The First Empty Birthday... Again

You know, I had just gotten kind of used to celebrating Brittney's birthday without her. I had only just started to be sort-of okay. And now I have to start all over again, to re-learn to celebrate a birthday without the birthday girl here, to re-learn to hunker down and hold on on yet another date on the calendar -- there's so many of those now, and I'm not even thirty yet. I have to re-travel that entire path of grief, all those years of birthday parties that will never happen, and I have to re-condition myself to at least pretend to be okay again on yet another date when I'm really not.

Yet I'm not allowed to die. The four of you were, Brittney and Grandpa and my cousin and M, but somehow I'm not? How does that make sense? Today on your empty birthday, in some ways I wish it was mine. Why couldn't you take me with you? Why did you get to go and I had to stay here, in the shadowlands of the oxygen-dependent? You had so much more to offer than I ever have. Why leave me here? What could I possibly still do here that you couldn't have done a thousand times better? Am I just a cosmic punching bag and mere sweet death would be too good for me? How long -- how long must I watch my friends and family marry and have children and work in fields they enjoy and excel at their hobbies and I just watch a steady parade of caskets go past me, I watch my friends fade off my 'recent contacts' list because you can't text the dead. My still-surviving friends roll their eyes when I talk about stuff like grief and death because to them it's years away. They won't have to worry about that for another forty or so years yet. How have I seen more deaths than some sixty-year-olds? How is this fair? They got to at least enjoy their friendship. Mine are always cut short before we have a chance to really see how much we can create and explore together. Am I just destined to be companionless forever? How is that fair? How is any of this justified? Why do I have to be the only one?

I had only just begun to be able to put some of these questions out of my mind, at an uneasy rest. But now they're all back, and I'm so tired of not being able to ignore them and not being able to answer them.

And now I'm back at the beginning, once again. That first not-right, empty birthday. The first 'wish you were here' in a long, LONG neverending line -- given how long my mediocre existence will drag on at this rate, I might end up celebrating eighty of these empty birthdays, the days without you here, though that fact that you even have a birthday means that you were here, and it only emphasizes just how much you're not here anymore

(Metaphorical) Split Jump

I feel like I have one foot in two provinces and it's honestly exhausting.

Earlier this spring I had made plans to stay in Saskatchewan fairly long-term (despite graduating college in April). I notified my housemates, job-hunted, started looking at places, told my entire extended family/friend group -- and then it fell through. Completely. Entirely.

I came up with a backup plan fairly quickly. Since it involved me moving back to Alberta, I officially ended the perennial Saskatchewan job-hunt -- no point in prolonging the frustration of not getting hired if I was only going to be there another month and a half anyway.

However, because I have zero income, this means I am literally scraping together couch change to pay for gas to get to rehearsals. I have $18 to my name right now. I literally can't even break a twenty for change for the parking meter at the doctor's office.

This leaves me in a very tight spot. I'm still in shows in Sasktachewan till mid-June. However, I don't have money to even fuel my van this week. The one saving grace was that there's a week and a half between performance dates here. It's a long enough period of time to go back home and work for my dad's company for a week. And that should earn me enough money to pay my final rent bill in Saskatchewan and cover gas till I move back to Alberta. It's really kind of stupid that I'm having to commute nine and a half hours (to a different province!) to work, but I swear literally NOBODY ELSE on the planet will hire me. Name it and I've applied for it. Even jobs below minimum wage. I have applied for literally everything.

I've just confirmed my place in a renting option in Alberta. I guess it's official now -- my time in Saskatchewan is ending, much sooner than I anticipated. I really only have about two weeks total here -- the rest will be in Alberta, working to afford to actually move.

It hurts. 98% of my friends -- my support system -- are in Saskatchewan. I really only have two Alberta friends left, and they'd be in a different city than me. I would be well and truly alone in a strange city, when I'm already not in a great headspace.

Don't get me wrong -- I love Alberta, and I love the city (both cities in general and the particular one I'm moving to). But I feel very much like I'll lose all the friends I made here in Saskatchewan, and I'll have to start rebuilding a support system from step one all over again -- do you know how long it took to cobble together the one that I currently have? And that was in a school environment, where you're together with people all the time, in a setting that's fairly conducive to building relationships.

