"Suicidal Patient"?! - 2-27-09

I went to Dr. Palting today. I’ve never been a “suicidal patient” before. It’s an honor I’ve managed to skirt. Not sure I like it much now it’s caught up with me. That’s how the nurse put it when she was on the phone making an appointment for me with counseling services. I overheard words I knew I would never forget, that dropped into my chest cavity one by one like lead musket balls: “I have a suicidal patient. She’s actually attempted suicide.”

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They are wrong, but I suppose that is just semantics. The cutting I specified turns into suicide implied. It’s all the same to them. I understand.

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But what a weight on me at those words, seeing the wary alarm in their eyes that I had wanted to avoid – this choice colors all lenses, tints all glasses that people will squint through trying to see me.

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I did not attempt suicide, nor have I ever, but it was close enough not to matter. Who would understand that my parents have chained me here with their blinding love to ever leave such an option open to me? Who can know that a couple of cuts and the soft thought of permanent escape is all I can ever have when it gets this bad? There are some times when thoughts don’t lead to actions.

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But oh, what anxiety is in me now at this label. And it is so ironic that life had begun to turn for me. The irony of my life will be the death of me one day. After Rachel called me and my dad spent the day with me the next day for Valentine’s Day, I began to feel normal for the first time in a long time. The numbness had cracked and splintered like a spring thaw. And in a whoosh, the writing I had been hunching over with all this pain informing it exploded to take the place of my burdensome reality, and all of a sudden it became my reality, my true reality. My writing was my bliss and I was good at it. It was my true vocation, my real job, and without warning, those loathed hours at school seemed to take on the look and feel of a thin, watery film I could poke my finger through. I had joy again, good feelings, certainty in my future. I was going to write and write and write, every night, at work, on the weekends. I was going to write because I had to. And wonder of wonders, I was able to go into work on Monday morning and all that week with a perfect peace. This was not my life. My writing – that was my life. I was going to get published. It was miraculous! All the storm clouds had split apart and the sweet moon was spilling through. I was happy. God, it stunned me. I even began to wonder if I needed to go to the doctor. Would I waste my time and money on medication I didn’t need?

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Then as if in answer to my query, last Sunday night, I had a startling drop into the old dread at the thought of going in the next day and deal with all the behaviors and all the work and all the crap. It took my breath away because it was so unexpected. I gasped with the sudden tears because I had been so certain that I had had more than a week in me. And where before I hadn’t journaled to chronicle this miracle because I was too busy writing stories, now I walked past my journal because I didn’t want to have to write of that glorious change in the past tense.

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I calmed down and my chest unclenched but it answered my question. I couldn’t trust any unaided good feelings in the maelstrom I was navigating through.

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So I kept on with my writing, having to take a couple of days away from it to just watch a movie and cross-stitch, because as lovely as my second job was, I was still working two jobs. And I put in leave for today’s doctor’s appointment. Good thing I didn’t take a half-day. I’m between appointments now, scribbling away with a heavy heart before my emergency counseling appointment. At least it’s a woman I’m seeing. I just don’t want to have to unearth my whole dating history and mindset and motivations like I did with Dr. Rabinowitz. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Not that I mind the subject matter – it’s just so complicated, I’d have to untangle it for someone outside my own head. But it’s a big part of it. While I think it might be a relieving thing to tell someone everything, I sigh inwardly and gird my loins. I am a suicidal patient after all. I wonder if I should have just lied about the cutting to the nurse and Dr. Palting. I hate to lie; it itches, sits wrong on my skin. But honestly is sticky – I’ve been burned before by it. I truly think if I just got the medication I’d be fine. I don’t think I need counseling. But it’s out of my hands now, isn’t it?

