Britney

I lost all the weight I gained after I left inpatient and I once again despise my body, the concaveness of it, the angularity of my face that my guardian comments on when I ask if it looks better fuller. I’ve progressed from writing in lists and ordering paragraphs to writing in a stream of consciousness-like way, and it only distances me even more from everyone else, from anyone who happens to be reading this (hopefully I’m wrong).

My friend Zach says that he understands why I ended up in inpatient but not why I took 60 mg of melatonin a few days after leaving the ward. He asks me to write a piece explaining it. I have not yet found the words—or perhaps, the motivation—to gather them from my mind and set them down neatly on paper. He’s been helping me a lot but I’m still afraid of myself, of my ability to propel myself down the slope that I’ve been on for the past year. He describes me as a pure person, a martyr, and it makes me cry. I am like a sponge, soaking up all the pain around me and in my life into my pores—I’ve always been that way. I’d cry incessantly whenever I saw or heard something sad as a child. My form of healing others was understanding their hardships and transferring their hurt to myself. It’s only gotten worse since then. There is so much inside of me that no one will ever understand. It’s hard to believe that I can even still function.

I’m going into partial hospitalization at the same place I was for inpatient; I’ll finish out the semester there. I visited it for the first time today and recognized it; it had been in my dreams before. I did not mention this. I mumbled through the intake process. I do not want to go. I truly do not. My ideal life for the rest of this month would be staying at home, working on my writing, my art, doing anything that would make me feel alive again.

I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?

I feel useless when I see that all my friends are in school. The only other person I know who is even close to being in the same boat as me is the Pisces, and that’s a tie that I have severed for the good of my own mental health; the companionship was not worth the isolation from my friends, the continuous self-destruction, the slow unraveling of my self. I believe the beginning of that relationship is truly when this downward spiral—not to be confused with the several other downward spirals in my life—began, and I hate to think about it, but as an obsessive thinker, it’s all I do.

I don’t cut myself but I like to watch myself bleed. An accidental slip of the knife, the jabbing of a finger into some sharp object—it delights me. I accidentally stabbed my finger with my pocket knife at a flea market and bled all over the streets as I walked home. It makes me recall wanting nosebleeds as a kid because I thought they were the coolest thing ever. I can’t explain this. My therapist told me to write down one thing every day that makes me happy; maybe, sadly, this is it.

Zach asked me on Sunday if I want to live, and without hesitation I said yes. I meant it so, so much. If he asked me again now…well, I don’t have to finish that thought. ♦