Catharsis (Born)

Catharsis (Born)

My two year old actually decided to nap today, which means I've had almost two uninterrupted hours to write. So much productivity!

But I didn't only write during these two blessed hours, I found a lost friend.

Today’s piece is something I’ve been wanting to share for a while. Before you read it, I want you to know that I wrote it while hurtling from an extreme depressive episode to a manic high, so the viewpoint is distorted and not to be trusted. Mental illness often erases all that is happy and good from our memories. It takes away hope and makes the future seem insurmountable.

This piece punched its way out of my chest in the ten most cathartic minutes of my life. Revision took longer, of course, as revision always does. But in those initial ten minutes, I healed years of hurt and anger. This poem is near and dear to my heart. It helped me reconcile with a friend I thought I had lost for life. The story behind this poem is one of great pain and suffering, but also incredibly hard work, healing, and forgiveness for both me and my friend.

Savannah, this one is for you. We’ve come so, so far and I’m so unbelievably proud of us both and the lives we’ve built. I love you. I’m so glad we’ve found each other again. Life might knock us down, but it sure as heck won’t keep us there.

To everyone else, I hope you can find your own little bit of healing here today. And remember, the viewpoint of mental illness is not to be trusted. My story is one of great joy and redemption, no matter what my illness tells me, no matter how hard my illness tries to convince me there is only dark. Read this piece knowing it tells only one side. There is always healing and there is always hope, no matter how hard our illnesses try to tell us otherwise.

BORN

Her name was Savannah and she devastated me the way only a true friend can.

I don’t remember how we became friends, only that we did. One day she wasn’t there and the next we were inseparable. It’s strange, looking back, how completely and quickly I gave her my unbreakable loyalty.

Unbreakable until the day it almost killed me.

She undid me in every way that mattered. I don’t know if she knows it, how utterly she broke me.

Savannah was the kind of person who needs saving from herself, and, like a fool, I believed myself enough to save her.

I was not.

My broken pieces can attest.

I’m still putting myself back together eight years after saying my final farewell to her. She reached out a few times.

I do not allow myself to respond.

I think, truly, allowing her back into my life would kill me this time.

For whatever reason, my loyalty to her knows no boundaries.

Because no matter how she shattered me all those years ago, I love her. Still.

Why? I ask myself all the time. What has she done to deserve this love, this loyalty?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Less than nothing even.

And yet…

And yet.

Here I stand, scribbling these words in a hurried fashion so as not to lose them inside my mind again.

She is the moment in my timeline. The moment I broke, to become who, or what, I am now.

I am pain and rage and resentment, bitter as the sun rises, empty as it sets. I am broken and yet whole, cold and yet boiling. I am a never-ending jumble of impossible emotions, submerged in a chasm of unfeeling which leaves me breathless, sleepless, hopeless.

I do not know how to repair what she tore apart.

But here I sit, already put back together, by some miracle of time.

Somewhere along the years I healed and I don’t know how I got here, because I am healed and yet…I hurt.

I am broken in places she never touched.

Perhaps she was my catalyst to the shattering which was inevitable from my birth.

I was born with an ill mind and I will die with the same ill mind, because, though I try, I cannot carve myself from my mind any more than I can separate my mind from myself.

We are the same, this ill mind and me.

I am an ill mind.

Why do I feel misplaced then, inside this ill mind which won’t ever feel like home? Whose skull is this I’m living in? I don’t think it is my own.

Who is she, this body I inhabit?

Who is she, this ill mind renting space in my head?

Neither of them is me.

Where am I then, if not in this body or this mind?

Where am I?

Who is I?

Who is me?

I don’t know how I got here.

How I keep coming back to here.

Always here, never there.

Never going anywhere.

But here.

This chasm.

Feeling everything and nothing.

Drowning in the deepest ocean, on a mountain top with the cleanest air.

Mania.

What is happening to me? To this woman in this mind in this body, if she is really me, or I am really her.

Am I here again?

Did I ever really leave?

And what of her? Savannah.

What of my Savannah?

She was never mine, though I thought her to be, for if she was, I never would have stumbled into this god-forsaken place to begin with.

But…was I already here when I first found Savannah?

Could she really break what was already broken?

What was broken, she made irreparable.

I am irreparable.

What is born ill, will die ill.

We are broken, this ill mind and me, ill beyond reckoning.

So, the problem was never Savannah, the problem was always me.

This ill mind and me.

Born ill.

Die ill.

Nothing in between.

We were both broken when we found each other, Savannah and me. Broken things trying to fix each other with pieces that didn’t belong, didn’t fit, would never work, should never be.

Instead of being the glue, we cut each other with our jagged shards, never intending to hurt, but tearing each other apart all the same.

As irreparable as she made me, I fear I’ve done the same to her.

The good thing about being a broken person is we already know how to break.

The shattering is easy.

It’s the rebuilding we can’t get quite right.

But like I said.

Born ill.

Die ill.

Nothing in between.

A REMINDER: Nothing in between? My friends, there is a whole great big beautiful life in between when we are born and when we die. Please, please, please do not believe mental illnesses lies. This moment is temporary and life is worth the effort. Life is worth healing for.