I think it’s done. I think I have finally given up, and while it will take a few months for the last echo of this death to bounce away, I feel the death inside me. I feel the numb cold of it, but then I can’t be sure, can I, when all I feel is numb and cold. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t slog through the mire of my day and still keep trying and failing to feel good, to use the Secret. If it is true that feeling bad literally pushes away the things you want and draws more bad to you, if it’s really true that whether or not you want something has no bearing at all on whether you will get it, that that is only determined by how well you live your life as if you have already received it – then I’m fucked. I have tried countless times in countless ways to feel good in spite of my circumstances, and all of it is mere words, tuneless buzzing in my ears. I can’t feel good. And I can’t try any more. My only options are to feel bad or feel nothing. I choose numbness.
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And I have to feel it on my own. I can’t tell anyone if I can at all help it. I have exhausted my quota of complaining – long ago, too – and contrary to my expectations, the quota is not refillable. I can’t hold off sharing my misery for weeks and have gained a little of that quota. Mom and Dad don’t want to hear and have grown impatient with me, even when I make passing, half-joking references that shouldn’t tax their patience too much. They are tired of it and are ready to have the old energetic, laughing Nicole back. So I keep my deepening, settling depression from them. My co-workers don’t need to hear anymore, either. They are in it, too, and don’t need anything pulling them further down, even though they would only show me support. Last Friday was horrible and I was pushing back tears all day and people kept asking me what was wrong. Jeez! I’m trying to spare you, people! Leave me alone so I won’t annoy you! But Jess came to my room after school and I hadn’t gotten out of the building yet and I couldn’t hold back. Fortunately, I still had a bit of my complaint quota with her left. I just cried and poured it out. I talked about how every day was hell and I was the Danaides in Hades whose punishment for eternity was to keep filling up a bucket with a hole in it. I talked about how I try and I try to be positive and not complain but I can’t remember what it was like to be happy or feel good or look forward to my life. I told her everything I’d been feeling and I could see sympathetic tears in her eyes, bless her, at my honest misery, and she ventured that maybe I should think about getting back on my antidepressant medication. That tore me up even further, though I didn’t show her that, because I had truly believed I had gotten past that, that maybe, once in a while, on a hard couple of weeks maybe, I would take Happy Camper. But prescription meds? Really? I have come to that? Again?
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But as I thought of it later, I was forced to admit that the thought of it brought me some relief. I had taken Lexapro several years ago when I was really depressed about meeting someone and only feeling my anxiety about it compounded by the pressure I felt about dating. Now, however, I am dealing with the exact same situation, goddammit, plus utter hopelessness about my job, which takes up a third of my life. Maybe I do need meds again. If I do, I’ll need a hell of a lot more than the 10 mg of Lexapro I was on. I’ll need Zoloft or Prozac or shock treatments.
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I just want to make all the relentless bad feelings go away. I have begun thinking about drinking in the evenings. Liquor like Vodka or tequila, not wine. Sleeping pills isn’t a viable option because I have no trouble sleeping. Some people deal with depression by not sleeping, others by sleeping often. I am in the latter group. Despite my damned restless, frenetic dreams where rest and peace are nowhere to be found, sleep is my escape. No, I want to find a way to numb the pain, loneliness, and hopelessness while I’m awake. Not at work or when I need to be driving, just when I’m alone in the evenings. I’ve thought – aside from all the known negative, life-destroying effects – how nice it could be to take a narcotic, an actual drug, to inject me with an untouchable peace. Oh, yes, maybe I should get on prescription antidepressants. These are not healthy thoughts. At least I’m not contemplating suicide this time.
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I think there is something wrong with me. I seem to have fashioned a lock to my heart based on an imagined key, and no key exists that will free me. I think I will never love. Yes, I think this. Again, it will take some time for this to truly sink in, because I had forgotten my hopelessness, had gotten used to feeling better and hopeful and open to possibilities. But I have become again the same girl I always was, incapable of responding to men who are actually living and breathing on this earth. There is no more faith or hope in me anymore. I had hope, and faith and vision and good feelings, for a year. Setting that year atop the previous 29 where no such feelings or vision existed, was already a Herculean feat. Is it any wonder I had an expiration date? I had been mired in hopelessness and loneliness for so long, unable to move, atrophying, and then thrown into a full gallop for a year – goodness, how could I go on without some return on that investment? And the thing is little things happen that probably are the Secret in action and still I am not moved, still I can feel nothing. It seems that nothing short of the big two – work and love – will shock my heart back into action. It seems anything less is simply not enough to encourage me. You may say I’m being foolish, that maybe it takes longer than a year of believing to manifest something like a new work and a true love. But a year was all I had in me. I had nothing more to give. It was precisely a year ago – the third week in January 2008 – that I picked up the Secret and began to transform my life – or at least attempted to. But the only major thing I manifested was a condo I love desperately that is more than I can afford. All the other, little small things – of which admittedly there are many – fade in my blurred, blunted memory. I have nothing left.
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If God will step in and save me, he will do it for himself, for his name’s sake, and not for me. And I will not know either way what he intends.
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I weep deep within me at the unending drudgery of my days and the biting loneliness of my nights. I am defective, created to hold myself apart while I yearn to be touched. There is no man who will swoop in and do that initial work to get to me. I do not yet think of laying my children again to rest. I should not be here in this job. God made a mistake. He should not have closed all other doors and trapped me in this pit. It was a wrong thing of him to do, to take a part of my soul, my nature, my makeup – my love of children – and retard its natural progression in me, and still further twist it and mutate it into a loathing, a hatred for all children. I hate them. I can’t stand the sight or sound of them. And in this job, you are not allowed to have a bad day. You cannot go into your cubicle and “just do your work,” because the children, like a sick sonar, will pick up on it and throw it back in your face magnified a hundred times. Not only can you not have a bad day, but you cannot even be quiet and calm but essentially dead to just do your job because the little demons must be entertained and engaged or they will make your life for those eight endless hours a waking nightmare. I hate it and I hate them and it is wrong of me to be in this position and be in such a state. There is a danger to hating this job that isn’t present in other jobs – you can do real harm. No, God should not have kept me here. I was always going to fail the task before me, with the price being young, impressionable minds, and I was always going to fall. And no one is picking me up.
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