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I had just been starting to feel normal again, not so broken anymore. I have been emailing with this guy on Match.com, with dad giddy over my shoulder. He makes me laugh in his emails and he doesn’t make me nervous. And when I feel broken, I just don’t see how I get started with him. When I feel normal and just ready to feel good and all my defenses are gone, I don’t feel any anxiety about him. He may be the One, he may not. I’m not thinking ahead. I just want someone to make me feel good, feel safe. You make me feel good, I’m yours. Simple as that. But now, this thing is hanging over me, this label, this diagnosis or whatever it is. And again I wonder if any man would want someone with these scars?

Visualization Entry - Hey, You - 2-27-09

Hey, you. I’m so glad to see you, to feel things I feel when I’m close to you. You’re here with me, and it’s all all right. My bones are loose and my muscles slack. My walls are rubble around me and it feels so nice. I’m here, with you, and it’s all all right. You make me feel good. I’m not broken with you. You see me, more of me each day, and make me feel so safe with your eyes on me. I’m floating free, no longer holding my limbs close to my body, no more defenses. You see everything and you’re still there. You don’t see anything wrong with me, no broken toy soldier but a lovely china doll. I’m lovely and seamless and whole, and I’m here with you.

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My eyes rest on you, on your sweet face, your jaw and hand, the shadows in your eyes that hide me. You’re all around me and it’s all all right.

Reaching Out - 2-13-09

Rachel called tonight, wanting to apologize for being “such a bad friend” and getting caught up in her own life and not checking on me. She said I just seemed so sad and that she didn’t want me to pull away from my friends as it seemed I was doing. Maybe because I had a better day, having perhaps some vindication on the horizon after talking with Sherry, or maybe because I was just so tired, or maybe because I simply needed to tell someone how bad it’s gotten – a relief only somewhat attained by keeping a journal – but for whatever reason I held little back with her. And some of the things I said, I could tell drove her to tears twice. I’ve never seen Rachel cry. She said she’s been in that kind of depression before and I needed to get on medication. I promised I would call on Monday. I didn’t tell her that my reluctance to make an appointment now was due to more than just wanting to plan my day off better than sticking it in an already shortened week when the month of March is chock-full of 5-day weeks. The other part of it is that some unreasoning part of me doesn’t want to take medication to force my emotional hand. I don’t want to suddenly be on cloud 9 and relieve everyone’s worries and justify the hell I’m in. I don’t want the pills to make everything I’ve been through, everything this place has done to me, suddenly okay. On some level – or maybe on every level inside my mind – it’s not okay. But if I’m stuck here with no expiration date, I admit I do need help. Lots of it. Strong dosages of help.

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Amidst her platitudes for which I didn’t resent her because she genuinely believed them, she managed to well and truly crack the ice that has rimmed my heart for so long. I truly cried, just sobbed silently in the phone, which inspired her tears. I broke down and confided some of it to her – not all, though. The worst of the symptoms of this breakdown (as this must be according to all the research I’ve done this week) I kept to myself. I didn’t want her to go suicide-watch on me, but when I whispered that I couldn’t see any future, any end to this, that I’ve become deaf and blind and dumb and don’t know how to see any hope, she did ask if I was planning on hurting myself. I didn’t let her sense my hesitation as I hedged, “I hope not. I’ll call the doctor on Monday.” She didn’t need to know my eye glanced down at my concealed left forearm or that I could feel the muscles in my face go from tired to wary.

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When we hung up, for the first time I felt anxious about the marks on my arm. Last night I had visualized going to Mom and Dad, defeated in my efforts to keep away from them, and showing them the lengths I’d been driven to and ask them one last time if they can help me, if there was any way out from this job so I could begin to heal. This morning on my way to work, before I got a grip on my weakly wild daydreams, I thought of them being so alarmed that they would tell me they would support me so I could write, because my hands have not been able to keep still for want of typing and my brain keeps writing in the dead air it’s breathing. It’s been this week I haven’t been able to bring myself to write in more than this journal, so stressed I couldn’t even channel it into my fiction as I had been doing.

