Married to Mental Illness

This is what it feels like to be held hostage by mental illness. The wooden floorboards covering my tiny, Brooklyn apartment are suddenly replaced by sludge. This mud strangles my ability to move; I feel terrified and confused. There can be doors and windows (openings) all around me and yet, I feel like I cannot move. Like I cannot leave. I am trapped.

Two and a half years ago, I did something I never thought I would: I got married. As a queer person, the government always taught me that these rights were not offered to me, so I loved many, but never took this step. On June 26^th 2015, the United States legalized it, and one year later, I did it.

Little did I know I have been wedded to my mental illness for almost three decades. The problem is, I don’t remember ever saying yes to its proposal. But that is the problem with depression, it does not wait for a convenient time to lurk and lunge.

My spouse is patient, loving, kind. These are all adjectives one desires in a human, but my mental illness is none of these things. Instead, it is debilitating, suffocating, devious.

More recently, I have begun to feel the weight of my depression wrap around my limbs and cloud my brain. It is like a mistress I never pursued but keeps trying to get my attention. It is beyond blocking somebody’s phone number. And I certainly cannot apply for a restraining order. My mental illness finds me wherever I relocate, when I travel, when I am being intimate with my spouse, and when I am at work.

It is difficult to be in a healthy relationship while I feel this way. And this is something that needs to be talked about more. The balance or more specifically, the imbalance. Trying to survive with voices constantly telling me I am unworthy, ugly, dumb. I never realized I have been in an abusive relationship, one which causes me to cancel plans at the last minute with friends, which makes me appear extremely unreliable or flaky. This relationship severs the trust I have in others because I cannot fathom anyone wanting to be next to me, love me, or even like me. Depression is persistent.

When my spouse comes home from work, he asks me how my day went. What I often do not tell him is that there are days I barely survive. Panic attacks on the subway, flashbacks paralyzing my body, feeling such utter sadness that I spend hours thinking of ways to stop existing. Sometimes, self-harm.

Having depression and being depressed are two different experiences. Many of us have said in our lifetime: I wish I were dead. We have days where we want to climb back beneath our comforter and sleep away our melancholy. But it is important to note that depression is an illness. A disorder. It is not just a bad day. It is something I will live with for the rest of my life.

At sixteen, I was hospitalized for my first suicide attempt and my last attempt was just five years ago. I stopped eating, was unable to concentrate at work and began cutting myself again. Various therapists have helped me to find coping mechanisms to soften the scream of my depression: punching pillows, snapping rubber bands against my wrist, drawing lines on my arms with red markers, breathing. But I have been trying to cut myself out of my body for decades. It has never really felt like mine. I yearn for the day when I can look in the mirror and recognize my reflection. To truly like who I see staring back at me.

My mental illness never lets me forget it exists in me. When I find myself relaxing into the marriage I chose, my depression taps me on the shoulder and punches me in the face. It does everything it can to get my attention.

My last breakdown was fueled by too many endings. I have never been very good with change. My mental illness insists things remain the same; it likes routine. So, at thirty-four years old, I lost my mind (again). My family gathered around me, took me to the hospital and I remained there with my mistress, while my bones protruded from beneath my skin because my body would not allow me pleasures like eating or laughter.

My father visited each day, and when I was released, he stayed with me in my apartment, drove me to work, and became like medicine for me without the side-effects. He reminded me that even though I was in this toxic relationship with depression, there was love all around me trying to get in.

My parents just want me to be happy. This is what they say, and of course, what parent wouldn’t want that for their child. The problem is I learned the meaning of this word early on, yet I have a difficult time grasping what it looks like.

“You were such a happy child,” my mother once said. But here’s the thing. With all the technology we have, the ability to chat with people from all around the world, share pictures of what you ate, spend hours LIKEing your friends’ words and images, we really do not always know what is happening within. I can smile for hours, but underneath I am in pain. I am drowning. My smile has become an easy mask to wear. It lets my mistress follow me everywhere without others knowing. I sew that smile to my face, inserting laughter at appropriate times, and no one knows. Then, I go home, rip off the smile, place it on my dresser to wear tomorrow and my mental illness mistress takes over.

