Things will get better

TW: Suicide

I can’t sleep so I'm writing. I write so much about mental health, and trauma, and depression, and love, and lately suicide. How important I think it is for people to speak up when they’re struggling, how important it is to get out of that isolation, to find help, all of the millions of reasons why life sometimes doesn't feel worth living, but how there are a million and one that can make it worth your while. I’ve been writing all of these years in hopes to make it to the other side, to look back on my pages of writing and think, I finally made it. Who knows what finally making it really looks like, I suppose it depends on who you ask. What I do know is that writing has brought me closer to people, it helped me connect and relate to people who were struggling, and comfort in the fact that they were still trying too. All of this talk and I have yet to put myself in a place of real vulnerability around some of those topics. Quite frankly, I’m still not ready to be that vulnerable, and I may never be. (How funny that up until I started this substack I would rarely share any of my writing with even my closest of relationships and now here I am airing it out to anyone.) I think as humans all we really want at the end of the day is to be seen by the people who are most important to us. I spent my entire childhood trying to fit into the molds of what my chaotic family wanted for me, liking things to please my parents, and my grandmother, just to be accepted. Whereas now it feels so sad because I'm left feeling like we never really knew each other.

Two months ago I went to a concert by myself, my seats ended up being next to this woman and her teenage daughter.  We chatted for a bit and they were both the ideal candidates to sit next to as strangers. The show started, the mom was ecstatic to be there, while the daughter was sweet, she was wrapped up in her phone and looking embarrassed by her mothers enthusiasm. I judge it only because I knew it, I lived it, I was a daughter embarrassed by her mother many times. Except my mom and I were never able to do fun things like go to concerts. I started crying, I started crying because I wanted to shake this girl and tell her someday her mom would be dead and someday she might end up at a concert alone thinking she’d be wishing her friends had come with her, but really be wishing her mom was with her instead. You’ll be wishing the two of you hadn’t wasted so much time getting caught up in your own lives. Living separately while under the same roof. It made me think about how short life really feels. How in my era of “marinating” all I wanted to do was flip that switch and make sure everyone I love knows it, I don’t want to play it cool anymore, or ever again. I can’t call my mom up and tell her I’m sorry anymore, how I’m sorry for spending so much time hating her, I’m sorry because I didn’t know how hard she was trying. That I’m grateful for all the hardships she endured that came with her young pregnancy. How lucky I am to live this insane human experience and I have her to thank for that. How many good parts of herself she gave to me. How do you mend a relationship with someone who hasn’t been on the planet for almost ten years? It took me until recently to really see my mom for not only the bad, but all of the really good parts of her too. How she must have spent so much of her short life wanting to be seen by anyone, my heart breaks for the loneliness she had to have felt, her struggle with substance abuse and mental health, and I wish we could have gotten to know each other.

I think what I really ever wanted was to be seen by my parents for what I really was and what I wanted to be. Instead of all the things they wanted for me. Money was tight growing up, so gifts were rare. When my parents did give me things, it was like they had no idea who I was, what my interests were, or what I liked. I was always grateful because gifts weren’t common and they were trying, but it was another reminder of how little they knew about me. This year for my birthday someone gave me a book. It was a book they had never read, and probably one they would never choose for themselves, but it was right up my alley. They went into an actual bookstore and found it and thought I would enjoy it. It was tucked in a bag with some chocolate and a handwritten card. I cried after I opened it, I cried because I have spent so much of my life around people who I felt like I had to write novels to explain myself to, to make them understand just exactly what they were getting into when they wanted to be close to me. Like I had to carry my body around as a warning to anyone who wanted to know me. I had been born with what my dad called the “Korn Curse” which had become so deeply en grained into my being that I tricked myself into thinking I wasn’t worthy of any of these good things in my life, I wasn’t worthy of being loved for all the fucked up parts of me, let alone love me for the things I liked, my needs couldn’t be met, my entire existence was a big, painful ask. I was a poison seeping into the world and it affected everything and anyone I got close to.  Tricked myself so many times that I sabotaged things that were good for me, because after a childhood like mine, I only felt comfortable in the chaos. 

A woman, who is twice my age, was telling me that despite all of the painful parts of her life, she could never imagine ending it. How sick someone must be to feel that, she said. How much we both missed Matt, and how part of me resonated with both sides. I wish I could have agreed with her, but I couldn’t. Maybe I was just as sick.