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But after talking with Rachel, I felt the first stirrings of – if not shame – then anxiety that my parents should indeed be kept from all I’ve done. I was a little sad that I felt I really couldn’t go to them, even “eventually.” I would have if I felt the way I did last night – I would have gone to them when the lines across my wrists has just been tracked with my fingernails and not a blade yet.

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So then will anyone know? Will anyone see the depths to which I’ve sunk and pity? Or will I find only alarm and judgment? Will I only be found to be an even greater disappointment than previously thought, or will anyone be moved to grab that wounded arm and pull me out?

Where Is This to End? - 2-12-09

I asked my creative writing instructor, Cecilia Petretto, about how one becomes a professor at TCC. It seems that even though I have some good qualifications, the most I could expect is one class as an adjunct in the summer and possibly a couple more in the fall if I do well in the summer, and that only as an adjunct because of the hiring freeze (it’s everywhere) and that means no benefits. And the pay for one credit is $500. So a 3-credit course would be $1500. Even if I got three classes in the fall, that would only be $4500 for the whole semester. So I’d have to do it in addition to my job, although apparently they are hiring because, as Petretto believed, with so many people unemployed anyway, many are going back to school, though how they would afford it, I don’t know.

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So I don’t see much in the way of that escape. I need my salary as a minimum (and it will be a minimum as next year we don’t even get our step, let alone a raise) and I need benefits.

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And the atmosphere at work is toxic. I have worked really hard to respond well to the kids, but I am betrayed by coworkers and then made out to be the unprofessional one by the administrators. As Analiese aptly put it, I am “getting it” from all sides.

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There is no way out and I started hyperventilating in the shower as I contemplated March, where there is not one day off, and next year going through this. I really don’t think I’ll survive that.

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Tonight I added another thin red line to the inside of my left forearm, the smooth, perfectly white skin marred by my pain. But this one didn’t track inward. It was, I think, a practice line for the real thing. I drew a line across my wrist and thought back to when I did that once before, at the end of my first year, but that one had been drawn out of self-loathing over what a bad person I’d felt I’d become. I feel that now, too, even worse than that time from more mistakes, but the driving force was that if I had no outlet, no escape, I would at least create the illusion of one.

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And I thought about my motivation for cutting my own skin in such a way, repeatedly, and thought, I do it for the day after more than for the moment of. I look at it frequently throughout the day and don’t even have a feeling, a specific feeling in response to that. But my eyes are drawn to it nonetheless. If my insides are so cut up and bruised and battered, if my insides are so ugly and malformed by misery and my weak responses to it, then my outsides should not cry out, “hypocrite!” Maybe that’s the real reason I stopped wearing makeup and let the shadows under my eyes show. Maybe that’s why I don’t dress anymore, but merely clothe myself. And maybe that’s why I cut.

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If this goes on, I’ll have to tell my parents on myself, per our agreement. I couldn’t take my own life without letting them know first. And I had thought often since I made that first mark with my fingernail of what I would say if one of them caught sight of my arm. “Cat,” I would say and shrug it off and hope they don’t think anything amiss with that brief explanation – and hope somewhere deep inside that they do. But I was thinking tonight, with just 3 marks on my arm, of driving to their house tonight and showing them everything and telling them about the cigarettes and alcohol, and ask them one more time if they can please help me. And I almost cried when I thought of them seeing me like this and finally being able to say, “yes.” To be the ones out of everyone in the world to tell me that short, lovely word: “yes.” I thought of them finally seeing for themselves that it doesn’t matter what happened to drive me to this – the important thing is that I’m driven to it.

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And it really is so much more than “I don’t like my job.” I have come to lose so much respect for myself – maybe the effect of the kids never having had it in the first place and the administration losing it for me because I’m unhappy, regardless of how hard I may be trying to do my job well in spite of it. This is the worst job and job situation I can fathom. It is the very thing I had always dreaded about getting a job, but even I with my vivid imagination could not have concocted such a terrible situation. And there is no way out. If I had an expiration date, I probably could keep going. “This, too, shall pass” is probably true but it won’t pass for years and I will not make it that long. And as if work wasn’t enough, I have no faith that I will fall in love, that I will find someone I can actually love who will love me back. And without him, there is no family. I am alone and filled with horror all my days.

