I actually felt better today.
I had been reasonably well over the last couple of months. I did not ever expect it to last, but I certainly submerged myself in it.
Then I got sick again. It came slowly. Getting out of bed got harder than usual, I didn't want to go to uni, I didn't want to go out for fun. Then I got tipsy and the alcohol made me angry and unthinking. I ruined someone else's night, then cried with laughter after an unmeaning joke about jumping in front a train just to ruin everyone's night collectively. They laughed too, but the sobriety post laughing pulled at something deeper and that's when I knew. I had a pseudo disagreement with a friend and through forced laughter joking sat myself down at a seat on my own on the train, glad for the silence and isolation I needed to dam the oncoming flow of tears. And I let my sadness drown me.
Despite having a friend staying with me that night, I felt triggered and I wanted blood. Truthfully, it had been vaguely on my mind for weeks, possibly months. Ever since I abruptly forced myself to end a cycle rather than riding it out to spare someone I care deeply about the horror at its most grotesque, the thought continued to cross my mind. Not enough to urge me, to be a want or a need. Just a thought.
But that night it was a desperate, desperate desire. Despite the presence of a friend I sat on the bathroom floor and tried to help myself in the only way I know how. My favourite/least favourite part of the process is feeling better afterwards. But this time, and for the first time in my life, I only felt shame. I felt genuinely bad about it and I think that was because I knew, and truly knew, for the first time in my life that I would not be able to hide it. And I guess that's the only pitfall for me about being so intimate with someone. It's that I can't hide it and it would hurt him if I tried.
I have been asked, repeatedly, how I feel about my cuts and scars. And mostly I feel nothing. They're just... there. There in the way my pencil case is. Or that book is. Or that pile of clothes on my floor is. Feeling bad about it is foreign and unwelcome but as a week has now gone by in which I have continued to indulge myself, not enough to make me stop. I have to not want it, and right now I do. So not knowing how else to live with myself won out, the guilt/shame/array of awful feelings taking a back seat.
And that is how my week has gone. In seven days I emptied a box of one hundred band aids, last night I added twenty marks. For the whole nine days it has been? I can't even count. It stings and I deserve it. It's ugly and I deserve it. I feel a bit better, maybe I deserve that.
But this morning, after the best sleep I've had in two weeks, I felt better. Not great, but better. Today I actually woke up. It was sunny and warm and nice. I felt serene enough to be able to sit on the box housing every dark thought I have and not acknowledge its presence.
Though unfortunately my reprieve appears to be short lived. There is a solid ache at the base of my spine between my hips, a frustrating reminder that I'll never be healthy. But more so there is an emptiness inside me that I don't feel capable of filling.
I guess I'll leave you with that
- Sky