This is what it is like to be married to a person with mental illness. My spouse and I will be playing our favorite card game (Skip-Bo) and suddenly I will break down crying. Words will try to tip-toe down my tongue, past my lips, but my mental illness will garble them. At night, I will move to the couch because my anxiety is like a thick rope twisting around me, constricting my ability to breathe. My mental illness jumps on my chest; it weighs six-hundred pounds. Six hundred pounds of trauma. How can I possibly sleep? I will ask my spouse multiple times: why do you love me? I doubt everything. I try to run away. The cutting never stops.

The thing about this depression is I know it so well. It knew me before puberty, haunted me as my body started to change, watched as I had my first kiss, fell in love. And as I began to get older, my mental illness became like a bully. It whispered distractions to me. My mental illness became my drug dealer. My mental illness brought me into strangers’ homes and led me into miles of bad decisions. When I tried to get away from it, it always found a way to bring me back.

I took prescribed pills to quiet it’s voice. Unfortunately, it’s speech grew louder. I tried yoga to get back into my body, to own it again. My mental illness whispered words which reminded me all the times I gave it away. When I wash my skin, my depression throws dirt in my face to remind me how filthy I am.

This is all to say that I am still here. Amidst my bully, my mistress, this sadness, a constant STOP sign for living. I go to work; I teach the most incredible minds how to write, how to think about the various texts we are reading about. I meet students who share their own stories of depression and anxiety and I watch them survive and thrive each day.

My spouse and I go out. We experience parts of the city that still amaze us after so many years of living here. Sometimes being around others can feel like a salve. Other times, I cannot inhale. The crowds make me feel like I am stuck. The skyscrapers scrape me. I fear that I cannot live here anymore, in a city where it is difficult to find a space of solace, of silence, where I can carve out space not already overfilled.

To be in love while having mental illness is a constant confrontation. I fight with the doubt in my head. I try to just trust that my partner loves me, and even loves the mistress who tries to break us up. Over the years, my mental illness has caused me to lose so many lovers and friends. I have missed out on enormously nourishing friendships because I stopped trusting them. I couldn’t understand why they would want to be near me. I would explode and then relationships would end.

This is what it is like to be friends with a person with mental illness. We disappear. We cannot go to your parties. We construct conflicts to prove we are unworthy of friendship. We are moody. We are inconsistent. We love you and then flee.

When I got married, I thought my mistress would disappear. I’ve got this piece of paper now, I said to it. I am bound to another. Leave me alone. And it did for a while. My spouse and I played cards without the interruption of my mysterious emotions butting in. We went to parties. We stayed out late. We went dancing and had spontaneous adventures. But then, I could feel my depression start to crawl around me. Mental illness cannot be ignored; I have tried.

So, I remain. Each day, I check in with myself. I take steps that are slow and sometimes that stop me. I cancel plans, oftentimes at the last minute. I try my best to communicate with others why I am like this. There is more vocabulary around us which allows for exploration of mental illness.

It is a different experience for everyone. This is mine. I am just trying to survive in a body that keeps trying to push me off ledges and onto subway tracks. But I am still here, today; I will check in tomorrow to see how I am.

Imposter

first published by great weather for MEDIA

 

You worry you enter rooms just for the free coffee. 

I write this into my notebook and leave it there, unattached to anything else. I try not to think about all the times I have walked into spaces I didn’t belong, or didn’t think I belonged. But this is not a story about coffee. Although, I am drinking some as I write this. No, this is about my life as an imposter.

I am approached by seven doors by the time I get to work. Some open and close without my hands pushing on them; some need to be messed with. I have a key to two of the doors, yet even when I’m inside, I’m not quite sure how or if I should be there.

I am a teacher. Some call me professor. Though that word sounds way too buttoned-up and makes it sound like I brush my hair or wear deodorant (I often forget).

Three days a week (sometimes four), I head into the Bronx and teach at a community college. Throughout the hour and fifteen minutes commute there, I read. Write in my notebook if there are enough words collected inside of me. Sleep. Stare at people staring at their phones. Marvel at the ways in which our lives can twist and turn us into so many different variations of being.

Every other week, I receive my paycheck and still grow astonished that I am getting paid to swell minds.