Dangerous Thoughts - 2-12-09

This is dangerous – dangerous to give free rein to my thoughts when they are so twisted with horror and dread and hopelessness. There is no way out. There is no one who can help me. I’ve been driven in my misery to do things I’ve never done before and some I thought I had put behind me: smoking, drinking in the evenings, cutting myself to create an outlet where there is none for the sheer weight of the pain, contemplating – dreaming, really – of suicide to escape since it seems all doors have slammed shut. Where will this go? I ask with trepidation.

The Third Race - 2-11-09

It seems to me that most people divide humanity into two groups: those who keep trying and as a result eventually succeed – the noble ones, the cream rising to the top on the basis of sheer hard work and faith – and those who are too lazy and self-indulgent to make anything of themselves and so they never do. It’s a neat list, one easily managed and corroborated by multitudes of human case studies out there in the world at large.

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But what if there is a third category, one many people dismiss because it is so slippery and amorphous? What if there are some people out there who could make it, but who have lost their faith in themselves and this universe? What if these people, just given some help, would rise to the top like all those people who are so much stronger than they are, who never lost sight of their goal?

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What if these people, this third race, are not so tough and strong as the first race but have so much to offer? What about them? What happens to them? One or two probably do receive some help, some lifeline, some buoy thrown out by some unusually kind, perceptive member of that first race who are made to more refined specifications than the rest of us. But what about the others?

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I’ve been thinking that maybe God really doesn’t help those who don’t help themselves, making no distinction between those who won’t and those who can’t. Maybe the verse, “Draw nigh unto God and he will draw night unto you,” is more universally true, more uncompromisingly consistent, than we’d like to think. I’ve always noticed God comes to help, is faithful to save, far less often than we cry for him to do so. And when he does, it’s because you have kept striving for him, or at least still sending your weak call out to him. But what if you have stopped calling? Does he then look down disapprovingly from his throne and say in a disappointed voice that you can’t hear anyway, “You gave up. Sorry. Can’t do anything for you.”

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Maybe our human frailty is our sin. And if you can’t see a way to be strong, to shoot your bones through with steel and push the corners of your mouth into a stretched smile, if you can’t even cry out or call out or whisper out to God for help that he probably won’t send anyway, then you’re damned. What a bleak thought. How can it be called rescue, salvation, if you’re strong enough still to keep yourself afloat? How can God save you from the raging waters if you’re not drowning, your lungs filling with salty water that cuts off your voice?

Naughty, Naughty Moon - 2-10-09

I see you, moonlight. You are trying to reach me, sending innocent lassos out to me, curving yourself around tree trunks and over porch railings. You lay yourself thickly on the ground so I am trapped in my house, but I’m smarter than you. In my house are all the shadows I need to keep you at bay.

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I’m so bold. I sit out on my porch, so close but so far. Oops, there’s a little stone you threw at me. There, I’ve moved. Try to find me now.

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But still, my eye keeps darting over, aware that you’re there. I remember I used to love you, that you used to move me. I remember, but I have no memory. I am stone now and statues have no past. They have no future, either.

Morning Is Here - 2-10-09

The morning is here. No more escape to be found in luscious sleep or restless dreams. The landscape of my bed is behind me as I travel on to the crags of my day. I get ready with a heart of stone for my day. As I ready myself and make my way out to meet it, my insides are ragged, not quite as neat and tight as they should be, mussed a little from the hours spent outside the prison. My numbness lays in crumpled gathers around me in faded purples that shy away from the light. I’m still crumpled, too, in no state to go to battle. I must gather the eggplant folds of my cloak around me, shake it out and clasp it tight so no light can reach any part of me.

