writing

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought, “I don’t want to be alive anymore.” There were days it was a mantra, especially in my older adolescence and young adulthood. Like I spoke it with every breath.

Just moments ago, I muttered it aloud and was struck by how much of an insult it is to God, my father of fathers. He brought me out of the dark, into His wondrous light, and I’ve spent my life begging him to let me die so I can go to Heaven. BEGGING Him. LOATHING the gifts He’s given me because it hurts to be here, because living hurts. I sound like such a child. I feel like such a child.

A week ago Friday I spent two hours in an orthopedist’s office… and only spent maybe five minutes of that time actually visiting with the orthopedist, who told me he didn’t think I’d had the sort of surgeries I’d had. The moment he said that, I tuned out the bastard, gathered my things and stormed out in as much a huff as my crippled legs could muster.

It hurts to live.

Where the hell did I get the idea that it shouldn’t? WHERE. THE. FUCK. DID. I. GET. THAT. SUPREMELY. RIDICULOUS. IDEA?? Because I look at the people in my circles and think it’s EASY for them? GOOD GOD, I’m an idiot. A petulant child throwing a temper tantrum. I had it in my head that at some point, things would be easier.

There’s a Hillsong Worship song, King of Kings, with the line: He did not despise the cross. I have LOATHED mine. I have loathed God for making me carry it. I have loathed life. LOATHED it.

The following is from texts sent yesterday to one of my oldest friends:

I feel broken in many respects at many times… That brokenness is evident in my physical presence–literally and figuratively… not just because of the maladies that have plagued me and persisted despite efforts to correct them but because of how I’ve handled adversity. I feel, often, that adversity has worn away all that is good in me, leaving the uglier aspects of my character raw and exposed. So when people talk about physical appearance being what’s shown of your heart, what of your character is reflected on the surface, when I say that I am not pretty… I’m not just talking about the surface, though that’s certainly one aspect.

There is such rage and impotence within me. I struggle, daily, to mask it. I think perhaps I inherited it from my mother’s father–he so hated that he could not be what he wanted to be. And, more, in me, there is such frustration that I have never felt a strong calling in my life, not one in which I had/have confidence.

I pray, daily, that the Lord would alleviate these feelings in me.

Perhaps this is why I am alone.

Ambition, purpose and a love for life are SUCH attractive qualities. I lack them all. I have no energy to cultivate these things because every attempt has always brought me up so miserably short.

All this is evident in me. I walk cloaked in despair with no confidence that I could walk any other way… because the cloak isn’t a cloak but a strait jacket. I am imprisoned in this body–doctors assumed at my birth I would be better off in an institution for people like me, and the older I get the more convinced I am that they were right.

All that said, I am FAR TOO focused on myself… like my grandfather was far too focused on himself.

Going to school felt like a death march. Coming home felt like a furlough. Every insult, every attack, whether orchestrated by a teacher or student, was mortar, the shrapnel chipping away at my sense of self so that by the time I was in junior high, I was a broken shell of a girl. First I let them destroy my self-image, then I let them destroy my self-worth.

I haven’t survived. I can’t even call this an existence. I wake up, and I waste time until the day is done. I take things to help me sleep… wash, rinse, repeat.

And before you say I should see a therapist, I’ve seen plenty of them. I know all the things. I know all the ways to combat this mentality. Depression is a lack of will. Anxiety is a fear of it. I am plagued by both.

My grandfather was groomed by his parents from a young age to become a surgeon. At some point I’m certain he was convinced he wanted this for himself. But his hands shook. He took medicine to still the tremors but became addicted to it. He drank. Once he had children, he hated not being the focus of the family. He could not change his circumstances so he drowned his sorrows in liquor and lashed out as his wife and children. He was verbally and emotionally abusive.

I have the propensity for this. Perhaps my singleness and childlessness is God’s way of ending the cycle… perhaps my parents’ efforts to steer me away from education was His way as well.

I have a heart for family and learning but the not the mind for it. And my body… often I feel as thought my blood is boiling and my muscles are cords of stone. Pair the physical sensations with the mental ones… it’s an ugly combination. It makes me feel ugly, literally and figuratively. And then I look in the mirror… and I see the ugliness.

I want to feel soft. And the only time I can feel that way is when I’m in bed. Or, better, when I’m being held.

When I say fear of will, I mean fear of choice, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of responsibility, fear of lackadaisicalness… it’s essentially fear of everything, but all things invoice choice of some kind. I fear the choices I will make will be wrong… so fear of will.