Growing up, I always thought teachers were aliens. Like flesh-covered dictionaries and encyclopedias. I firmly thought libraries of every book and fact lived inside their bodies, pressed up against their organs, which of course they knew all the names of. Ask a teacher anything and they knew the answer; this is what I believed.

My parents never put my report cards on the refrigerator like my sister. She was in the extra-advanced classes; I was in the low self-esteem club (yes, there was such a thing).

I wanted to be a veterinarian until I figured out I’d have to deal with blood and death. I thought about being a hairstylist, and then changed my mind to a pastry chef until I became a drug addict and that took me away for a bit.

I have been a nanny, a house cleaner, a barista, a bookseller. I’ve worked in a movie theatre, a diner, a dollar store, a fast food chain, a bagel shop. I’ve sold jewelry; I’ve sold my body.

Ten years ago, I never thought I would call myself teacher. What am I saying? Five years ago, I wasn’t sure I could call myself this. For most of my life, I never quite knew how to be. How to sit straight, how to socialize, how to be a girl, how to study, how to be bad, how to be good, how to remain.

I tell my students that doors represent an opening. An engagement with another side, land, perspective. I tell them that our bodies contain doors of varying sizes. Doors with padlocks; doors with police taped ribboned around; doors with broken locks. Doors with windows, screens, metal, wooden, translucent.

Even an imposter has a door to their insides. The problem is that sometimes they just don’t always know the way in or through.

I carried around an EXIT sign sewed into both my wrists from all the times I tried to walk out and jump off the ledge of this body. Yet I always found a way to get up and keep walking. But this is not a story about my mental illness and all the scars creating an alphabet on my skin.

I am an imposter. But maybe we all are? I mean, what qualifies any of us to be in any room? I want my students to remain and get their degrees, but that paper doesn’t necessarily get them into a room. Because then there are other STOP signs, which might assault their path like gender, race, class, religion, sexual orientation, must I keep going?

When I walk into the classroom, the students have no idea how nervous I am. Are they really going to listen to me? Me? But I almost flunked high school. I was a restless mess in college. And when I pass by the other teachers, I wait for them to ask me about my credentials. How many books I’ve read and if I’ve gotten through the literary cannon (definitely not).

In New York, where I teach, suicide is the 2^nd leading cause of death for those ranging in ages of 15-34. Every semester, my students tell me about their depression. Their anxieties. Their losses and their fears. I do not tell them all the times and ways I tried to walk off the ledge of this body. How I still feel this urge…

I do not tell them because what I show them is far more important: I always come back. At the start of every class, I welcome them as writers (because they all are) and remind them to be as present as they can be. At the end of the semester, I tell them I will always be their teacher, even when we are no longer walking through the same door.

And yet, I still cling to this word of imposter. I’m not trying to deceive anyone, as the definition often suggests. It’s more about how I feel.

I scratch hate crimes into the death of my skin, dry from winter fornicating with its oils.

I find this in my notebook, dated a few months ago. I have a steady job and a magical spouse who I love and a dog and an apartment and things and nourishment, but this does not mean that I don’t fall sometimes. Mess up. Relapse into old behaviors. Hence, my self-stuck imposter label.

I worry that I am an imposter in my marriage because I don’t believe in this word. I’ve had no great examples around me, and even though it’s a word my people have fought to have access to (and won), I still feel unclear by it

I am an imposter hippie. Swallowed by panic attacks at marches and rallies. Hairy but hungry for all varieties of animal. Can I still be a non-conforming subculture beatnik, and live inside this queer-stained heteronormative lifestyle?

Recently in my Women’s Literature class, my students and I watched Lidia Yuknavitch’s TED talk titled, “The Beauty of Being a Misfit.” Though I have watched this many times, I still feel emotional throughout. She said, “Even at the moment of your failure, right then, you are beautiful. You don’t even know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly.” Afterwards, I asked the students to react and one announced that she felt like her soul had been touched. So often we don’t quite have the words to say how we feel or even what we are. And then someone else articulates it as though they have been swimming inside our lives, our brains. A student asked, “But what is a misfit?” And I let the other students answer: outsider, someone unlike the others, someone who doesn’t fit in.

Maybe being an imposter is like being a misfit. It’s this giant secret I have living inside me. Like seeds of my former lives growing in my gut, pushing it out. It feels like the reason I should not be welcomed, but maybe being an imposter is the reason I should be here.