To My Child - 2-8-09

To my child:

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I’ve been thinking for some time now, in the thick of my loss, my lost belief in the marriage and family I hunger for, of ironically beginning a journal for you, a chronicle of all I have to teach you. The whole of my life has been marked by my efforts to learn, grow, mature, experience, all for you. All my choices have been made to build something of worth for you. My heirloom gift to you, my hope chest of sorts, my legacy. And when I began thinking of writing down all the thoughts I’ve collected for you, I found actually that of all the lessons I have to teach you that have been packed away inside me, carefully preserved in tissue paper for you to open them, the first lesson was the hardest to choose. When I considered how I would begin this work, I couldn’t think how I should start. Which lesson, which experience, which battle-scarred sliver of wisdom should set the tone for this? What should you learn first that would prepare you to receive all I have to offer you with eager, open hands?

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And finally, tonight, it came to me. It is this.

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I love you. I have always loved you. When I was still a child, I viewed my dolls not as toys but as a representation of you. I have always known you, always held you, been waiting for you with such breaking hunger. I thirst for the first sight of your face. I long to know you name. You have been nestled inside me since I first came to consciousness in this life. All my life has had one ultimate purpose: to bring you to consciousness as I was, to stay close by your side and teach you all I can. To equip you with the tools of survival and the tools of your destiny.

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I love you enough to stay close, and I love you enough to move away. I love you enough to say no, and enough to say yes. I love you enough to put behind me my hard-earned fearlessness and embrace fear for you.

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You are worth all you ask of me. You are worthy of my greatest efforts and my deepest truths. I am the earth from which you spring but you are the light that keeps me fertile and growing. All I have has been ordered and laid at your feet to use as you need.

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I have so much to teach you and so much to give. But all of that is ashes if you do not know, do not believe to your very core that I love you with all that I am. I am your mother, no one else’s. You are of my body and soul. I love you.

Frozen Sun - 2-6-09

The numbness has been shivering lately. I’ve been too stimulated, too close to feeling mildly good about a few things. I enjoy my writing class too much, the discussions too lively. I feel the weight of anticipation settle in me when I think of writing. I feel annoyed too easily at various things. I have to get back to feeling dead. I’ve had a good couple of weeks where I have remained untouched by the slavering horde I am assigned to, but the last two days I’ve been closer to speaking sharply, showing my annoyance. I have to remember, have to remember, they are spies. That anything I say may be twisted out of context and out of my hands. They are not to be trusted. I have to remember this. I have to stay dead. I have to lock myself up tight. I will remain depressed if I have to, if the numbness isn’t binding enough. I cannot afford to feel good. Any good feeling immediately gives way to the inevitable despair at being trapped in my situation. I have to freeze my hatred of them, my all-consuming, violent hatred of them. I have to lay down my sudden visions of taking them by the throat and throwing them against the wall. I have to simply remember that this is the way it is. There is no way to change it. No matter what I do, they will act like this. And I am trapped. And nothing will ever change. I just have to recite that to myself. I just have to remember this. Remember this. Remember this. I will have this class next year or another one that is worse. I can’t imagine the Transfer Fair will bring any relief, or that I will be able to transition out of the classroom so I can work with adults. It is a ridiculous pipe dream to think I can escape by becoming a full-time novelist, even though my motivation has exploded and I am writing all the time, even in class when I am supposed to be teaching but can’t stand the sight of them. I am buried under small, frenetic limbs and tinny voices. I hate them. I hate them all. I deeply hate and loathe them. I wish them all to be hurt somehow. I would let all of them stand in front of a bus and feel only dark satisfaction. This is what I have come to. This is what is trapped in the classroom with them. All of these innocent, helplessly aggravating children are locked in with Grendel. It is horribly wrong for me to be here. God is wrong. He does not know what he is doing. Yes, the clay is clamoring to the potter. I am dimly resigned to the so-called rebellion. It is wrong. How can it be otherwise when I am driven so close to the edge? Does he want me to snap and make a rash decision that will ruin my life? Does he want me to be compelled to harm myself? Surely it won’t come to that. Surely I can preserve the death in my soul. Surely Lazarus can resist the wake-up call and remain shrouded in shadows and silence. I am dead. I am dead. I am dead. I feel nothing, not even despair, not even hopelessness. There is no release, there must be none. This numbness must swell within me until my skin splits. I will remain untouchable. No one will ever touch me. No one will touch me or they will burn up, they will combust from being so close to my frozen sun. I will remain encircled by thorns so no one can get to me. No one will reach me. I am gone.