I was thinking about a journal entry I had written shortly after my dad died. Before his death I had plans to fly to LA to celebrate one of my best friends finishing Grad School. I hadn’t talked to my dad in a few weeks because I had finally told him I couldn’t be in his life until he decided to get sober, for real. A boundary anyone should be able to create for themselves. This journal entry is talking about how I tried calling him the day I was leaving to say I was sorry, to make sure he was okay. He didn’t answer, which wasn’t unusual but I just knew in my core that something was wrong. I had to get to the airport, and with all of the things my dads alcoholism took from me over the years, this was going to be something that it didn’t. Or maybe, I really knew something was wrong, and I panicked. My body went into fight or flight mode, and I flew. I remember standing on a bridge in DIA looking over the high railing, and I had the poison leak in, to tell me what a shit daughter I was for boarding this plane, how if he was really dead I wasn’t able to save his life, so how could mine be worth anything now? I wrote about how I woke up alone in my friend's bed in LA to a text message from a woman I had never met telling me my dad was dead, followed by a call from the police who found his body. He had been dead for five days before anyone found him. I walked out to the living room to two of my best friends. All I could say was that my dad was dead, and I had to call the cop back. We went out to breakfast and we went to the beach. This might sound insane but part of me knew my dad was dead before I boarded the plane to leave Colorado. The night before that phone call, I was drunk at a fancy graduation party, sitting in a bathtub with some of my best friends and taking funny pictures and laughing. Then I’m sitting in the living room watching everyone drunkenly dance, celebrating their graduation. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I felt like my dad was dead without the proof of knowing, and how all I wanted in that moment was to trade places with anyone else in the room, to be drunk and dancing and happy. To be wrong. I hated that I was right. 

Maybe I’ve written about this before, but it's a memory that is now a huge part of my make up. My dad’s alcoholism had become so severe that he was no longer someone I knew. The only person on the planet that had been my safe space for so many years turned into someone who wasn’t allowed in the bar I worked at, who made me afraid to walk to my car or take out the recycling after my shift in fear that he would be waiting for me, angry at me, angry at me for abandoning him. I don’t know if he was really angry at me, but I was angry that I couldn’t fix it. That day in LA my friends took me to the beach. I swam out into the water, I’m not a great swimmer but the thing about grief is you’re so numb in so many ways you’re simply unable to think clearly. I couldn’t imagine existing on the same planet that no longer held my dad. Without him I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore, I couldn’t think of life continuing on how it’s supposed to, how I was supposed to live with myself for failing him. I turned around to look back at the beach, a handful of people I love sitting there, waving to me. In a moment that I so badly wanted to let the ocean swallow my body, I started swimming back, remembering when I was little, the way my mom would watch me holding my breath as I lay underwater in the bathtub, the first time she walked in on me doing this, I probably scared the shit out of her. She told me when people are waiting for you, you always have to come back up for air.

As I’m flipping through an old journal looking for this entry, I find a different one. A six months after my house burned down. It’s such a painful entry I can’t bring myself to summarize, but I ended it by stating that I hadn’t had anything to drink in months. That I was afraid to drink, I was afraid if I drank too much I’d try to kill myself.

I don’t remember writing that, and re-reading it rattled me. I was in such a dark place of grief that I couldn’t keep my own thoughts clear, I was a complete stranger to myself. I was drowning in trying to keep myself together.  

I had written this entry the day before I found my current therapist. Now I spend every day of my life looking for at least one part of life that makes tomorrow feel worth sticking around for, and surrounding myself with reminders of them. 

Fast forward to last week. I signed a million documents that labeled me a homeowner. A homeowner in the sense that I own a small unit in a big building, but it’s all mine. I had started saving for a home when I was 17 years old, researching and teaching myself about first time home buying programs and how a mortgage and interest worked, how to build my own credit score. I did an entire math project on this in school. I knew someday the home I grew up in wouldn’t be available for us anymore, a constant fear as a kid that my parents would someday be homeless. A burden that I now know I shouldn't have had to bear at such a young age. I was continually told that we didn’t have the means for me to amount to much, dreaming big was not something we did as a family. Right before I turned 27, after I had traded all the years of my 20’s working three jobs and paying other people’s bills, I had managed to save $10,000. Which I had tricked myself into thinking was enough to buy a home. When I think about it, all I really wanted in life was some stability. Although not once did I think my life would turn out the way that it did, and that both my parents would die before I turned 30. 

