Enitchi
Hot days + no friends = Mountain, meadow, sun, green tea, cigarettes, old books.
3/30/12
This is Alex! I love my friends because they are willing go along with my ridiculous impulses. e.g.) swimming in the ocean on a foggy night at an abandoned beach. I had to improvise a swimsuit out of my scarf (bottoms) and my bra (top).
I got a bit unstable at one point and I don’t really know why. I walked off by myself for a smoke, and after the fourth drag or so, something told me that there reason I was here is to swim as far off into the ocean as I could. My rational mind reminded me that my friends were only a couple yards away, and that it wouldn’t work. So I just sat down in the tide and let the waves crash over my head and the current drag my body around.
I was feeling everything: how my vulnerable by body was to the strength of the ocean, the sand scratching against my naked skin, the stinging current versus the cool foam, the numbness. I was observing everything happening to me externally, but my mind felt NOTHING. How?! I want this to stop.
On a lighter note, the only consequence I didn’t notice until much later was how much sand went down my ass.
I’m not sure how much I weighed two and a half years ago, but I this is probably less than what it is right now.
On the upside, I’ve lost almost 7 pounds now in the last two and half weeks!
My body two and a half years ago ——> My body after two and a half weeks. It deserves a picture.
As an alternative to cutting, one of my therapists once suggested holding ice to my skin. He said that the ice essentially burns you temporarily, causing a similar type of pain while doing less damage to your nerves. Obviously, he’s never been depressed before.
Anyway, one of my ex-boyfriends and I drove up Mt. Hamilton where there were some patches of snow. (So rare in the Valley!) We sat for a while in silence, smoked cigarettes, drank black tea. On the way down I told him to stop the car because there was this big, seductive patch of snow which reminded me of what my therapist had told me. I took of my shirt and laid there for a while. It hurt at first, but after that I felt warm. Same thing when I got off the snow; my back was tingling the rest of the way down.
Beginning of a minor mental breakdown two nights ago (while I was still indoors and coherent enough to take a picture.)
The presence of other people just seems to stifle/postpone it. When I do break down, I have to leave and be by myself even though it makes me feel so incredibly alone. It was pouring outside and I was drunk, thinking about walking home but actually walking around aimlessly. Eventually I climbed over a fence and sat under the stairs of an abandoned winery which looked like a nice dark and isolated place to completely fall apart. It’s always the same breakdown: occasion outbursts of crying, shaking, screaming, panting, but in the end it goes back to me being silent while a million thoughts expand in my head. The reasonable thing to do would be to smash my skull against the bricks and let those begging thoughts escape. But I’m unreasonable so I just sat there. Good god, I wish I could speak in a way that would make people understand.
There have been a hundred “tomorrow’s.” Not one has gotten “better.”
You see that girl on the left? She’s absolutely, completely gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s the girl I was living with before I had to leave school, and she’s my best friend of almost 7 years.
Like any relationship, we’ve had our ups and downs throughout those years. I say “ups and downs” for lack of a better phrase, although it doesn’t really describe what I mean. For months, maybe a summer, we would be inseparable; living in the same neighborhood made it easy. But then out of nowhere, it would all stop. I mean, we were still friendly, we would say hi, talk about whatever was in front of us, but it was entirely different. Seeing her each day felt the same as meeting her again for the first time, every day. I’m one of those girls who is closer to her friends than to her family, and I’m also one of those girls who only has one or two close friends; she means so much that silently losing her is like… wow, I don’t know. Can’t describe without using some long ass metaphor that will make me sound like a fat drama queen.
This post isn’t supposed to about me anyway. I know I wasn’t actually losing her and I’m aware that my feelings are always going to be stronger than the situation. So yeah, enough digressing.
Here’s what happened: I had a dream about her last night. I couldn’t have described this dream even if I had enough courage to write it down… therefore I don’t remember much of it except for this one scene. The gist of what’s happening basically goes that I drive back down to school one weekend to visit her. I walk in and the blackout blinds are pulled so it’s completely dark at 3 pm. She’s in the corner of her bunk bed underneath her covers, the air in the room is stale. She must be napping! I climb onto the desk and tiptoe to hoist myself up to her bunk to surprise her, landing with a bouncy thud. This next scene, oh god… When I landed, I saw blood everywhere. Her arms were stained with damp, reddish brown splotches. There was blood smeared into the blue walls and crusty chunks had congealed on her face underneath her sweaty hair which was stuck to her forehead. Her eyes forced themselves open and it was so apparent how much energy it took for her to even do that much. Her face was just drained, hollow. I recognized that look so well. Then, I saw her push the Xacto blades under her pillow, the ones I used to use.
In the past I’ve had persistent dreams in which strangers around me are dying but I can’t move, ones in which I have to kill myself in order for other people live, or ones in which I am dying. This dream was entirely different… In the other ones I felt numbness and acceptance, but I can’t piece together words to describe the feeling I woke up with after this one. Fear? Love? Hatred? Worry? Love. The sharp, dying kind of love. The terrible kind that enables a pious Christian husband to commit murder after he finds his wife brutally beaten and raped. All the vulnerability, all the hurt you’re susceptible to feeling when you care about someone, it comes all at once— the sharp, dying kind of love.
I will recover. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t get that exact feeling I felt in my dream. It’s knowing that what I do to myself influences her and everyone else who has told me they care: that’s the feeling I need to hold onto. I’m meeting with my new psychologist and psychiatrist today, and I am not going to lie to them to “make things easier”. I need to believe the things they say, I need to want this. What I do to myself influences the people who care. Hold onto that feeling, you can do this.
** Wow, I just realized this post is quite a contradiction to the quote I posted earlier from Anthro of an American Girl. For now, I’m just going to put that on my bpd. Impulsively changing beliefs, you know how it goes.