I’ve screwed up. I’ve blown the funds in my bank account. Pray, FERVENTLY, that I can be more respectful of and responsible with money. Pray I can grow up and stop spending it like a stupid child.

All but the last of the italicized paragraphs were sent yesterday… I’ve omitted her responses from the conversation. The last paragraph was sent about three hours ago. I had that glorious epiphany about insulting God about an hour ago.

No wonder I’ve hated life so… I can’t be trusted with His blessings. Can’t be trusted to appreciate them. Can’t be bothered to care for them. I see them as toys to be tossed aside when I’ve lost interest in them. Why SHOULD He bless me with ANYTHING? WHY should I get to see the glory of Heaven?

A long, long time ago I made a list of fifty reasons to stick around. And I wrote a list of fifty reasons not to do so. And BOTH helped me, yall. Both have been good tools for combating the crazy. But they’re old. And I wrote them in haste, without putting much thought into either of them. I did the different reasons list AFTER I’d written the live list, and almost every item on the different reasons list was the antithesis of its counterpart on the live list. Those lists… they need a little tweaking. So I am rehashing them for the current moods and madness with which I struggle. This is a hard one for me to write. I took more time with this one. I have to be in the right mindset, which at first wasn’t easy to do and I wasn’t sure I could find that place again, but that was the other day. I found it.

In reading this the mindset I have at the beginning, one of agreement, morphs into one of denial by the end. The Bloggess, aka Jenny Lawson, has said OFTEN depression lies. Here are the lies I tell myself:

One. You are broken. You were born that way. Everything about your body, your face, your brain is fucked.

Two. Your brothers got most of the goods: the looks, the personality, the mad skills. You got the scraps: the leftovers, the rejected bits, all the less admirable traits from your ancestors. The mad and the madness. You’re a spawn, a spore. There’s one in every generation.

Three. Six surgeries. Thirty some-odd-scars. And you’re still an ugly hag.

Four. And now you’re a FAT, bitter, ugly hag. FAT. Remember what that one boy said to you? How at the reunion, people’s reaction upon seeing you would be, Who’s that rolling in? Yeah. You don’t get to prove him wrong about that.

Five. No one will ever want to marry you because you’re too ugly and no one wants to wake up next to something that ugly every morning. You don’t get to prove him wrong about that, either.

Six. You should go kill yourself; you’re taking up valuable air and space, and there are more important people who need it. You should’ve done it. Those people could manage to make friends and live good lives. You don’t get to prove them, any of them, wrong about that, either. You keep trying, though. You keep thinking you have gifts. Oh dear heavens, girl. SCRAPS. You’re made of scraps!!! Gifts ain’t found in the junkyard.

Seven. You signed up for that socials site to meet new people, to PAY people to spend time with you. TO PAY PEOPLE TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU. Your friends don’t want to spend time with you. They don’t want it SO much that one of them suggested that socials site so you could stop badgering her to spend time with you. They WANT you to leave them alone. You’re one of those unimportant people, remember? They’re too nice, too GOOD to tell you to fuck off. And you should. YOU SHOULD.

Eight. Your own brother doesn’t even want to spend time with you. Seriously. You’ve seen him like four times since Christmas. And it’s NOT because of Covid, though he sure does like to use that excuse with you… it was like this BEFORE the virus… and THEN it was work. Ask yourself why he makes the excuses. He sure can find the time for quite a few others.

Nine. Mama says you’ve got that go to hell look patented, and you know she’s right because you can feel the fury on your face when you unleash that look. You boil over, Jennifer. ALL the time. You boil over because the pan’s filled with rage and hate. There’s no love in the pot to temper the heat.

Ten. Good men want nothing to do with you. The moment they figure out you’re off your rocker, they RUN for the hills. Can’t get away fast enough. The words… you’re a WRITER, and the words that come out of your mouth are RIDICULOUS. They say you’re intimidating? That’s polite code for YOU FUCKING SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF ME, BITCH. PSYCHO FEMALE.

Eleven. You don’t know how to love. That BSF Bible study group leader talked about what happens when the virtues are perverted. You’ve perverted ALL of them. A L L of them. There’s a place for people like you.

