Day 152: I wrote a poem that I quickly made into a song, but I haven't had a chance to record the melody yet. In the mean time, here are the words:
I like to think I’d be brave
But I think I’d be lying
I like to think I would stand up and save them
Or at the very least die trying
But I am too fearful to say what I think
I am too shaken, too scared…
And if I’m too afraid to live my own life
How could I ever save theirs?
I like to hope I’d be true
But that’s just wishful thinking
I’d like to say that when all this was through
I’d have withstood it proud and unblinking
But I am too cautious to say what I think
And I am too wary to share
If I’m too bewildered to know my own mind
How could I ever change theirs?
I like to think I’d be tough
But I know I’m a failure
I like to hope I’d know when to step up
To be there for those with no savior
But if I’m too fearful to say what I think
And if I’m too distant to care
If I’m too spineless to trust my own heart
How could I ever reach theirs?
It’s time to be honest. It’s time to be brave.
There may be consequences, I’m aware.
But I’m tired of hiding from my own life
When there’s a big, wide world out there.
When there’s oh so many lives to change,
And such huge hope to share.
Day 153: I started writing, and random things came out. It seems like the beginning of a short story about a crazy, suicidal girl who's just gotten out of rehab and is going to stay with her sister at Thanksgiving. Here's what I have so far:
The most effective way to kill yourself is to live. It's long and drawn out and usually messy, but I'm telling you - it works every time. There are differing opinions on suicide. People talk about it like they know from experience. But it's all a terrible kind of oxymoron: the cowardly act that takes such bravery (and/or desperation) to perform, the peace of death brought on my such a violent deed. You can talk about suicide and you can think about it, but until you're actually in the moment with it you honestly won't understand.
Attempt #1: razor in the bath tub. I only got one wrist before my sister came barging into the bathroom for her hairdryer and ruined the whole thing.
Attempt #2: overdosing on the various medications brought to my bathroom cabinet courtesy of Attempt #1. Two words: stomach pump.
Attempt #3: call it lack of creativity, or just being in general tired of the whole thing, but around this point in time I simply decided that if I couldn't die I'd just stop living. Sleep. I slept constantly. I stopped talking. I wouldn't leave my room. I wouldn't eat. This brought on a regimen of psychologists and psychiatrists, the latter plying me with even more drugs which I enjoyed mixing into various cocktails of alarming effect. Somewhere in the midst of this maelstrom the hallucinations began.
Yes, you're right. Suicide, mental illness, drugs, hallucinations. This is like a very bad three-episode arc on a poorly-written soap opera. It also happens to be my only means of self destruction. Death by life, and all that's left for me to do is dive right in.
My sister Rachel has potted ferns in her kitchen. This is noteworthy not due to the pot, nor even to the fern itself, but to the fact that there is not a sign of dust, nor a fragment of fern frond or bit of stem anywhere to be seen in the room. Not on the windowsill or the floor. Nowhere. In fact, I'm pretty sure not a speck of dust has settled in this kitchen since 1993. My sister is a freak. If I had a kitchen it would be fernless - or it would be littered with fernish debris.
This was inevitable, the fernly perfection of my elder sister. Like Jacob and Esau, except we're girls, and she's the elder sibling, and I didn't sell her my birthright - so actually it's nothing like that. It just seems like she gets all the breaks and I make all the mistakes. Her favorite color is yellow, "because of sunshine," she says. That alone should be enough - proof positive of her Disney-princess perfection. And I, the pointy-eyebrowed, black-robed villain of the scene, have to bite my lip to keep from blurting out that sunlight is, in fact, not yellow, but made up of the entire visible spectrum. Rachel believed in unicorns until she was fifteen. Apparently that one was my fault as well.
I want to keep saying mean, snide things about my sister, but out of all my family she's the first who's actually giving me a chance. After the rehab and the mental institution (soap opera... I know), I'm mostly treated like a dangerous animal or a child. Rachel, however, has actually tried to treat me like a normal human being. So while she provides endless setups for all manner of sarcastic asides, recently I've tried to hold back my barbs, internalize them so as not to offend my only current ally.
Day 154: If I ever got a tattoo (which isn't very likely) it would probably be something very small and simple with symbols that would hold specific meanings to me (oftentimes representing scenes or ideas from some of my favorite stories - the ending of the legend of Pandora, Sam's star in Return of the King, Tolkien's short story 'Leaf By Niggle,' the end of 'Till We Have Faces' to name just a few). The problem is: how to encapsulate such big ideas into small, basic symbols? Here's a brainstorming sheet which very quickly just turned into a doodle page:
Day 155: I was in a doodle mood. Here are some more of my sketches:
Day 156: I drew on a bunch of post-it notes and made a giant face... Weird.
Day 157: I wrote something that's somewhere between a diary entry and a nonfiction essay. Since it took more effort than just pouring my emotions out on a page, I'm counting it as Good Madness. Here's a bit about my experiences with depression:
I think that’s a common misconception about depression. People think there has to have been some major event or tragedy or life change that somehow triggered it. That certainly is the case in a number of instances, but not always. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re depressed until you’ve been in it so long the world doesn’t seem like it could have ever been any other way.
That’s the way it was with me. Sure, in hindsight I can try to pin it on a number of different things. I had just graduated from college, and a number of people find that transition from student into adult life to be hard. I was already deeply depressed by the time I quit my job, but being unemployed didn’t help things. Being isolated and feeling useless can only have added to the problem.
