TW: Suicidal Ideation
You used to think you knew what sadness was, but you did not. What you knew was a life that was punctuated by moments of sadness.
The sadness is what happens when the brightest colors fade immediately and stay that way. The sadness happens when you are halfway through your favorite meal and suddenly stop, not even close to full. The sadness happens when you put on a favorite horror movie of yours, probably some junk-food caliber slasher with lots of gratuitous violence and sexuality, and realize that while not deaf, you actually can’t hear the words. The actors are just background noise now because the noise in your heart is too loud.
The sadness happens when your favorite magazines pile up, when you stop paying mind to the news at all, when life moves like a speeding train in the distance, behind a thick tree-line. Soon there is nothing but that sadness. It is with you with such regularity that you begin to fear that you might lose it.
Because surely, Nathan, there are things worse than the sadness.
Sometimes it collects deep in the center of your chest. It is a treasure trove of awful and it is filled with everything; insults at peak levels of obscene, lies, raging and impulsive actions and behaviors. It is a long list of wrongs, one after the other, magnified, refined, melted down and shaped into a sword. You learn into this blade daily. It doesn’t hurt when it penetrates but it feels tight. So very tight.
When the sadness tightens up into anxiety, you call it your passenger. Your passenger does not come around as much these days, but he used to arrive at 4:00 PM sharp. You would freeze, your heart racing for no identifiable reason. In an attempt to get rid of the energy, you would pace around the house, room to room, collecting steps while slowly pulling your mind outside of your body. You would end this ritual in a fetal position, on the loveseat in your home addition, breathing slowly into a metal charm you keep around your neck.
You love this charm and never go anywhere without it. You even keep a spare.
The sadness comes in the form of the passenger many times, but often the sadness comes alone, stripped of its weapons but still very much prepared to cause pain. It is the sadness that makes you think through your past, climbing through the dusty, cobweb covered parts of your mind until you have built a spirited case against your own person.
You would love to be the prosecution and the defendant in your own trial; it is the perfect dynamic for someone caught in a cycle of self-love and self-hatred, with heavy emphasis on the latter.
One time the sadness told you that you were not good enough to drink a milkshake. Can you imagine that? It was an Ocean City vacation. You were alone again, after storming off and away from a mess of your own making. You remember walking past the hotels, your heart sobbing, your mind painting awful portraits of what it would be like to fall from the tops of one of those hotels and rid yourself of everyone. You heard the body go splat but couldn’t really imagine horror as a response from the crowd. Planet earth had certainly had enough of your antics.
When you arrived at the end of the boardwalk you realized that you were hungry. You got in line for a chocolate milkshake. People crowded around you. A gentle breeze passed through your hair, and the chiming and buzzing noises from a local arcade sounded. It was all a lovely scene and you made it miserable. You nearly got out of line because you didn’t think you deserved a frozen dessert.
The things you think, Nathan.
Sometimes the sadness, of course, is a good thing. You certainly love sad music, film, and literature. You love such art to the point where you are often turned off by endings that seem to have an artificial happiness. You find comfort in feeling sadness with characters who ought to to feel sad. In this way sadness makes you feel human. When the sadness is nice it tells you that you are capable of doing all the good things, like expressing love and creating inspiring literature. The sadness tells you that the sad things are often fuel for the fire, and you know this is true.
Inspiration is often born out of the ugly.
So the sadness isn’t all bad. It’s good to be sad. Being sad tells you that you value things. The sadness tells you about the temporal nature of this planet, and about the temporal nature of existence, really. The sadness makes you love the next moment sometimes, even if that next moment seems awful.
The sadness, when it is nice to you, tells you that you are good and kind and worthy of love and happiness. That’s not too bad at all.
You look up, snapped out of your day dream by the call of the unit attendant. That’s right. You are finally out on the patio. You can feel a nice breeze. To your left is the lovely view of a construction site. Since it is one of the only things that you have seen from the outside world in days, it looks like an undiscovered rainforest to you.
In front of you is an artificial fountain, carved into the side of a hill. The water has been flowing with that distinct bubbling sound; at once it is soft and calm, but somehow chaotic. You think about the chaos in the water, and about how that water just goes round and round, flowing and flowing.
It is time to go inside. Your time has been cut short due to staffing issues. This is not uncommon.
You get in line and return to the unit, losing yourself in your thoughts again. Is it day 3 here? Day 4? You can’t remember.
You used to think you knew what sadness was, but you had no idea.
Now you know.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
Comments