I Am Gone . . . - 2-4-09

I am gone. When I look in the mirror or at my familiar surroundings that have been imprinted with myself, I don’t see anyone. I don’t recognize the girl in the mirror every morning with the uncovered purple smudges under her lifeless eyes. Whose hands are these that lie so still, no longer fidgeting with excess energy? Those things which once defined me to myself are missing, peeled off like weathered paint or simply dropped from nerveless fingers. Who is this girl who no longer runs, who no longer seeks out the moon? This woman breathing and sleeping, hardly eating, in this empty house – who is she? Where did the familiar grin go, the unorchestrated undulations that used to curl through her at this thought or that sensation?

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I can’t imagine I have entered into the entire rest of my life, that this is how I will be now for the rest of my days. But I no longer comprehend the buzzing, nonsensical words “one day” or “surely” or “must” or “change.” I no longer look toward the future except when my present grips my chin and jerks my head in that direction. And even then my eyes slide away from the emotion that may spark.

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I am gone. I am a husk. I am dead and move only as I must. I have become a person not of small things but of necessity. I walk as needed, I respond to my students only as far as I must, I eat what I have to to take the edge of hunger away, I listen to music to fill the silence and not my hollow chest. I do what I must and only what I must.

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But a suspicion has begun to form in my mind. I wonder if I can truly keep distinguishing between numbness and depression. The whole point of the numbness was to stop feeling all the bad things – the despair, the rampant hopelessness, the anger, the frustration that iced over my pores till I couldn’t breathe. But am I settling into – not an emotional ice age – but a mere acceptance, embrace even, of those bad feelings? Some would argue that shutting off all feelings is depression, but I have a different view. I think there is a difference, but I don’t know if I’ve crossed it already. Maybe the numbness simply keeps those feelings quiet rather than keeping them away. I don’t really mind. After all, the numbness is still there in whatever state my mind is in, either calm serenity or depression, or both. It just keeps me from being able to see either way.

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You know, I understand why people cut themselves when they claim to have gone numb. Even without feeling any emotions, even with so much of your humanity stripped away with your sensibilities, there still is a heaviness there, and we none of us are Atlas. In the cutting, you push all your heaviness, all your despair, all your anger, into that swipe. Your eyes narrow and your lip quivers and curls before shifting into the sleeping line it took before you cut. You do it for release, a release of heaviness denied, of a frozen hopelessness and stilled despair.

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I wonder what would move God. What would pull him out of his orbit and pay attention? How far do you have to go before he says, “All right, I see you really do need me”? At what point would he see that you’re not being stubborn but that you truly have lost hope? That it’s not that you won’t move, but that you can’t? When does his eye sharpen on your still frame sprawled out on the endless sand and he sees that you do indeed need his help? Where is the place, the borderline, between “he helps those who help themselves” and “oops, sorry, thought you were just sleeping” where he sees that his help is the only way to change anything? I don’t know. Do I have to get to the point of drugging out to kill the stretching day and selling my body for the fix? Am I still too comfortably situated for him to validate my need? Is he prejudiced against the middle-class?