But really, there was no sane reason for me to feel this way. I had loving, supportive parents who would have moved mountains to help me. I had friends who cared about me. I had a good life, hobbies, interests, passions. But it all kind of faded, became like white noise, and it was me and the empty house and nothing but time to fill and the notion that, really, I wasn’t much of a person, and that probably there was no reason for me to exist, no excuse for me to be alive any more.
Despair sounds rational when you’re in it. Writing that now, I think, How could I have ever thought that way? But I did. And it had the ring of truth to it. I was useless. I found no joy in the world around me, and contributed nothing to it. I felt like a literal waste of space.
Day 158: I worked more on recording keyboard and vocals for the "Under the Stairs" wizard rock song.
Day 159: I finished recording on "Under the Stairs," my last addition being a bit of xylophone. You can listen to the song at this link. It's number nine. I went by the wizard rock moniker "Mopey Merope," for lack of a better Harry-Potter-related name.
Day 160: I wrote the following couplet. No idea where it came from, but I kind of love the idea of everybody hating the know-it-all prophet who gets to say "I told you so":
I’d remind you that I warned you once you weren’t meant for this,
but nobody likes listening to prophets reminisce.
Day 161: I had just moved into a new apartment with Melissa, and I was exhausted. Creativity wasn't exactly a high priority when my muscles were screaming at me from moving boxes and there were still ten million things to be unpacked. However, I did find the time to put contact paper liners into my bathroom drawers, so as uncreative as that sounds I'm still counting it since technically it created new, prettier drawers than before...? (Cheating? Maybe. But I was really tired!)
Day 162: I made another one of my silhouette art thingies, this time for Mandy...
Day 163: More sketching, this time on more of a fairy tale theme...
Day 164: I wrote another poem. It has some pretty vague writing in it, and I tried to take my couplet from a couple days ago and squeeze it in there, though I like it better in its original form.
Tell you, I’ll thank you to please leave me be.
Enough of that from you, now. Enough.
Yes please you, I’ll thank you to go now, to flee.
Enough of it from all of you. I’m through.
Isn’t that the way of it, the criss and cross of pain?
Intersecting lines that just as quickly branch astray.
Isn’t love a bullet hole, a jagged tear, blood stain?
Somehow wrong and yet you find you cannot look away.
Tell me, you’ll thank me to save up my pardons.
Not nearly what it needs to be. Not nearly, no it’s not.
Yes, if you’ll have me, I’ll accept. Ice either melts or hardens.
So tell me, is your mind made up, your temper cool or hot?
Isn’t that the way of it, the criss and cross of pain?
Intersecting lines that just as quickly branch astray.
Isn’t love a bullet hole, a jagged tear, blood stain?
Somehow wrong and yet you find you cannot look away.
I could have told you a long while ago that none of this would end up right.
But nobody likes listening to prophets reminisce, and so I’ll toss my thoughts into the endless void of night…
For isn’t that the way of it, the criss and cross of pain?
Intersecting lines that just as quickly branch astray.
Isn’t love a bullet hole, a jagged tear, blood stain?
Somehow wrong and yet you find you cannot look away.
This was always wrong and yet I couldn’t ever tear myself away.
Day 165: I worked on a story I'm nicknaming "Ozymandias." Here's what I came up with...
The first time I ever heard the name Ozymandias was in Mrs. Halligan’s tenth grade English class. I can still recall it clearly. I was seated toward the back of the room in that class, but more importantly I was seated right in front of Justin Barris, who had a habit of putting his feet up on the back of my chair. Unfamiliar with tenth grade boy flirting tactics, I tried scooting my desk away from him, but it was still really distracting.
In poetry sessions, Mrs. Halligan would often have students read the poem aloud before we discussed it as a group. I raised my hand, grateful for any excuse to be out of my seat for a little, but it was quiet Susan McCabe who got called on to read. Seriously, if you ever heard this girl string together more than four words it was something of a miracle. And yet here she was raising her hand to read a poem out loud in front of a classroom full of her peers—volunteering herself for the one activity she usually avoided at all costs. It was pretty unexpected.
It was also a shame. Her voice was reed-thin and lapsed sometimes into whisper. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s best efforts at noble grandeur were squelched in the miserable cadences of a voice almost consistently on the edge of something—probably tears. But even in Susan’s faltering tones, two lines rang out with force and clarity: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
We picked apart the poem as high school English teachers have a wont to do. We talked about Shelley and his life and other works. We talked about time and the inevitability of decay. We even talked about why someone would have a stupid name like Ozymandias (that was Carl Phillips’ brilliant contribution to the discussion). Then Mrs. Halligan tried to wrap things up on a hopeful note by giving some uber-inspirational speech about how we impact each other’s lives. I really am not sure what her point was, as by then I had pretty much stopped listening.
That was the extent to which I knew the name: a shadowy part-statue from an old poem that was read ever-so-forgettably by the school’s resident mute girl.
The second time I heard the name Ozymandias was when the dark-eyed man appeared at my door, tipped his hat at me, and asked if he could come in.
“The name’s Ozymandias,” he said. “You may want to remember that.”
But after that day I’d have no problem with forgetting. That name would come to haunt me beyond the very bounds of Time.
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