A shopkeeper in front of his craft shop, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India
A shopkeeper in front of his craft shop, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India
Category: Writing
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Burn away all the hate and rage. Cleanse my soul of all karmic punishment. Begin again.
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A sentence that means so many things to so many people. Sometimes it’s just pure physical exhaustion. A long day of work, frustrations, road blocks. For others, it means mental exhaustion. Minds are not light switches, they go at their own pace and so often are beyond our control.
I mean the latter. Mental exhaustion.
I’m tired of staring at an empty future. I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of hate surrounding me, surroundomg all of us in one form of another. I’m tired of hoping for a glimpse of humanity – just one, a tiny peek of actual people behind the bureaucracy we call the government – that maybe they would give us our disability benefit money a day or so early. A hope that ended in predictable disappointment. I have my two weekly appointment Tuesday, which means taking the train to get there because my town has no benefit office of its own anymore, and I have 30 pence in my bank account. It’s £6.50 to get to the town with the benefits office. I will be penalised if I don’t attend for a good reason.
I hope a family member can lend me the money but there’s no guarantees there.
I’m tired of letters asking for money that, thanks to the benefits cut, I simply can’t pay. I have been working with a company to consolidate my debt but the gentleman I was speaking with has gone quiet – Christmas holidays. The credit card companies, it seems, do not take such holidays.
I’m tired of the utter lack of desire to create. All I can wrote, it seems, is about misery. My misery. Unsurprisingly, that’s not a popular topic. Not that I had much audience to begin with.
I’m tired of having nothing to take my thoughts away. I don’t care of it’s an addiction, it’s my escape. I need the silence. A few nights ago I found an old Valium and cried with joy. I slept like a baby.
As Jimmy Darmody (via the immensely talented Michael Carmen Pitt) said: “I am what time and circumstance has made me.”
I’m tired. I’m sad. I feel little emotions other than quiet despair. The world remains apathetic. It always is. It always was. The world that cared, that one only ever existed in my imagination. And time kills all such fantasy.
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Written for a prompt on hitrecord.org.
I won’t tell you what my inner monologue has to say these days. That would seem to run contrary to the prompt, so I’ll clarify a bit: I’m not going into much detail on my current inner monologue because it is a dark place. Anyone who knows me will know what I mean.
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It wasn’t always that way. My inner monologue was full of movie ideas when I was six or seven – a child with a vocabulary of a teenager, an active imagination and few friends interested in hearing about any of it. That didn’t bother me back then. I rehearsed my lines in my head, rewrote my drafts, offered commentary on how I was doing. We had a lot to say to each other.
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I learnt quickly never to say it out loud though. I knew early on I was a bit different to the other kids, and certain behaviours wouldn’t fly with them, but it didn’t make me sad. Not yet.
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My monologue started to get angry when, once again, maths defeated my understanding. My flaws, my weaknesses, my deficiencies were starting to show and my monologue, like my teachers, hurled criticisms at me.
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Monologue, once my most jubilant cheerleader when teachers and other students loved my short stories, suddenly became a stranger.
Monologue, the one who had wondered if that man Stephen King (my dad was a huge fan, so he was the one “adult” writer I knew of) would like my stuff, called me stupid. A loser. A freak.
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Darkness crept in more and more as I got older and, it seemed, the world became ever more hostile toward me. Sometimes people would catch me muttering under my breath – monologue and I discussing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or dinosaurs or art or acting – whatever I had on my mind that day. What a weirdo.
Why are you always embarrassing yourself like this? Demanded monologue. I didn’t know.
You’re stupid, she said.
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As I sat on the classroom step alone during lunch break, a long time before things got bad, I asked a question monologue couldn’t answer at the time: why didn’t the other kids like me?
Later on, she had a whole list.
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Many years later, at 14, monologue asked me a question I couldn’t answer: why won’t you just kill yourself?
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She still asks. Sometimes I answer. But that’s between just me and her now.
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One of my favourite wigs. I bought it originally because I liked the subtle colour, and I liked the name. It is from Lush Wigs, as are all but one of my collection. I don’t recall exactly how I even came across their site, but when I did I felt excited, at home. A beautiful mix of eccentricity and wigs meant for every day wear greeted me, and I never looked back.
Swear I wasn’t paid to write this – hell, I could use the money! Those are my genuine feelings about the company, and for anyone looking for affordable synthetic wigs – I generally advocate against buying human hair as they are often unethically sourced – I highly recommend them: https://www.lushwigs.com/
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“Trich” as I like to call it, first began in secondary school. All of my mental illnesses emerged then, a terrible confluence of outside influence and genetic stresses.
In the late 90s, a bookish, gender non-conforming girl was not common at all, and thusly an automatic target of bullying. I suffered at least one hate crime: a thug trying to light my hair on fire.
My friends said it was something that happens and to shrug it off. It wasn’t meanness on their part, but that society at the time wasn’t likely to care much, so better not to dwell on it.