Twelve. How desperate can you possibly be? You love Aggieland so much, were so incapable of conveying that love to your parents so they could respect your choice of institution for higher learning and have regretted that inadequacy with every breath since, that you’d brainwash your brother’s children in their infancy to love that university so they’d decided by their tenth year that THAT’S where they want to go so YOU can live vicariously through them. WHAT BULLSHIT IS THIS?? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE LIKE YOUR MOTHER??? You HATE that she took choice from you! You’d want to take it from them? Those babies you say you love as though they were your own? IDIOT!! Why would you perpetuate that hell?

Thirteen. Must every other word that rolls off your tongue be foul? Really? Because girl… your mouth is essentially an ashtray. Your words reek like the trashiest of alleys.

Fourteen. When your parents pass, you will lose all contact with people. You will hole up in an apartment and play on Facebook… the modern day arena where Ms. Brill would watch her shows… Handy that she wouldn’t have to leave her house. You are JUST like that pathetic woman. JUST LIKE HER.

Fifteen. You spent thirty minutes writing about the lack of love, and half the words you put on the page were film quotes. You’d spend the rest of your pathetic life in bed watching movies because you’re too afraid to live.

Sixteen. You’ll NEVER write a story so good people would want to show it on a screen. And all you wanted when you were a kid was to win a damned Oscar. You’d make up speeches. WHAT A FOOL.

Seventeen. Everything you write is crap. No one’s every going to want to read it.

Eighteen. The staff at Pappadeux’s? They’re only nice to you because they have to be.

Nineteen. You quit smoking?? That was STUPID. You want a short life, right? Doesn’t quitting mean it’d last longer??

Twenty. Your teachers… how many of them hated teaching you? I bet it was a lot.

Twenty-One. Like school did you any good anyway. All that money your grandmother and great aunt left you so you could have a fine education, and you squandered it.

Twenty-Two. Every night, just so you can sleep, you gotta pop some pills. There’s so much ugliness inside you, the only way you can silence it is to drug it.

Twenty-Three. You like giving things to people, don’t you? Makes you feel better about yourself? They’re just things. And you’re trying to buy affection, just like when you were a kid. Remember the year you gave everyone in your class Valentines and got NONE in return. Yeah. YEAH. You sat at your desk staring at your pitiful, poorly decorated, EMPTY brown paper sack, waiting for someone to drop in a card, and NO ONE DID.

Twenty-Four. You BELIEVED Adam when he said you were gorgeous. YOU BELIEVED HIM. Of COURSE he’s going to say that. Boys will say ANYTHING to sucker a gal.

Twenty-Five. You’re too much like a boy, anyway. How could you POSSIBLY be GORGEOUS. GORY. GROSS. N O T gorgeous.

Twenty-Six. Haven’t got the faintest idea of how to be a girl, do you?

Twenty-Seven. Boys don’t want to get their hands on you anymore. Not the gentlemen. They never did. EVER. NOT ONCE. You were just there. Weak, convenient, lonely and easy… or so they thought.

Twenty-Eight. But you can’t even do that right, can you? So eager to play… but then you balk and walk almost EVERY TIME.

Twenty-Nine. When you finally said fuck it? You let a narcissistic, manipulative, emotionally and verbally abusive JACKASS have that card. You gave it to him in a fucking VALUE PLACE INN on the southwest side of San Antonio, in the damned desert, practically. Good GOD, girl. Talk about TRAGIC. SHIT. What a loser you are.

Thirty. God knows your parents would be better off if you weren’t here. They could’ve actually ENJOYED retirement instead of having to support their stupid, lazy daughter. They could’ve set aside money for their grandchildren’s education, but you’d rather rob them of that.

Thirty-One. Your brother couldn’t because he was weak. You’re JUST like him, in ALL the WRONG ways. All those bad scraps…

Thirty-Two. You signed a piece of paper twenty years ago. That doctor who made you sign it? He’s probably forgotten all about you. So many will…

Thirty-Three. And the debt. The goddamned DEBT you’ve amassed. STUPID GIRL.

Thirty-Four. You think you can sing? Bullshit. Your voice ain’t that awesome — ’bout as good as Marge Simpon’s. Look at all those times you tried to get up on stage. Your friends were in bands and never once asked you to sing with them.

Thirty-Five. It won’t be alright in the end. It’ll just be more of the same bullshit.

Thirty-Six. Those doctors in your infancy… they told your parents you would be better off in an institution for people like you. Those doctors were right.

Thirty-Seven. Your boss gave you a job because he needed a body–someone to occupy a desk and free the boys up from the incessant phone calls so they could actually WORK. He doesn’t actually like you. The hand!!! That face he made with it! I’m not talking to you. Shut the FUCK up. Answer the phones. Take the payments. Be QUIET.

