This text was from 2022 just before I checked myself into detox for alcohol. She made me cry. She took all the best parts of me with her when she died, but I’m determined to get them back. That’s what she would want for me.
Tag: mental-health
-
Lizard plays dress up
I muck about in my ill-fitting skin.
I grind my jawbone into grit.
I waft and I waver, and I wait and I wait.
My scaly shoulders suffer in the thick air.
It’s putrid, even rancid; every inhale burns.
I can’t stay here.
I make it halfway down the road,
I let out a chilling scream then, and turn around.
My sandpaper tongue probes the spaces between the dentin of my teeth.
I lick the sediment from my gums and I wait and I seethe.
Oh, this alien skin.
I grimace, spitting out sawdust remnants.
The first scale has sloughed off and hangs suspended halfway down my back.
I am reptilian. I am panicking, and wishing for the grace that I lack.
A quick glance around, but I no longer care who sees.
I unzip this human suit, step out.
No, I step in. To myself. To me.
-
the kind of person I’d like to be
I don’t know what my values are. I don’t know what I want out of life anymore. I don’t have any goals at the moment per se. I don’t even have a to-do list for tomorrow. But I I know that I would like to be the kind of person that um has um a filing system at a home.
Yeah. I would like all of my important documents and paperwork and stuff to be in a central location at my house that is static and I would like for the organization to make sense. I would like to be the kind of person that goes to a room to declutter or clean and doesn’t just make a mess out of cleaning before getting frustrated and shutting the door behind her as she exits.
Yeah.
I’m the kind of person that goes to clean or organize and declutter, and just makes a bigger mess. Yeah, that’s my brain. I try to sort things out and I just make it messy. So I’d like to be the kind of person that has a filing system at home, and I’d like to be the kind of person that keeps up with it – not only keeps up with that, but thinks about it on their own, like, wake up in morning like, “uh oh – “
“well, darnivvy, I forgot to water the the hoses outside and it’s gonna be freezing overnight and they’re gonna be out in the cold.”
I wanna just think of that stuff on my own, you know? The boring adult stuff that you’re supposed to do, nobody really wants to, but you do it because you’re an adult. I want to be the kind of adult that instinctively just is an adult.
I want to be the kind of person that people can come to for reassurance. I want to be the kind of person that knows what to say when someone they love is hurting. I want to be the kind of person that cares and that’s empathetic and not just you know, pretend empathetic, and fake.
I don’t wanna be fake, but I am fake.
Because my every thing that I do, every action, every interaction, every response, I have mapped out in my head what I think it’s gonna go like. When it comes to other people, I am so concerned with whether they like me – well, I don’t even actually really need them to like me, although I’ll tell you all day long I just need to be liked. I don’t actually care.
What I really need is to be perceived as a person who is likable. Why is that? My couple remaining brain cells can deduce that I need people to perceive me that way because I don’t, in fact, see myself as someone that people find joyful to be around.
And I’m gonna be honest, I am not a joyful spirit anymore. There’s a glimpse every now and then, usually when I have been off of all substances, at least 72 hours plus minimum. Um, I want to be a joyous spirit. I want to be like my grandma, man. Be a joyful song. Right now, it’s like a generic beat uploaded to SoundCloud, with some dude you went to high school with mumbling over it. And then he posts it to his Facebook, like, “hey y’all, don’t forget to go check out my music.” That’s the kind of song I am. I’m a SoundCloud song I’m not even a song — I’m a SoundCloud rap. Yup. Maybe I’m the SoundCloud rapper.
This is why nobody likes me. At least if I were funny, that would cancel out a lot of my inherently bad aspects and at least make them a little there would be one thing that would make people want to be around me occasionally.
So that’s the kind of person I want to be. I want to be the kind of person that doesn’t allow myself to remain in the situations that I put myself in. I want to be the kind of person who claws her way out of the poor decisions and bad judgment and terrible utter abysmal failures of coping mechanisms. I want to be the girl that dragged herself to detox three years ago. I couldn’t even walk, man, but I got in the building, couldn’t sign my own name on the admissions paperwork because I couldn’t stop puking and sweating and crying and, I don’t know, making these weird moaning noises for some reason, cause I thought I was about to die.
But you know what? I wanna be that pukey sweating crisis of a person because that crisis did what needed to be done to come out of crisis mode and this crisis – this is just chosen chaos at this point. It’s not even comfort.
Talk about a tangent, wow. I think the kind of person I’d like to be is resilient. I’d like to be resilient and honest and sure of myself.
I wanna be the kind of person that doesn’t have to talk to herself because she feels like nobody else is listening. I wanna be the kind of person that doesn’t talk to herself constantly just as some sort of reassurance that she’s still there. I want to be that kind of person. I want to be the kind of person that is sure of myself even if I go three weeks without saying a word, and I want to be the kind of person that can go three weeks without saying a word because in my head isn’t such a bad place to be for that amount of time.
I want to be the kind of person that can be alone with her thoughts. Who can go to bed at a reasonable hour, instead of staying up for no reason other than the fear of self-reflection in the dark. Because that time is the loneliest time for me.
I wanna be the kind of person that doesn’t use the voice memo app on her phone to pretend that she’s doing any sort of self-reflection in an attempt at growth in the way of actually doing any work. I can record a voice memo every day of the week with my faults and moral failings and toxic traits and all that, but what good is that gonna do me? It’s not gonna fundamentally change who I am. It’s not going to push me to actually take the actions and do the tiny little things I need to do to make changes.
I’m not the kind of person I want to be and I wanna start trying to get there. I wanna try. I want to give it everything I have and I know it’s not much, but I I hope that it’ll be enough. I may not have all that I used to have, but what I do have I will throw at this with all of my mind.
All of it
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable 