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?
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