Thirty-Eight. What good is a woman without a husband and children?

Thirty-Nine. Those prayer boards you’re fashioning… so you can have something positive and lovely and good to think on when you wake and when you sleep… You put little knickknacks and mementos on those so you can delude yourself into thinking people love you. IF they loved you, they’d not let you hide out in your room so often. If they were truly friends, they’d be FRIENDLY.

Forty. Jamie. Remember that time you felt bad that no one was at the other end of the pool cheering him on, so you went down there to be his cheerleader? You were the only one. Why would he WANT to swim toward that end if you were standing there screaming at him? Your interest in him was LAUGHABLE.

Forty-One. David. Three years you obsessed over that dude. THREE. YEARS. And I don’t know what he said about you to others, but it must’ve been ugly. And your fascination with him made everyone in that circle uncomfortable. Regina told you so. You should never have tried to be friends with them. You should never have thought enough of yourself that you could be appreciated by them, by him.

Forty-Two. Ben. He signed your junior high yearbook, “To the Love Doctor.” He humiliated you then, and yet, when yall were in college, when he roomed with your brother, you thought maybe he’d become a better person. He seemed to have done so. But you had to go and fuck that friendship up, and by doing so, fuck up his friendship with your brother. You drove two hours to go see about a guy, because, again, you thought enough of yourself… Cried the whole way home, and when you got closer to home, you realized you didn’t want to be alone, so you drove another hour out of the way to impose on your brother’s hospitality… You ruin EVERYTHING.

Forty-Three. Adam. Everything about that was a lie. EVERYTHING. Maybe if, just once, JUST ONCE, you’d been honest from the get-go, maybe things would’ve been different. But… you ruin everything, so… probably not.

Forty-Four. Tony. Everything about that was a lie, too. He was probably really good. He was probably worthy of your consideration. But… he bored you, and you can’t have that. Who the fuck do you think you are???

Forty-Five. Casey. You thought so well of him. A modern day Puck. He thought SO LITTLE of you. SO LITTLE.

Forty-Six. Gary. You thought so little of him. He thought so little of you. SO LITTLE. Yall deserved each other.

Forty-Seven. You should stop taking your meds and start smoking again and drink all the liquor and eat all the bad food… just get it over with already.

Forty-Eight. They said you couldn’t live, and you can’t.

Forty-Nine. They said you shouldn’t live, and you don’t. This isn’t a life, girl. This isn’t anything remotely resembling a life.

Fifty. They said you wouldn’t live, and you won’t. You’ll just keep writing the same damned chapters day after day after day… Who the fuck wants to read that? No one.

The trouble with going to sleep unhappy with yourself is that you wake up that way. Only it’s worse, because while you were sleeping all those negative feelings you had magically intensified exponentially so that when you wake the next morning you have maybe two hundredths of a second to revel in the glory of the sunlight and the comfort of your bed before your brain switches from automatic to manual.

And when that switch takes place… some days, nothing good can come of that.

On this particular morning, I woke at ten after seven. By fifteen after I was feeling despicable, and the feeling wouldn’t be shaken no matter how many times I tossed and turned or how much more deeply I buried my head to snuggle under the covers.

So then I tried to distract myself by watching recorded shows. Ones that had been camping out for months, waiting for me to remember that I actually liked them. I watched Three Rivers. Why I liked that one, I do not know. I watched NCIS: Los Angeles. That one I love. I watched the last two episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. These made me cry. Both of them. So much for distraction.

By this time it’s eleven or so. My head’s started to hurt. I figured maybe if I eat that might help so I all but hobbled downstairs to the kitchen (on days like this, mental anguish begins to take on a physical form, and all my joints hurt, especially my knees and ankles) to pour a giant bowl of Cheerios.

I camped out on the sofa and flipped through a dozen channels. First I settled on football. While last night, I might have succeeded, momentarily, in shrugging off despair with the glee of anticipating a fast-approaching football season, this morning football could not pacify me. So then I switched to What Not to Wear because I think Stacy and Clinton are cool. This morning, however, they annoyed me. So then I switched to Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader. No luck there either.