I have an exercise I do with my students each semester. It is based upon all the times we are approached by boxes: a box to check off our gender, our race, socio-economic class, educational background, religion, etc. Before the students arrive, I tape up blank pieces of white paper all over the classroom. Then, I ask them to stand up and approach a piece of paper.

This is your box, I say. Think about all the times you are asked to check boxes that may not include what you are or how you see yourself. Boxes with someone else’s language and expectations. Boxes which aim to label you with words or categories you may not feel connected to. Boxes just not big enough to include your vocabulary. I tell them that these pieces of paper are their boxes. They get to fill it in with their words. In the past, students have written: mother, battered, divorced, misunderstood, smart, latina, multi-racial, brother, son, survivor, queer, human, pansexual, Muslim, and even a question mark.

I ask them to sit down when they are done and write in their notebooks about what it felt like to choose their lexicon. Then, we get back up and walk around the room, taking in each other’s language. We notice the repeated words, what we have in common, and what words surprised us. For some, this is their first opportunity to give away their self-identified language.

I absolutely hate labels, even though I wear this imposter one across my bound chest. And I wear other labels too, which I self-imposed. Do I do this before someone else does?

Dictionaries are thicker now, and so are we. In brain stem, worry lines, and flesh stretch.

Maybe we need new definitions? To take these words out of their tightly-sealed casings and wrap new syllables around them. Make room for more meanings. Expand the width of our doorways.

sharps: notes from a dormant cutter

previously published by great weather for MEDIA

 

I spent much of my teen years in a romantic entanglement with sharp objects. I hoarded staples–stretched away out of magazines, paper clips, safety clips, razor blades. I practiced various forms of mutiny on my skin. I felt in control, even though the only thing I was in was a dark cavern of sadness. 

When I was sixteen, I met a girl called J with short, yellow hair like bristles of wheat and criss-crosses of sorrow all over her face. She’d scratch her cheeks and forehead with her fingernails, trying to invisible her pretty away. We met at mental hospital number three and although we both starting ‘dating’ two crazy dudes also in the psych ward (mine, a hallucinogenic boy who took too much acid and couldn’t trip his way out), I was really just in love with her.

At seventeen, in the back of math class, I took stretched out paper clip to the palms of my hands, because I was desperate to feel anything but numb. I counted the shapes my blood made, dripping out of my skin like morse code.

I loved my blood because it reminded me I had something alive inside of me. These sharps were like cat-calls to my skin: Hey, baby….follow me home. How about I show you a really good time?

There were days, weeks, even months, I tried walking away from sharps, from the bellows of scars which had begun to howl off my skin. But any addict knows wanting to stop and actually quitting are two very different movements.

One may reference the state of my forearms, where sharps and I dated on-and-off for fifteen years. We had a tryst two years ago, but the whole time I was thinking about someone else. Someone I hadn’t quite met yet.

They diagnosed me: cutter. Called me manic depressive, though I never reached those highs. My mom locked up the knives and suddenly sharps and I were like Romeo & Juliet, sneakily searching for ways to tangle in the night. I became very good at picking locks.

Razor blades were my mistress, disrupting relationships. We made love in numerous positions, invited in other toxins called pills and cocaine and called it an orgy. It was thrilling, but I was dying.

Now, it seems New Yorkers are hoarding box cutters, altering people’s faces and (false) sense of safety.

I will always be a cutter, just like I’ll always be a drug addict. But I’m not active. These tendencies are dormant and though I’m hopeful that they’ll remain asleep inside me, I work hard to keep away from the taunt and flirt of their haunt. I never thought I’d be frightened of something I was once so in love with. But I am. Immensely.

Sometimes, I envision it. Sitting, sandwiched between two other commuters, on the 4 train back to Brooklyn, with chalk dust on my fingertips and pant legs. Some human brandishing a box cutter, corroded in anger. Why are so many of us so angry these days? Some take it out on others with knives, just like I used to do on myself.

In this imagining, I can feel the unzip of my flesh, parting, making room for the rush of my blood. The panic. The true pain.