To think that at one point in my life, this life I’m currently living is exactly what I wanted, this life where it’s well past midnight and I’m standing in a kitchen that I own eating boxed tomato soup and goldfish with a dog curled up at my feet, waiting for us to head to bed. So in a way, I made it. I’m living it, but this was not how I wanted to get here. When my house burned down, my friends started a gofundme against my will, (and I am thankful to them everyday that they didn’t listen to me).  The gofundme gained four times the amount they were asking for. I sometimes still go back and re-read the comments complete strangers wrote to me, to remind myself that all of these people didn’t want me to give up either. To remind myself that the world can be kind, and people are good. It’s insane how easy it is to see how important a life is to so many, when it can feel so insignificant to it’s owner. The money made me feel guilty. It still makes me feel guilty. I immediately donated thousands of it to other people, I helped some co-workers pay rent, and get caught up on their bills. I donated it to other people who were struggling, mostly strangers. I bought expensive and nice things for people I cared about. I did this because I felt like everyone deserved this money except for me. I had wanted that money for so many years to save my family, and it came just a few months too late. Logically I knew I should have been grateful, and I was, but it felt like the world was mocking me. Giving me the one thing I had needed all my life to get my family on the right track, to get them the help they had so desperately needed all of those years. I would have traded every single penny of it for my life back. I never really gave a shit about money to begin with. Chris, my boss, made me promise I wouldn’t give it all away. He told me to take this as my opportunity to rewrite my family history, to fix the things that I still could. At that moment I couldn’t imagine how that would ever be possible, or if I’d stick around long enough to know. 

I grew up in a male dominated family, my dad, my brother, so many uncles, so many male cousins. I think that made me tough in a sense, but it also made me see the clear differences in being a woman. How I could do anything they did, but not always the same way. I was born into this body I had to protect from men, while simultaneously being told how important it was to get married to someone who had a good work ethic and money. Forms of emotional abuse that I’m still working on putting names to. I’m breaking all of those cycles, I’m breaking those habits, and I am the first woman as far as I can trace in my family who gets the opportunity to not only live alone, but to live alone in a place that I own. My existence isn’t focused on finding a man to marry to take care of me. I finally get to choose. At one point my biggest goal in life was to say I bought a home, and that I did it all by myself. It would be a safe space for me and my family to live in and would never be taken away from us. I’m struggling to utter the words that I did this now, because I still have the poison leak in and tell me I don’t deserve it, I didn’t do the work for this. I lost almost everything I loved and people gave me money because of it. It’s odd the way a happy milestone brings up the hurt of all the people I love that aren’t here anymore. This hurt rips open these existing wounds that feel as though I’m forever tending to, the wounds that remind me they’re no longer here to be a part of this process. How once someone is dead, they’re suddenly everywhere. The spiral of different outcomes and how I miss them. On the topic of this new home, a close friend recently asked me, ‘What do you think your parents would say if they were here to see you now?’ My first thought was simply, ‘What the fuck?’ is what they would say. My parents would not believe where I’m at now considering what I came from, but I know they’d be really proud, and that thought alone makes my heart feel a little better. As much as I wanted to say I did this alone, I now know how much more incredible it is to say that I didn’t. There are the big things, like the money, and how incredible of a community I have that helped make this possible. But also the little things, like when my boss insisted on coming to my first home inspection with me, as much as I wished my dad could have been with me, how lucky I was to have someone else that wanted to be there, I wasn’t just another task. Or how my hairdresser and I met because of my interview on the radio, how she never charges me for my hair cut and it takes three hours because she cares enough to want to know all about my life since I saw her last. How I’ll bring her coffee and slip her cash anyways. How everything that ends up on this stupid substack gets sent to someone I love and trust and respect enough to honestly critique my writing. How I have all these little reminders that people love me. How lucky I am to have all of these people and then some that saved my life in a million tiny ways, whether they know it or not. Just like my friends waving to me from the beach in LA. The last night before I moved into my new place I had a party at the lake. I'm sitting out on the water wanting to cry watching all of the people who showed up, who continually show up for me, for themselves, for everyone they care about. Wanting to cry because Matt should have been there, because he was a huge part of me making it this far in life. How all the monetary and physical things I thought I wanted were never real, this was really what I had wanted the most. How lucky I was that I didn’t do this all alone. How these people like and celebrate the different parts of me that I didn’t even know were valuable, how I am still a big messy pile of a person, but so many of them help me sort it all into smaller, more manageable piles. When I meet people, if they ask about my family, it feels odd to say I don’t have one. As much as I miss my parents, what I have isn’t necessarily “better”, but it’s hand picked, it’s mismatched, it's real, and it’s fucking beautiful. 