It still doesn't seem real that one day, in less than a month, I will be leaving this house, driving away from this town, taking the exit off the highway... and never coming back.

Honest Ramble

Can I be very, very honest about my life right now? Here is one of the few places I can be, because here, on this website, on my domain name, nobody is required to read anything I write. If you want to read it, fine. If you don't, fine. Nobody's forcing anything on this blog down anybody's throat. On Facebook and Instagram, I have a persona to keep up, at least a little bit. I do show frustration on there sometimes, but I try to balance it with humour (even if it's sarcastic/dark humour).

I'm frustrated beyond words at my lack of ability to get a job. I've been job-hunting for three years. And I'm not being picky. I've applied for waitressing, cashier, reception, janitor, construction, literally anything that I'm even kind of half-qualified for. I feel like a failure as a human being because I'm not self-sufficient, because I still need financial assistance. People tell me, 'just apply for everything.' I know... I've been doing exactly that for three years. And I feel like I'm defective, like something's fundamentally wrong with me because despite being very qualified for a variety of different types of work, literally nobody even contacts me for an interview or anything. How is it so easy for everyone else to get a job and not me? What's so horribly, horribly wrong with me that it's immediately obvious even to those who have never met me in person?

I haven't practiced dance since February. I just -- haven't. I was busy, then sick, then injured, then recovering, now sick again. And now I'm wondering if I even bother picking it up again because now I'll be so far behind -- again. And it's not like all that practice was serving me well anyway... I was easily the worst dancer in Fame.

I am bored as heck. Having no job and no more schoolwork (ever) has left me with a LOT of free time that I really wasn't prepared for. Ordinarily I would just use it for practice, but I'm not even sure I want to put in that much effort anymore... I'm not sure it's going to be worth the time and energy I've put into it, and I have so little energy to play with as it is. I'm not sure I should even bother pursuing the performing arts anymore. I'm not sure what I should be pursuing or what I should be doing. I feel very, very purposeless. Up till now, the arts was my purpose. But now... now I don't even have that. Never before in my life have I not had the arts, some kind of creative project, to capture my imagination and my days. Never, never before. Is this how people live? Is this the hell they wake up to every day? How do they breathe under that weight?

I just feel so, so useless. I feel like I have nothing to bring to the world that somebody else isn't already doing ten times better. I feel like everyone's got everything taken care of and they don't need me for anything. I worked so hard and I tried so hard and I practiced so much and it wasn't enough to be of use to anybody. I feel like I have nothing to contribute, nothing to say that hasn't already been said, nothing to do that hasn't already been done. They say to put your own unique stamp on the world and to live life as only you can, but my only calling card is that everything I do is subpar. And maybe that's not even my fault... but it feels like it is.

I don't want to just spend my life watching YouTube. I don't want to spend it scrolling through Facebook. But right now those are literally the only options available to me. I don't have a job and I don't have talent and I don't have money to start something even moderately big. I can't even do another dance video -- I don't have the money.
I'm scared that I'm just wasting my life and that I'll be mooching off my family for the rest of my life. I'm scared no-one needs me. I'm scared I'm missing something.

My brain literally feels like it's being eaten by acid -- melting, burning. I wanted so much to create things, but they're always, always subpar and I'm exhausted from expending so much energy into something that's worth nothing.

When you're a kid you can do something as stupid as make bracelets and sell them for $5 each and make money that way. But when you're an adult they expect so much more from you. They expect the world. They expect complete perfection. Nobody will pay $5 for a string with three beads on it made by a fully functioning adult human who's perfectly capable of going out and getting a job... right?

I feel unheard -- completely invisible. I send emails and it's like they're never received. I talk to people and it's like they never heard my voice. I stand by them, I even touch them, and they look right through me. It's like being gaslighted by the entire world -- 'I never ignored you.' Then why do you refuse to acknowledge my existence?