I asked my creative writing students to channel Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf in “A Street Haunting” and become flaneurs. Their experiment was to go to The Strand for a pencil. But if they never made it there, it didn’t matter. The emphasis was on wandering. Getting lost. Viewing life not from the glare of a cell phone, but from the unencumbered gaze of their eyes. Most of them had never been to this epic book shop before, so I was excited for their adventure.

At the end of class, a student came up to me and said, “I don’t think I can do this assignment.” I asked why. They explained that due to the slashings, their dad didn’t permit any trips outside of school and work.

On the train ride home, I traveled with fear curdling my veins. I became hyper-aware of the humans around me, particularly jumpy each time someone dipped their hands into their pockets.

I broke up with panic years ago; I’d rather not revisit its sensations of terror. I don’t want these slashings to stop me from existing. From traveling underground with strangers. From being a flaneur. I spent far too long trying to carve my way out of this world. I will not allow someone else to try to do the same.

it’s ok….actually…..please don’t smile.

WARNING: This post may cause abdominal pain. And it may increase digestion. And those who read this may develop bed sores on their bed side. Side effects may also include: increase of oxygen to most parts of the brain, teeth whitening, freckle recognition, harmonized memories and unambiguous thoughts.

******               ******               ******                  *****

Resting against my face is not a smile. I used to take pills to push one into my skin like the imprint a foot makes in the sand. But there were all those side-effects and suddenly a smile just wasn’t worth all the small print tumbling me into nightmares, dry mouth, loss of sexual appetite and on and on.

I walk on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn from home to subway and three different humans (all male-bodied) stop me and say, “Smile!” as though I had forgotten how.

On the train, I study the commuters who travel like I do and try to decipher the language of their faces. I realize that my lips are turned downward. I lift one side, not quite into a smile but less than a frown. Then, I stop myself. Who am I manipulating my lips for?

I enter a room and collect a bouquet of “How are you’s”. I answer wisely: “Well” or “Good, thank you.” But what I want to utter is: “Troubled, at times” or “Feeling stifled by language which I cannot connect to myself” or “Traumatized by my trip here” or “Okay, but I’d really like to be better.”

My father reads my blog. Tells me my posts have grown sad. I want to tell him that my words are all from the same seed. That the soil they live inside is sometimes colder and sometimes rotten and sometimes neglected but always feeling. I want to tell him that I am a writer and words cannot all be yellow with three dimensional, rotating suns singing in unison. Sometimes syllables shake and have to sit down.

I just don’t want to fake it anymore because in that fake there is tragedy. I want to frown in plain sight; how terrible it feels to be in hiding.

At night, our faces can rest. No one needs clarity when the lights are turned down and we travel into REM. We can wince and we can furrow and we can twist our flesh into sorrowful sighs. And how beautiful and how real all that is. To just rest in a face you really feel without having to make someone else more comfortable.

It’s okay……really…..please…..don’t smile…..just be.

how to be found

originally posted on great weather for MEDIA

 

how long until/ the limbs become/ just/ skin’s memory 

 

I travel west to contact every doorframe and window hinge I have ever touched. I want to know if they remember my fingerprint configuration. I need to know I am impactful.

In my pocket are three words I did not know before three days ago and one references a fruit I have trust issues with: aubergine. I contemplate renaming myself this word because I like the sling of its third syllable slapping tongue against roof of mouth. Is it ever too late to retitle oneself?

My mother calls me while I am pretending to write and she goes off script. She tells me my uncle has passed away. How long until a body loses its shape? And what shape does it become? Death lay there in his body for at least three days until. Until.

How to be found.          Out.

While living in suburbia, as a teenager with a license, I walked out of my psychology class one day with a mission to drive to my favorite park and hang myself. I was without weaponry, but I much preferred DIY techniques anyway. No one noticed when I walked out, right as the teacher—with three day beard or lipstick on teeth, I cannot recall—was offering a lesson on fight/flight and the biology of mental illness (or perhaps something completely unrelated). Slowly, I walked through the school parking lot to find my car, which really my sister’s, and it was red with only two doors. If I listened to the radio, I would have searched for Nirvana to scream his suicide notes into my ear.

This was the 90’s.

This park I liked was small, with evidence of duck excrement littering the ground like confetti. I did not care enough to watch where I walked; I just wanted to find the perfect tree to keep me elevated.