I spent all of my adolescent life dedicated to sports, claiming to love them, and now I’m not even sure if I did, or if subconsciously it was the only thing my dad would show up for and not complain about. If I had a school performance, or when I had art on display at BMOCA, when I wrote something in class that made my peers clap and talk to me about how inspired they were by what I did, he couldn’t be bothered. Those things weren’t important to him, so I convinced myself they weren’t important to me. I began avoiding telling my parents of performances or shows, or I’d kindly ask them to not attend. Them not being there by my own choice was less painful than them forgetting about it or acting as though the event was torture. How many parts of my life I’m working on untangling. How messy I feel in most ways, how hard I’m working to be proud of myself, to be someone I would have been inspired by as a kid. My brain has jumped into a lot of different places when typing this, and the past few weeks I can’t keep myself from crying at the worst times. I’m crying because I’m happy, and I’m crying because I miss my parents, I miss grams, I miss Matt. How I wish I could have taken some of their hurt, that I could help them see that there were so many parts that were going to be better, that were going to be worth it. I now know that isn’t how it works, but the logic doesn’t make my heart feel any better. I’m trying so hard to stay present and enjoy my own life in the absence of theirs. 

I went to a small concert recently with someone I really care about, someone who slows me down and doesn’t make me feel like a task, who needs or wants nothing from me except to share time and space. We’re watching this person Anna Moss on stage who is a complete stranger to me other than me liking her music, she’s a stranger I respect and admire. Watching her in her element, something so unique to her, and to passionately perform songs she’s probably sung a million times, is inspiring. The feeling I get when I see people doing something they love is more inspiration for me to wake up and experience the world every single day. How watching people look at something or someone they love makes my heart swell, how the commonality in knowing what a special feeling that is, is so, so incredible in itself. To be sharing a table with someone who is sharing this space and event and time with me, seems so trivial, but in that second it felt so important. I could feel myself untangling some of the damage, that’s how recovery works. You feel it at the most unexpected times. It all kind of came to a head. It made me angry at my dad, how selfish it was to not appreciate being a witness to something like that. Being a witness to these things in the company of people who I care about is a huge reason I show up every single day. For him to avoid coming and seeing the things I loved and was passionate about, and to only show up for the after school practice or weekend game days, made me bitter. How selfish a man who gave his everything could be. How many times he unknowingly made me feel rushed, and as though my existence was a burden if it wasn’t focused around what he cared about. Like if it was my choice to have been brought into this world. How if only he could have stopped to enjoy the feeling of watching someone do something they love. How my dad was too busy and rushed to ever see things in that light, how his entire life was stuck in survival mode, I became less angry, and felt sad for him. Sad that everything to him felt like wasted time. Wasted time it may have been, but if he had seen how his life would have ended, would he have done any of it differently?

I like to think he would, and that’s why I’m trying so hard to learn from him and do mine differently. I guess my original point of writing all of this had been to say that I made it, I'm combatting the poison and I’m finding reasons every day to keep living my life. To say that I’ve been in those deep dark scary places, to say that it’s possible to get out. To be living proof that if I can do it, I believe anyone can (especially with the help of an incredible therapist). I’d be lying to say it goes away forever, I think that sometimes there are these seeds that are forever part of us, no matter what we do, we just have to choose which ones we’re watering, and which ones to pull when they get to be too much. I’ll never be able to say I made it, because life doesn’t work that way, and that’s all I’m absolutely certain about at this point. I’m still sad, it’s not as often as it used to be, but sometimes I get home and look at my dog and immediately have to lay on the floor and cry because the world feels like too much. I still get mad at the people I loved who have died, but in a lot of ways I have learned to forgive them, to know that I’ll never completely understand and that’s okay. I still hold a lot of weight in between my bones. I think it’s important to talk about those parts. We live in a world where everyone is posting and sharing the highlights of their lives, which makes us all forget that we all share a lot of the same pains too. It’s isolating. That pain. To make it be something that we hide, because other people don’t want to see it, and we don’t ever want to be a burden. For anyone to ever believe suicide is selfish doesn’t understand how much that person loves other people, how much they have convinced themselves that their existence is hurting people. How much love and compassion is out there waiting for people to feel comfortable with expressing, how sometimes all you really need is someone to sit with, how important it is to tell people how you feel, how to keep looking for something everyday to convince you to stick around for tomorrow.