I'm aware that time is marching on and I'm doing nothing with it and it'll end soon and I'll have nothing to show for it, but it's not for lack of trying. I tried -- I tried. I freaking tried.

I feel like I'm trapped and I'm drowning and I can't get out.

Too Personal

I've touched on this rant before. However, I've reined myself in in those instances. Here, I am going to give you the full, unadulterated, 100% pure-from-concentrate rant.

(Buckle up.)

In the more immediate aftermath of the Year from Hell (2015/my second year of college/when literally everybody I ever loved was dying), I was so consumed by the pain that admittedly, it was all I talked about. I was trying to process it, trying to hash it out, and as a result, I talked about it incessantly. I was angry, I was wounded, I felt like everybody was abandoning me (dying) and I was crying out for somebody to just not. I felt like everybody was leaving, despite my cries for them to stay -- it was like nobody heard me. I call this phenomenon 'screaming into the void.' I was screaming for someone to stay and they kept walking away, without even glancing back or checking their pace. As if I wasn't making any sound at all. As if they never even heard me. As if I wasn't even there.

So, in a desperate attempt to get some measure of sympathy or attention or even some acknowledgement that I wasn't invisible, I kept telling the story of my pain. Over and over. I was waiting for somebody to really, truly hear me. To listen. No-one did, so I kept rehashing the story. I wanted somebody to hear it, and I would keep telling it until somebody did or die in the attempt.

In May 2016, somebody who I had considered a friend told me through text (somewhat rudely) that I was getting 'too personal.' I was too stunned by his rudeness to ask what that meant, but I made a mental note to not bring up anything but fairy floss and unicorns around this person again (which, when your life is a living hell as mine was at the time, means you're never going to talk to them again). As best as I could figure given the limited context, 'personal' meant 'not ecstatically happy.'

Two months later, a very good friend of mine said the same thing -- the exact same words -- after I confronted her about blocking me on social media. This person knows pain very similar to mine, so this one hurt especially deeply. Our relationship still has a rift in it, as I now feel I can't talk with her about anything lest it be deemed 'too personal.'

In November 2016, in an email that was a direct factor in my suicide attempt four months later, a mentor said to me, 'you are being too personal. Nobody wants to hear about your troubles.' To me, this translated directly to, 'nobody will ever love you because your life has problems.' (Even though it was not my fault that everybody around me was dying.)
Even though I didn't attempt suicide till the following March, this email was the point where I mentally/emotionally gave up and these words were ringing through my head the night that I actually attempted suicide. Those words sent a very clear message that I was broken beyond repair and that nobody would ever want me in their lives.

What do we do with things that are broken beyond repair, things that nobody wants?

We throw them away.

People ask why I tried to kill myself. How could I be so selfish? they ask. Answer: Because I was broken and nobody wants a broken person. Broken people are a drain on friends, family, society, and -- I was told in no uncertain terms -- churches. We take energy and joy and hope from people and replace it with bleak despair. And Nobody Wants That. Don't lie to me -- you all told me that yourself, in those 'nobody wants to hear...' messages. I was going to throw myself away -- the way all broken things should be (sayeth society).

'Too personal' bothers me because it means that you think you can impose on me what I can and cannot say. You're trying to censor me. Everyone else gets to pull the 'free speech' card, so -- where's my right to free speech? More than that, it shows that you don't truly care about me. A true friend is there through everything -- good and bad, thick and thin. Yes, tough love is a useful tool, but it should be a last resort, not a wall you put up the SECOND a friend starts struggling. (Also, side note -- tough love really only makes sense if said friend is actively hurting themselves. However, if life is beating your friend down through no fault of their own -- you know, like if someone close to them dies -- that is not, not, NOT an appropriate time for tough love. THEY ARE IN MOURNING AND IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THEIR FAULT THEIR FRIEND/CLOSE RELATIVE DIED. STOP PUNISHING THEM FOR BEING SAD ABOUT SOMETHING OUTSIDE THEIR CONTROL.) The instant you throw out the 'too personal' line, you have permanently placed your friend at arm's length and told them that you are not a safe person to come to if they need it (for more on that, read this). I have literally ended friendships over this line (and it takes one heck of a lot for me to end a friendship -- I've only ended two or three friendships in my entire life, but they were all over this or very similar issues).