I ask my mother how he died and she does not know. I use a word like autopsy because of movies and over-saturated crime television programs like CSI and Law and Order. I need to know that even after addiction and depression, one finally reaches an age of understanding and stillness. I need to know I won’t want to revisit that tree with DIY weaponry when I am in my sixties.

I was fifteen when Kurt Cobain died. Less than one year later in 1995, I will try what he succeeded at, choosing pills and knives over shotgun. When Kurt died, everyone around me draped themselves in capes of flannel. When I die, I wonder if everyone will dye their hair red or just head to work because. Because. Why not.

On my travels west, I reach a doorframe found in an old school house, now called apartment complex. I licked the doorknob to see if it still tasted of me. All I can report is my tongue felt like pocket lint and pennies for the rest of the day. There was no sign of recognition.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, an American commits suicide every 12.9 minutes. In the course of writing this, at least four people have died.

I ask my mother once again about an autopsy, sounding out each letter slowly. Don’t you want to know? I ask. But I know that I am really asking me.

The last song Kurt Cobain recorded with Nirvana was titled, “You Know You’re Right” and I wonder if we ever really do. The lyrics haunt like the loudest lover you never could get over.

Kurt growls, “No thought was put into this/ I always knew it’d come to this/ Things have never been so swell/ And I have never failed to fail.”

The tree refused to elevate me on that day I casually escaped the confines of high school. Instead, I carved my name into a bench that faced a manmade lake. I contemplated what I was contemplating. Almost twenty years later, I look up that lake on the computer, and find that it has a yelp page. People express joy for its vastness; a perfect place to picnic; a spot for fishing or handholding. I ponder submitting my thoughts on the trees and how they may have saved my life that day, when I might have contributed to the census of Americans who end their time. How many stars would I give and would I mention that I used to think this park was a perfect spot to die, but now I just think it’s the right place to remember how to be found.

but also because of this.

[for Lily.]

 

You asked me when I started writing. Where did it begin and what caused it.

I mentioned Lou Reed. Bob Dylan. My sister’s old boyfriend, my favorite, who encouraged me to poem and to hippie. I mentioned that assembly freshman year of high school when I read a poem that caused all the teachers to warn my parents that I might try to Sylvia Plath myself. I mentioned open mics and giving up my dream of being a pastry chef.

But also because of this.

I started writing when my razor’s blade grew dull. And I started to write when I ran out of girls to kiss. And

I write when I binge on too much food, and feel the need to purge something.

Here’s the thing:

I’ve been writing letters to this old, white guy named Richard Brautigan, who keeps feeding my book shelf.

And I think of my student who asked me: Prof, why do so many writers off themselves? 

And I said, because so many come from tragedy & addiction & too much sadness to be cured by prescriptions, and it is the writing that keeps them alive, until….it just no longer can.

So I write to stay alive. Until I no longer can. And then maybe someone who needs a reason to remain will find me. And I will feed their bookshelf. And we all can just keep saving each others’ lives. One poem, one story, one page at a time.

how to address a scar

I didn’t expect you to be here this long.

I was in math class, grade ten and you were just supposed to keep me from jumping.

When James B. told my best friend, Drew in 12th grade, that I should just kill myself already, you kept mocking me with your inability to go away.

I didn’t know you’d grow louder in the summertime, from sun baking you into a starring role on my arms.

My mother remembered a commercial for a cream that could be rubbed on scars to vanish them away. “They may not disappear completely,” she said, “but at least they won’t be so visible.” I cried that night, realizing how forbidden you are.

I was dressed in just skin and water, in a bathtub that belonged to me due to monthly rent payments and name on mailbox. When I was a kid, it was the water, which washed away my chalk drawings; I thought maybe it would wipe away the carvings on my hips too.

Hello. Yes, I remember the first time. And I also remember Rachel, from the mental hospital, teaching me other ways to push myself off ledges after all the sharps have been taken away.

No, I really meant it when I said that I find scars sexy, because it is a reminder we have given ourselves permission to falter.

Age nineteen, I am in the only car I ever owned—a green Honda Civic I titled: Quentin Antoin McKenna. At the gas station, the attendant looks at my forearm as I hand him a ten-dollar bill and he makes a comment, which reminds me there is no escaping this billboard of sadness.