As for how genetics came in to play, nearly every woman on my father’s side of the family had/has been designated some form of crazy. Granted, plenty of this has roots in good old fashioned misogyny, but the stories I heard over the years pointed towards their being some truth to it.
One great aunt simply took to her bed for three years, refusing to leave or manage basic self care. In the days before SSRIs and therapy, plus the mere shame of mental illness being known about by the neighbours, she was simply left alone. She came out of it, luckily. So many do not. Not alive anyway.
I should’ve been luckier though, right? I lived in a slightly more enlightened time, so a depressed, withdrawn teenager tearfully explaining her misery every day should have received appropriate treatment. Right?
No. The school denied any bullying happened. My dad believed i was exaggerating and shouted at me over any lashing out I did over simply not being listened to. Later on, I discovered that he often hadn’t contacted the school at all regarding my main tormentor as he would claim when I asked.
I filed Incident Reports, which were red paper forms for people to anonymously record their suffering. I don’t know what happened to those but I wouldn’t be surprised if a paper shredder was involved.
I had one breakthrough: the vice head teacher ordered my Main Tormentor to apologise to me! Huzzah!
She went right back to making my life an utter misery the next day. But I appreciate that he tried, because barely anybody else did. He was alive last I heard of him, which was when he was quoted in a news story regarding the suicide of my old maths teacher. He was a kind man, one of the few teachers who I could say that of.
When I turned 14, something changed. I was never happy, but this was different. I wasn’t just unhappy, now I wanted to die. I imagined it all in my head: rehearsals of The Ending, The Finale, The Curtain Call. But death was scary. It is scary. Could I go through with it? Films made overdoses look almost regal, reclining delicately into eternal sleep. But I wasn’t stupid to believe that was reality.
The first time I pulled out my hair, I did it with no real thought at all. I teased and pulled a few strands of hair. Then a few more and a few more. I kept going, little bald spots appeared. I kept them to places where they were easy to disguise, no conscious planning, the mind is surprisingly complex even on autopilot. Later on, those same areas were the first to turn grey (I began greying in my mid-20s).
It was weirdly relaxing. I felt less stressed, as though something had been released and peace had finally settled in its place. It felt…nice.
And that’s how it started. And how it kept going. Eventually my parents noticed my hair looked odd, but nobody quite twigged what was wrong. Perhaps they would have, had things progressed to the point they would later on, but as fate would have it an event occurred (well, several) that got in the way of that.
I’ll focus on the one I believe had the largest effect: my Main Tormentor left the school. The story of why was a fairly delicious cake of irony: as it turned out, her own friends bullied her into leaving. In fact, it didn’t sound as though they were ever her friends, but more that she was a hanger on always trying to impress them, and ultimately she told them an unbelievably stupid lie that they uncovered.
It was funny, yes, but also I did feel the tiniest pang of sympathy. She didn’t really deserve such empathy, but there it is.
I could relate, after all.
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I live a stone’s throw from the cemetery where my mother’s relatives are buried (dad’s family favoured cremation). I see their headstones every time I walk down the lane leading into town. I give a glance of acknowledgement. For a long time that was my sole concession to their presence.
As years went on, the family plot grew: once it contained just Grandad (he died of bowel cancer when I was four. One of my earliest memories was seeing him, jaundice from liver failure, on his sick bed), then it housed Grandma (passed away 2002) and my still born cousin Thomas. More recently, my uncle died in a car accident, buried in a plot of his very own, always easily recognised by the Middlesbrough FC regalia adorning it.
In 2011, my mum very nearly joined them after doctors failed to spot a ruptured appendix. Death, once a subject that was usually in the back of my mind, was everywhere. A lurking threat to my family. A shadow clinging to our heels.
To me, death was a subject I mostly thought about in times of stress, when it seemed like a good escape route. I never thought to wonder whether I would be buried or cremated (I’d chose cremation simply because it’s cheaper and the cemetery is overcrowded). Unlike emergency exits in buildings, death isn’t easy to locate when you’ve decided life has screwed you over one last time. All I’ve got to show for my efforts is minor liver damage.
It is one thing when, as I do, have suicidal thoughts. That is under my control, and I can decide “not today, Satan” and carry on.
You can’t stop it taking away others. It seems unfair, almost taunting, to take the life of someone who had everything to live for and deny the suicidal person who actually wants to leave. A cruel joke.
Today, I did something I rarely do, and spoke to my grandparents. Or if you like, I spoke to a slightly tilting piece of granite like a mad woman. I apologised to my grandfather for a very private reason. I joked he’d picked the right grandchild to favour since my sister is the only one of us who actually has a stable life and he adored her. And I cried. I’ve cried so much recently, somehow a floodgate opened inside me and everything I have repressed over the years has come out in unpredictable bursts. I accepted my terrible failure of a life and confessed my deepest sin: I still don’t want to be here.
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I burned my hopes and dreams. Rest in peace, naive little me.
Bloody Roses 