By this time I was crying again. I figured sitting at home’s not helping, and I have errands to run — money to deposit, bills to pay, vehicular registrations and inspections to make current, a vehicle to wash. responsibility. So I went back upstairs to change. I managed to quell the tears while doing this. but then, as I got my hair wet — because fine, curly hair never does well the day after — the tears came again. the more I stop and start this crying, the more despairing the tears are. I remembered I’d left my comb in my father’s car the night before. So it’s back downstairs to my parent’s bathroom, still crying. Somewhere between the landing and the doorway to their bedroom, the crying morphed into full-on wailing and misery.

Which morphed into wrath seconds after I’ve entered their room.

And by this time, by this time I might as well have been hunched in a ball in a corner.

Wrath terrifies me. Whatever strength I think I might have dissipates rapidly in her presence.

Tears that were once huge rivers became quiet streams that are more reluctant to flow, and I was chanting no, much like my then nineteen-month-old niece and nephew do when they’re crying and miserable. No. No. No. Scared. Because I never think I’m going to get through it when I’m in the throes of wrath.

But somehow I do.

And I’m grateful for this.

I rounded the corner, passed their closet, padded into their bathroom, still chanting. I rummaged through my mother’s cosmetics drawer for a comb and sat on the commode to slowly, slowly, run the comb through the tangles. Five minutes or so of this, and I was better.

Drained but better.

The trouble is, I didn’t indulge wrath.

Usually it’s better if I let her play for a bit. harder to handle. harder to live through. But better in the long run. Usually, afterward, I’m tired but nice. I won’t smile at you, but I won’t tear your head off, either.

I’ve got those errands to run, and on this day I wasn’t so sure of my strength so I shoved her back.

Somewhere between the time I left the house and the time I came home, I got ugly with cranky and snarly. So much so that by the time I got to the last errand, I was at the I’m-gonna-tear-your-head-off-just-for-looking-at-me stage.

When I was twenty-five my family went to Austin for the Fighting Irish versus the longhorns football game. A handful of my older brother’s friends met up with us. I’d been having a conversation with one of them — I’m a pretty sarcastic girl, and those who know me are amused by this as they should be because I mean it in good fun, but those who don’t aren’t so much. This one didn’t know me. All of the sudden he comes out with God, you’re bitter. I don’t even remember what I’d said that prompted him to say this, except that whatever I’d said, I hadn’t meant for it to be so sarcastic that it offended.

Flash forward. I thought of this conversation today. Of this friend of my brother’s.

Today, I was a prime example of bitter hag. Ugly with it.

This is what happens when I don’t give into wrath.

I bitched at an employee — an elderly woman who works in the floral department (What a lovely job that must be. Really. Happy and thoughtful) — for not washing her hands after using the restroom before returning to work. I snarled at the library staff because printing a single sheet of paper is more of an inconvenience and challenge than I think it ought to be. God forbid I should consider that they don’t have to offer such a service. I don’t have a printer hooked up to my mac. My mother’s printer, at the time, was not communicating with her computer, and my father’s computer was off limits so I had to borrow someone else’s. That it doesn’t work like I want it to do so was, apparently, a criminal offense.

The best example? I stopped by a courthouse, after having finally succeeded in enlisting the help of a reference librarian to get the damned proof of insurance card I needed so that I could get my registration updated, and had been walking, rather intently (in other words, in a don’t-fucking-talk-to-me fashion), when a woman had the audacity to smile at me and ask if I worked there.

What? (Said in the same fashion as I had used when walking.)

Do you work here? (She was walking toward me, still smiling, still being friendly. Curious. In need of help.)

I was wearing a T-shirt promoting a Grand Junction, Colorado brewery, capris and flip-flops. I looked like death. No. (Said in a what-the-hell-would-make-you-ask-such-a-stupid-question tone of voice.)

Now she’s not so friendly. Now she’s taken aback, and a hell of a lot smarter than she’d been a second before. she proceeded to tell me that the building was locked, that I couldn’t get in, that I was rude…etc., etc., etc.

The moment I heard that I can’t get in, I turned and headed back to my car. So while’s she’s telling me that I’m rude…

I could hear this boy’s voice in my head, just as I could while at the library. See his face just as clearly today as I’d seen it a dozen years before. God, you’re bitter.

Earlier that day I’d found a picture of me as a first-grade student. In it I’m sitting there with my hands in my lap, my arms pressed to my sides, my shoulders slightly drawn up. I’m grinning. beautifully.

I wish I could be that girl again. I wish I could channel her and infuse my present personality with a bit of the cute and funny my mother said I was back then.

I don’t understand why I have to hurt so much. I don’t understand how I could hurt others knowing how much the hurting sucks ass.

Originally published September first, ‘ten.