I am engaging in an activity that some people call sex and the one pressed against me grabs my wrist and rubs callused thumb against what is raised. Calls it braille. Asks to read the rest of me.

You twitch each time you see others like you. Thunder against my skin knowing how similar we all are. How sad we all are. How in need of other languages we all are. How loud we all are. How brave we are. How desperate we are to survive and yet desire to die we all are. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How.

cutting.

No one taught you how to cut your hair but on the seventeenth year of your lunglife, you grabbed rusty scissors from all those times your mother cut open packages of meat and cut away your knots. Your length. the girl from you.

You heard a scream and wondered if your follicles could feel. You stopped, briefly and listened to where the howls were coming from.

Scissors? Your fingers?

Your mother, just on the other side of the door, which had opened without your knowing.

Your mother, with frosted tips because that is what mothers did back then. They highlighted parts of their hair to make up for the parts of themselves they couldn’t.

Your mother, who grabbed scissors and gasped at the river of curls colliding on the floor of your bedroom, messy from an episode of rage several hours earlier.

Your mother, who bled out words of anger, spoke, “Why do you make yourself so ugly?”

You look in the mirror and then at her. To mirror, then her. See the genes of her genes in your face. Shared ears of protrusion. Shared spots on face called freckles. Shared mental illness.

You do not pause, before jumping into the pool of hair below you. You try out your swimming postures as you butterfly and breaststroke into the waves of girl against wood. You flap and spread your skinny arms, coating yourself in tangle.

And then.

And then.

You drown. Forgetting your inability to swim.

Your mother? She is too caught up in the state of your scalp to save you from the flood of your suffocation.

what it is to lose

When I was thirty-four, I lost my mind. It had been ten years since the last time, and I found myself ransacking my bedroom for the map—torn up and burnt—which would guide me toward my bearings.

Outside, the air was gathering up its new identity. Its nametag of Winter had been removed and thrown away; it was now calling itself Spring. The yellow daffodils, though beautiful, were just confusing to me. All I could see and feel was emptiness.

The last time, which was not the first time, I was twenty-four.

The first time, which may have not been the first, was when I was newly sixteen.

I have lost my wallet once, dropped during a bike ride in Boulder, Colorado. But a considerate Samaritan returned it to me, several hours later. They knocked on my front door and handed it to me.

I lost my favorite red scarf somewhere in the Museum of Natural History during the first week of January. Then, I found it near the photo booth by the bathrooms. A few months later, I lost it for good somewhere in the halls of a community college.

Losing a mind is tricky. You can’t exactly retrace your steps or ask a friend to ask their friends to keep an eye out for it. You certainly can’t put up fliers or ask the subway conductor to make an announcement:

“EXCUSE ME, PASSENGERS, A LOST MIND, WEIGHING IN AT ABOUT THREE POUNDS WAS LAST SEEN IN CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN WEARING A NAVY BLUE SHIRT. PLEASE CONTACT LOCAL AUTHORITIES IF YOU LOCATE THIS MIND.”

When I lost my mind at sixteen, my mother found me. I was sliced up and unconscious. My mind slowly crawled its way out of my body. I was gathered up and sent to stay in a hospital for twenty-one days.

I was confused how I would retrieve my mind in a place that caused me to lose it even further. It grew blurry and the signal was weakening. I was around others that encouraged me to remain lost. I was given tiny capsules to swallow that slurred my mind into curious shapes. My appetite, that I coveted, was lost as well. It simply vanished, leaving me bony, translucent and weak.

Six years ago, I lost a brown, corduroy cap, which I had borrowed from my then-girlfriend. I left it somewhere between a thrift store dressing room and a bike ride throughout downtown Denver. That night, when I told her of this loss, she cried. It had been in her life for a long time, with memories stitched into the fabric, visible only to her. She asked me to go and look for it. By then, it was nighttime and all the lights had been turned off, but I jumped on my bike and began retracing my steps. I begged the moon to point me toward the direction of this hat, but it was barely a sliver of light that night. When I got home, we mourned the loss of her hat and slept in silence.

