Britney

“My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.” -Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

The loudness is what terrifies me the most about the situation. As soon as the lights shut off and images begin flashing on the screen, it crashes down on me, a wave of sound drowning me. I come out of the fetal position that I’d contorted my body into on one of the plush chairs in the very back corner of the theater and look around frantically, trying to see if anyone else realizes that it is too loud in the room, that someone needs to tell whoever is in control to turn it down, but unsurprisingly, I am alone in my shock. Everyone else seems fine as they either continue talking to whoever came with them to see the movie or eating, their eyes fixated on the flashing pictures as their hands move mechanically to their waiting, open mouths. The room is small. I am close in proximity to everyone here and yet I still feel a strong absence of human contact. The girl that was supposed to see this with me did not show up and I am all alone and it is then that I realize that I have not been to a movie theater since what as might as well of been ages ago, on July 8, with my mother for my birthday. There are tears in my eyes as the trailers play, and I can’t tell if it’s because she’s not there or because the girl isn’t there, and then I decide that it could be both, but it doesn’t matter either way. There is a severe feeling of unwantedness that gnaws at my chest as I try to assimilate to the actions of the other people in the room and watch the screen quietly, letting its strong glow pull me in.

After the movie ends, I am eating lunch when the girl tells me that she was late but is still in the area if I want to meet up. I’m not surprised; I tell her that I’m going home and walk to the F train, an action that feels unfamiliar even though I did it every day up until recently. I am a professional out of practice. The train has not arrived yet, so I stand on the platform, waiting for a few minutes, when suddenly, something inside my mind switches. I don’t know what it is, and the only two things I can liken it to are a cloud of murkiness and depersonalization, although the last comparison is severely flawed. It feels a lot like depersonalization in the sense that I am no longer in my body and am watching from the outside, but I still know it’s me. It’s most comparable to when you’re in a dream, and you can see everything that is happening to you from a bird’s-eye view. I hear the train coming and see its familiar lights on the dirty tiled wall of the subway, and when it happens, I begin walking towards the edge of the platform. It feels normal, like I am walking down the street, and the suddenly, when I am about to step off, I snap out of it and pull my body back, shaking. This is what causes me to look up “involuntary suicide attempt” later on (the search yielded no real results but I’m sure it’s happened to at least a few other people). I am scared when I realize what I am doing and I am scared later on, thinking and writing about the experience, because I don’t understand it at all. I think my life is, in laymen’s terms, pretty much garbage, but not enough for me to actually want to kill myself. Even when I think about it, it is still a passing thought, nothing that I would ever actually want to do, so it terrifies me that that happened, and it makes me incredibly uneasy to think about the fact that my body, for a few minutes, was able to control my mind.

When I get home, I tell the girl about what happened, with great hesitation (but of course, the need for release overrules the wariness). She tells me that I will get better. Someone insists that I will get better at least once a week, tells me with an almost convincing smile that soon my life will be great and that my mind will be stable and I may even be happy. It’s almost like a game at this point; I tell someone about my life and they tell me not to worry and I say OK and they believe that I am taking their words into account. It’s a trope. I still tell it to myself every day, though, and mentally make very short lists of things to look forward to (warm weather, being put on the antidepressants that I’ve needed for years), and hope that in a few months I won’t have to constantly remind myself of reasons why I should feel good about life, or feel untethered, floating around in a sea of my emotions, spilling how I feel to anyone who will listen. I miss not feeling either empty or full of a toxic mix of anger and sadness. ♦