There's a quote that floats around the internet to the effect of 'If you can't handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best,' and that is SO true. Either you're with me through it all, or I'm done with you. I don't have the time or energy for fair-weather friendships who only want my perfect, happy life. If you love me, you love all of me, no matter how sad or frustrated or discouraged.

That being said, please hear this -- you don't have to fix me.

I'll say it again: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FIX ME.

I don't expect you to make my life perfect again -- that's not possible for anybody. You just have to love me. If I trust you with the information of how difficult things are for me at the moment, that means I trust you. Take that as an honour. Don't destroy that trust by telling me that you have arbitrarily decided that I can't talk about a certain topic or issue in my life that I just want to hash out or verbally process.

Now, that's all frustrating, just on its own.

But even before you get to all of that crap, there's the fact that from an English-speaking standpoint, the phrase itself doesn't even make sense -- at least not in the context of me talking about something that's happened to me. It makes sense if I'm asking you questions about yourself and your life and you say, 'that's kind of a personal question, I'd rather not answer it.' That makes sense to me, but if I want to tell a story from my own life, how is that 'too personal?' What does that even mean? You're asking me to avoid something that can't even be properly defined. And a person who's struggling -- especially if they have a condition like depression -- will tend to swing to the opposite extreme. They will stop sharing their pain -- entirely. To anyone. Full stop. They -- we -- will carry it alone and bottle it up.

And bottled up pain, just like bottled up anger, will eventually explode, and sometimes pain explodes into a suicide attempt. And sometimes suicide attempts don't get thwarted -- sometimes the thing we try actually does kill us. Sometimes nobody calls. Sometimes the person doesn't find us in time. Sometimes telling someone to stop talking about their pain means that we listen -- permanently.

Pieces of Starving

Written 23 March 2019.

Whatever this thing is that wants me dead -- mental illness, demons, whatever you want to call it -- is resourceful. I've started fighting to not be sad and negative all the time (because otherwise nobody will ever associate with me and I want human interaction more than anything), and in the absence of space to be sad, it's turned to other means.
In an attempt to get this out into the open but unwilling to burden my already long-suffering friends and acquaintances with yet another issue, I'm posting it here. If my friends see this, they see it of their own accord. I didn't force it on them, and I take comfort in that.

I've been restricting food. I've discussed this with my counsellor before on a couple of occasions, as it's popped up before. But each time it gets stronger. I only ate one meal yesterday, and it's 1.23pm as I type this and I haven't eaten yet today.

Part of it is finances -- I can't really afford to buy more food, so I'm trying to stretch out what I have.

Part of it is perfectionism -- 'you aren't good enough to deserve to eat.'

Part of it is scheduling -- between school and rehearsals and job-hunting, I don't have time to make food.

Part of it is exhaustion -- again, school and rehearsals and job-hunting take so much out of me that the thought of making and eating food makes me want to lay down and die because I just don't have the energy.

Part of it is for attention -- maybe if people notice I'm not eating they'll start paying attention to me, if only to intervene.

Part of it is suicidal -- if I stop eating, eventually I'll die. Maybe the too-soon death of one who literally starved for the sake of being good enough (too busy practicing to eat) will wake some people up. Plus, I'll be dead and won't have to fight anymore, and I'm just so tired of fighting. It seems pointless and I feel like I'm not really needed. Yeah, it would suck for the shows I'm in because they'll have to respace everything, but really, how much would it affect anyone's soul if I wasn't there? I'm shoved in the back anyway because I'm not good enough, it's not like anyone will notice I'm gone... and that's not their fault, it's mine. For not being good enough. For not practicing hard enough.

I shouldn't feel guilty for eating food, for spending the money, for not eating something other than eggs -- again, but somehow I do. It's not that I think I'm fat or need to lose weight, it's mostly just pure mental/physical exhaustion.