When I lost my mind at thirty-four, it was due to various factors colliding. It felt like a gang-bang of bad news. I had lost my partner, then my therapist, and the dark in me was growing like persistent ivy all throughout my body. I could feel my sense of direction weakening. Food, which once gave me such pleasure, was making me sick. I couldn’t chew. My skin was beginning to show imprints of my wandering mind. My white skin with old scars was turning red with new scars. My tongue was no longer being utilized and my spit dried up. I may have stopped swallowing; what was there to swallow?

One day, on my thirty-fourth year, I awoke deciding to no longer search for it. My mind was gone and I could feel myself slowly slink away, like a snake slithering out of its skin. But I was not looking to regrow anything. Instead, I was ready to disintegrate.

When I was somewhere between eight and ten, I lost a moccasin in a brook behind my best friend’s house that we weren’t allowed to wander in, so I couldn’t tell anyone of my loss. I can’t remember how I explained my arrival that night with one bare foot. I can’t recall if anyone even noticed.

When I lost my mind, no one asked me if I wanted help looking for it. People don’t tend to talk about this kind of loss.

I got it back. My mind. My skin of scars. No more new ones though. I’ve given up on the pills, so I’m free from the side effects. I’ve got my appetite and my voice back. I wouldn’t say I feel complete ease that I’ll never lose track of my mind, but I’ve hoarded enough maps to make sure I’ll at least find my way back to it sooner, if it tries to bail again.

(can you) LIKE this?

When I was a junior in high school, I liked a boy called G. I was too shy to ask him if he liked me the way I liked him, so I gave him my Enya CD before class one day, because I had overheard him saying he liked her music.

He smiled and took it, but never really said if he liked me or even the album and I have a scar on my right forearm from the day I drove to that park somewhere between where I lived and didn’t and cut my skin until I felt touched by something.

Grade ten in high school and I am told by my best friend that while he was in the gym locker room, a bunch of other boys were making fun of me. They said they wished I had just killed myself already and I began to wonder why my friend was relaying this to me. He said, “I defended you,” because he liked me, even though no one else did. Four more scars were born soon after.

First grade. A boy called D passes a note to me via three other people and asks me if I like him back. He gives me a choice: Circle YES or NO or MAYBE. I circle all three; even then, I had a difficult time making up my mind.

Nowadays, we are LIKED at least once a day, sometimes ten or thirty depending upon how often we ask through typed-up messages and photographs. We unravel our scars, dig them out like time capsules and put them up onto our computer screens, so that someone will press a button and deliver validation we’ve grown to thirst for.

Nowadays, we walk around with instant validation. All one has to do is post words and wait.

LIKE.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Two minutes pass and you’ve acquired three and then two more and suddenly your lack of employment or depleted bank account or untreated-but-diagnosed depression does not matter.

You. Are LIKE’d. Simply because you posted words above a button making it very easy for others to press it.

You tell people you have grown sick or gone to hospital or stopped eating or what you are eating or how you sit or how you lean or the delicate drip of your nose or who you are dating.

You tell people about what you just did or what you are about to do or what you plan to do next week.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Nineteen years of age, I am swallowing a boy’s body part that does not feel safe or comfortable in my mouth. He did not ask me if I LIKED this.

Year twenty-seven of living and I leave a place that I never recorded after my body is broken into once again and there is no button, but if there were I would not press it.

Seven years later and I try it out. I gather up some words like a bouquet of flowers stolen out of someone’s front yard. I take these words and thrown them onto a computer screen. And I wait. And I hold my breath until the first….

LIKE.

It feels good. Adrenaline of acceptance rushes through me and suddenly it does not matter how much I meant what I wrote. It doesn’t matter that I never spell-checked or fact- checked. All that matters is someone LIKE’d it, which means someone LIKE’d me.

And all my scars began to faint away or I pretended they had and it did not matter I was alone or lonely or hungry or still depressed. Someone pressed that button for me.

LIKE.

I take all these LIKEs and crush them up. I press down firmly to smooth out the hard bits. Like gristle. Suddenly, I’ve got a fine powder of LIKEs. I lean toward them as though about to whisper something worthy of a click to them. I get so close, I almost blow some of the LIKEs away. Then, I glide this dust toward my nose and snort them up like the drug it really is. I inhale. My chest beckons. My ribs climb themselves. I inhale every last drip of LIKE that exists and revel in the aftertaste of anticlimactic emptiness.