked in dog shit and then they dumped me. Fuck. Everything out of control and I hate that, since the food thing is also about control let's not forget that. 

Not sure where I'm going with this. Does this count as journaling? Does this count as therapy? Supplemental to the actual therapy I'm paying so much for. 

Anyway. I'm trying. Yet to see how it turns out, but I'm trying and maybe that counts for something.