Spring

These are the days that make me miss home. The blue sky, the sun, the smell of damp grass as the snow melts, the overwhelming brown of dead grass, mud, and last year's leaves.

I've noticed in the past few years that my depression worsens in the spring. Winter has always been my favourite season, and with each passing year I despise its departure more and more. I hate the mud, I hate the brown, I hate the slush and the damp and the receding snow. And I hate more than anything the fact that everybody gets so darn excited about it. Everybody everywhere suddenly starts celebrating the drab brownness everywhere and the mess and the fact that you can't take one step outside without getting covered in mud. How is this something to celebrate...? It's like they're rubbing the horribleness of the season in your face. Just when you thought you'd forgotten it's not crisp and clean outside anymore, someone comes up to you and says, with eyes brighter and wider than any human's should naturally be, 'ISN'T IT SO NICE AND WARM OUT TODAY BOY I THOUGHT WINTER WAS NEVER GOING TO END DON'T YOU JUST LOVE THE SUNSHINE THEY SAID IT'S SUPPOSED TO GET UP TO PLUS FIVE TODAY I'M GLAD I WORE SHORTS.' It's like a firehose of fake cheer in my face, trying to drown me. Have you actually looked outside? It's BROWN. No colour. No life. There's nothing beautiful about it. Don't tell me spring is when the flowers bloom, Martha, that happens in June. This is March.

And the statistics bear me out. Suicide rates spike in May. Not November. Not February. May.

For me, I realised today that one of the reasons my depression bottoms out at this time is because for whatever reason, days like this remind me of home. And I'm not home. And I won't be for the forseeable future. Ach, der mich liebt und kennt / Ist in der Weite.

Sacrifice

Written 7 March 2019, 11.01pm.

I'm tired of trying so hard and sacrificing so much and only getting people telling me I'm still not trying hard enough/giving enough. I have sacrificed my time, money, sleep, meals, friendships, health, mental health... everything for this. And still it's not enough. What WILL be enough? What more do I even have left to give up to be good enough to satisfy everyone? Performing is all I have left. My life has become so narrow - there's nothing else I can give up, short of my actual physical life. And at the rate it's going, even that's not going to be enough for some people.

Unfortunately, those are the people that hold the roles in their hands.

Smaller

Last night, on a long-ish solo drive, I got thinking.

I've kind of been not-talking to a lot of my friends lately. It's not that I don't like them or have any problems with them, it's just that I know most of them have a LOT going on and I'm terrified to be a further drain on them, even more than I already have been. Of course, hot on the heels on this thought was the time-worn logic that's been dictating my life for over a decade -- if you were dead, you wouldn't be a drain on them anymore.

If only I could somehow make myself smaller. If only I could make myself need less. If only I could be even more self-sufficient. If only I didn't need SO MUCH people-time. If only I could be happy with the same surface-level relationships that everyone else manages to be happy with. If only I could somehow apologise deeply enough for the fact that I need so much from so many -- without immediately regressing back into the same behaviour that I'd just apologised for. If only I could apologise enough for taking up even the little 5'3 amount in time and space and oxygen. If only I could apologise for wasting the time of everybody I've ever said 'hello' to. If only I could be smaller. If only I could need less.

And I realised that I've been thinking these things, in some form or another, for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid. Even today, I'm constantly making myself small -- I draw my knees to my chest, I keep my things piled high rather than spread out and I keep them close to me, I tuck my feet under the chair, ankles crossed, I stand (against the wall) rather than sit, I keep my elbows tucked against my ribs and my hands close to my chest and face. I've been looking for ways to take up as little physical space as possible for so long that I do it without thinking now, and I feel guilty when I make any kind of expansive movement or step into the middle of a room or even raise my voice or start a conversation.

I'm tired of apologising for existing. But I don't know how not to feel guilty for breathing.

Music Day - Tourist Trap

I recently acquired this album on vinyl. I already have it on CD/my iTunes, but this is one of my top five favourite albums of all time and I wanted it on vinyl.

