I'd Rather Not Feel This

An excerpt from my novel

There is a sea inside of me. It has sweeping tides and rips that drag me out to drown with no sight of shore. There is no safety in it’s waves. They crash upon me as I blindly search for purchase in the churning sands. This is how my emotions fill me. They do not pass gently. They say that you are not your emotions but they do not say what you are without them. Or what you are when they fill up every inch of you till it is suffocating. There is not a lot to be done when I am tipping over into them. Maybe the sea inside of me calls to water. Maybe that is why if I go and sit beside a creek for long enough the sound slips between my ears and washes all thoughts out. The problem is that whenever I return home it all just rushes back and I don’t know what to do with it all over again. Water; the feeling of floating, pulling myself through it, chest tight with held breath can help. Even a bath will do, but the ocean is best. Return my eroded feelings to their source.

And so today I am in the ocean. It’s a little further than I’d like and the water is much too cold to be swimming in. But I caught a glimpse of the news today while I was at the doctor and a war is going on and no one seems to even care. So I am screaming on the ocean floor. Running sand through my fingers. I try to avoid looking at what’s happening in the world as much as I can. The same things repeat again and again and again and people say the same things they said last time. I don’t understand how they aren’t all tired? I’m tired and I don’t even know even half of it. Though I know it in my gut. Catch updates in the corners of my eyes. Blink to dislodge. Drown to forget.

It’s dark and the wind is whipping the sand against my calves as I shiver to the bathrooms to get changed. A gentle moon is hanging amidst light clouds. My train pulls away from the station just as I arrive. The next is in an hour. I passed a ramen restaurant on the walk from the beach and think I would welcome the warmth in my belly.

The glow of the neon sign comforts me. Paling the dark. Few tables are full. The waitress asks about my damp hair, my damp towel filled tote. Notes that she hasn’t seen anyone swimming for months. I tell her that “sometimes I just need to fill the space between my ears with the sound that sand makes as the current rushes over it.”

She agrees and tells me “I drive with all the windows down when I need to fill that void.” Takes my order of takoyaki, edamame and tonkotsu. Hot sake arrives and I warm my fingers, palms, wrists, against the cup.

A couple behind me are talking about their days in hushed tones. A man on a counter stool slurps the last of his soup. The chef drops noodles into boiling water and adjusts her hair net. I try not to think. Try to retain the gritty sounds of sand against sand that echoes inside me. I count each mukimame as I shell them into my mouth. I get to 73 as the takoyaki arrive.

I finish the broth and focus on the feeling of fullness. Pay and leave. The next train gets me home in just under an hour and I turn on Gilmore Girls as soon as I enter my apartment. Let the sound wash over me. Let the scenes I’ve seen again and again and again fill out the space in my thoughts. Shower the salt from my limbs and curl into bed around my laptop. There are glow in the dark stars in a pattern like the Milky Way across my ceiling, they give me light in the hours it takes me to fall asleep.

Min and I are drinking coffee and reading in the sun. Her broad shoulders freckled from our weekends of doing the same. Fine muscles down her arms from her work as an archaeologist. She likes to understand what went on before. When things were newer. Less cemented than they feel now. She tells me that even then things felt permanent. That the cruel elements of society felt like they would be cruel forever. That change always felt slow. She watches me watch her then returns to her book. I sip my last sip.

What does it feel like to be depressed? It feels like the earth is trying to drag me down, like gravity decided today I am all it wants. That it will suck me into the depths of the earth and god would I be grateful if it did. It’s hard to recall the feeling when I am not in it. A self preservation device. Just nothingness while I try to grasp what it was that made me feel like dying would be a perfect antidote.

Like grating my teeth together, grinding to nubs, because my gums ache and it feels like chomping will fix it. Make it stop. It feels like a vacuum at my nostrils. Sucking the feeling of tears into my sinuses but nothing erupts. Like constantly holding onto a breath.

What does it feel like, it feels like scrabbling to get up, crawling through mud, freezing mud full of sticks and rocks and little bits that stab into your soft palms. It feels like being alone. So alone. Empty. But also so loud. How can it be so loud when you are so alone?

My head feels empty now. Cold. Hollow. I make myself tea and toast. Water my plants. The day slips away.

More emptiness today. I am tired of it. It starts to feel so hollow I can’t breathe. Some people brag about not having any thoughts. I’m not sure it’s true they have no thoughts if they are bragging about it. It is too much of a painful feeling. Not being able to call up anything. Maybe they’re talking about something different to what I’m experiencing.

I’m trying to call up feelings. Journaling felt like staring at a cold wall. Everything that came out felt like I don’t knows. Maybes. Nothing. I bought my favourite food and ate it in a weighted warm sun and still no feelings occurred. No thoughts bubbled up. Am I tapping a now empty well?

My psychologist is kind. But I am not sure she can do anything for me anymore. I need to find a new one. But for that, I would need to care again. And I am struggling to do that. A lot of things feel very counterintuitive. Like filling out paperwork to get an ADHD diagnosis. Or trying to find the energy to get a new psychologist when you don’t even really want to get out of bed. I always get out of bed. Even when I don’t want to. Not because I’m better than people who give in to the call. I think I am in fact much weaker than those people. If I allowed myself to accept that I couldn’t face my day, that would be my last day. I do not have the strength to give in to one and not all.

Min takes me swimming at the local pool. Knows that water seeping into my skin might start to wash something else in. That I sometimes need another person to push me into the things I know will make me feel better but cannot summon the strength to do. Gently folds me into her and nestles me into her couch. She feeds me cheesy pastas and hot chocolates and olives and little bits of salami. At some stage I start to cry.

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This is the first section of a manuscript I finished just over a year ago. I have a lot of feelings about it. Many thoughts about whether it is actually good or I am deluding myself. It was written over the course of five months and was one of the most cathartic ways I have woven my experience of BPD, dissociation and depression into the world. It felt like letting something go.

I wrote it in the hopes that someone who needs a hopeful story of mental illness would read it and feel seen. I wrote it because it needed to come out.

I’ve submitted it for consideration for publishing twice, both times no luck. I am very interested in self publishing but I have one last stop to make before I start to properly work on that, I would love to hear your thoughts and criticism (is particular criticism, I want to know what people think quite honestly). Would you be interested in reading the entire thing?