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He is still my God. I can’t change that. Even though I don’t really talk to him – as with anyone else, what’s the point? – there is still a moment each night in the dark when I squeeze out his name in a groaning, half-awake whisper. “God.” And hope he will hear all I cannot say, all that no longer fits into lifeless words.

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I am gone. I am taken away, with only my doppelganger to punch the clock. Where am I now? I have neither eyes, nor ears, nor skin to feel, to understand where I am now. I stumble blind and frozen, not knowing which way is up.

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Even if my mate actually was on Match.com, I can do nothing about that. I am broken and no one wants a defective toy. No one would want me now.

Well, That's What Parents Are For, Right? - 2-2-09

I informed my father of the new, rather lifeless state of affairs with me. I explained very calmly that this numbness, this pervasive lifelessness, is all for the best and it enabled me to get through my days so much better. I all but glide through them, feeling nothing. Of course, in explaining this, I had to explain also that I was facing the less lovely side of maturity and realizing I truly was incapable, despite all my valiant efforts, of compromising even a fraction as any wise adult should be able to do in my expectations of a mate, and therefore was halting the search. I explained to him that it had never worked, had never come close to working, and I wasn’t going to try any longer. He listened with sadness, but when I went to the bathroom when we finished our dinner at Spice of India, he started thinking, trying to save me somehow from the oblivion of my loneliness which I was embracing now. He offered to go onto Match.com and screen the matches for only likely possibilities. I sighed and told him he was welcome to but I couldn’t promise anything. After all, at some point, the effort would have to transfer back to me and I was letting go of that.

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So he’s been looking, mentioning it a couple of times casually, and tonight he and Mom called me with a narrowed-down list. I went along with them on my computer listening to their evaluations and feeling more and more compressed.

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And after listening to them explain how I could just email for a while and if I decide I wasn’t interested after all, there were some very respectable “outs” Match.com provides, I explained to them that I just didn’t see how I could go out and make a first impression as I am now.

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I have nothing good to talk about except my writing which has oddly become so much easier now that I am numb. I can’t be flirty and fun, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to have fun, don’t want to make new friends or even hang out with the old ones because that puts me in danger of feeling good and if I can feel good, I can feel bad. I explained that this really is the only way for me to get through my days. I have five months left, not even considering a possible extension of my sentence if the heavens don’t open up and rain down miracles. This is truly the only way. I said my days go so much smoother, when I feel nothing. I tried to communicate the exclusivity of this numbness. I can’t just switch it on and off. If I open the door a crack, I might as well fling it wide.

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My mother asked if falling in love and getting married wouldn’t make my days easier to get through. I didn’t give much of an answer because I knew I had no answer she wanted to hear. At this point, no. I did say that if my free time became so much better than my days, if I came more alive, it would just be that much harder to go into work every day.

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We ended the conversation on a mutually discouraged note, for different reasons. I promised I would think on it and I think we all knew that was little more than lip service to quickly end a painful conversation.

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See, here’s the thing. Two things, actually. First off, as I told my parents, I don’t think I could go out and be charming and sociable and lure anybody in and I’d feel apprehensive about doing it if I could because I don’t want any good right now, aside from my writing. I have no belief or vision left and I am just surviving. This is what I have to do to do what I must.

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And the other thing is, what man wouldn’t feel cheated after looking at my profile – which was all true, just not true now – only to be met with what I’ve become? I’ve stopping wearing makeup beyond mascara and foundation – and those only because I must – and I am faced every day with finding in my closet stuffed with cute clothes only the most comfortable clothes I can wear with tennis shoes. I don’t smile much anymore. I am quiet and oh, so patient with the kids because I am dead inside. I am pale and hollow-eyed and this I see in the mirror with a distant satisfaction. Let them see. Let them all see. Let them see how they’ve ruined me and yet I am still flawless, no misstep to be found, no frustration to be seen, no yell to be heard.

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Who would want me now? Who could fall in love with me? They say be yourself, but how can you when the self you’re showing is a husk?