For context, this is a space-age concept album, born out of the 'not of this world' school of thought that you find in the Bible (referring to the people of God whose home is not on earth, but in the kingdom of God). This is a theme also used by Larry Norman in his Only Visiting This Planet album (1972) and Petra's 1983 song Not Of This World, although in my completely biased opinion Crumbächer gave it the most thorough and relatable treatment.

Until I listened to the vinyl and read the enclosed lyric sheet, most of the lyrics of this song had eluded me. I had gotten the general idea of it -- that this was a song about how alluring fallen-earth society can be and how easy it is to get comfortable and to lose sight of the fact that this is not our home. But on the day I listened to this vinyl, lyric sheet in hand, I was not in a great headspace and I was starting to ruminate on suicide again (I say this casually only because it's such a common occurrence).

This song had never been a favourite of mine (that was an honour given to tracks like Royal Command Performance, Interstellar Satellite, and Solo Flight) -- until that day when nearly every single line leapt through the stylus and struck me, particularly this one:

When the pressure drives I want to stall

It would be so easy after all...

It would be so easy. At the time I was exhausted -- physically, mentally, emotionally. The thought of waking up every single morning for the next sixty years and fighting literally non-stop with the demon in my head when I was already so deeply depleted at such a (relatively) young age was more than I could stand. All I wanted was to stop fighting. I just wanted a break. I just wanted to breathe without something telling me I couldn't or that I wasn't working hard enough or that I wasn't good enough. The song's opening lines capture it so perfectly: [W]hen every day's a constant uphill climb / They say the joy of living can get lost within the bittersweet of time...

In spite of that, the chorus continues:
So I sally forth, try, try again
Passing up a 'last chance' now and then...

I couldn't feel the same determination that Stephen and Co. feel in this song within myself, but I caught enough of theirs that it inspired me to keep going, just one more day.

Title: Tourist Trap

Artist: Crumbächer

Album: Escape From The Fallen Planet

Year: 1986

Label: Frontline Records

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Musically, I think my favourite moment is the key change after the guitar solo (I'm always a sucker for a key change). Other highlights include Crumbächer's trademark harmonies and of course plenty of space-age keyboards. There's a nice little guitar solo in here too (a rarity in early Crumbächer, but I think it gives the song added weight and substance).

What is Good?

The last two days have been full of despair and fear. I have exactly $20 cash to my name. One of my most promising opportunities for the summer may not even happen -- leaving me very much in the lurch and forcing me to make long-term decisions sooner than I anticipated. And overall I've been feeling very alone. I just want to spend time with someone, but it seems everyone's busy. And this makes me frustrated because I feel guilty for needing so much people-time.

I was reading over the last few posts on this blog the other day and I realised that it's been pretty depressing here as of late. I want to do a 'good' post, a sort of hopeful post, but I didn't know how or what about. So I'm just going to bullet-point it.

- This past week I've finally started work on Kyrie again. I'm truly loving writing this story right now. I'm trying not to think too much about how many plot holes and loose ends there still are and how many characters are severely underdeveloped.

- Peanut butter banana smoothies. Some days this is literally the only thing that makes me happy.

- I recently obtained a copy of Crumbächer's incredible album Escape From The Fallen Planet on vinyl. This is one of my top five favourite albums of all time, and I've wanted it on vinyl for several years. I finally got a chance to listen to it today, while reading the lyric sheet.
I've known and loved this album (on CD) for years now. It was one of only three albums that I could stand to hear for about six months following my cousin's sudden death, so I played it a LOT. But there were always a few lyrics that eluded me, and now, reading them in full, soaking in the rich, full sound of the vinyl, I discovered (as I had rather hoped) another layer of conceptual and sonic depth to this album. This is what I love in good music. This is what I look for -- I look for the music that will give me new things for years and years to come, no matter how many times I play it.

- My mom and my brother came to visit for a few days. It was nice to walk around campus actually talking to someone rather than wandering about all by myself.

- On Friday one of my friends came up and gave me a hug.

- Michael W. Smith's '80s output. (i 2 (EYE) and The Big Picture.) Also the Imperials' ...This Year's Model.