Traversing misery and detachment

Monday:

“I don’t feel good,” I say aloud while sitting upright in bed, shivering at 4:19 AM. This is particularly bad. I went to bed around 7:30 PM because I wanted the day to end. I, for one, had seen enough.

When I wake, I feel afraid for my own life and/or certain it is about to end. At this point, that’s just symptomatic. Where life has historically felt too long, suddenly it feels constricted and short. This is confusing because I don’t know where to turn for relief—to hope for the day, or for a long slumber.

“I really don’t feel good.”

First, I try to follow my own instructions: rest, take a piss, stretch my legs. I lay still a moment longer, feeling my pulse throb in my upper back and shoulders before rolling over. I make eye contact with a tall laundry hamper overflowing with clothes. It’s Monday. I think about watching The Jetsons and writing on LiveJournal in my childhood home. Fear was with me then, too. Were you reading then, too?

By the time I get up to continue following my own instructions (piss, stretch my legs), I realize two things. First: I am covered in sweat, which means I was dreaming about something scary. That’s why I’m awake, why I can feel my pulse throb—but delayed processing means I register the sensation before the memory. I am learning to be with sensation as intel. And then, next: I am covered in blood. I got my period.

Immediately, I want to cry. Curse my body and the moon. I want to be inconvenient to someone who is sleeping. I spend the day wanting it to be over. I go to bed early again.

Tuesday:

I wake up heavy, unwilling to let the room come into focus. My glasses are always in the other room. It’s still dark. Everything is too cold and feels like Winnipeg. My whole body hurts. I walked a lot yesterday to get away from myself. I am scared again, obviously. I am scared of how scared I am. Everything is falling apart. I am no longer enjoying being alone. I wish you (whoever you are) would join me in my wasteland. I am feeling a shift — like readiness. I’m also declining. I will live in a constant state of maintenance forever.

Although I need to take meds daily to function, I did not take them on Monday because I was scared they would make me more focused on my fear. I’ve been medicated for an extremely long time—an early adopter, before the age of consent. So this is not how meds work, and I know it. But it’s a trick my brain plays on itself when I am acutely unwell.

I stop taking my ADHD meds. I don’t want to focus on how bad things are.

Now: This morning, I take them immediately upon waking. Won’t be fooled again.

I set the thermostat on high and boil the kettle. Over the sound of the water bubbling, my cat meowing for food, I recite from memory a preamble to a talk by Berlant aloud:

“This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world—a state traversing misery and detachment…”

Berlant is my closest friend, maybe. I am impressed at my ability to recite by memory, but also, their words are perfect and worth remembering. Obviously they are dead too. I cry for a moment: a PhD is the most useless thing in the world but ideas are everything. The kettle clicks at the same moment I hear my child’s sleepy voice say from the other room: “I want a hug.” My heart breaks for not being there the moment she needed me. I go back to her, back to the dark room — without a tea, and with the cat unfed and meowing in a way that makes me wish the cat did not exist, the same way the mountain of laundry should not exist. I’m still bleeding. My belly is still soft from carrying my baby (now 3) and bruised from my last testosterone injection.

I hold my baby (now 3) and feel my heartbeat change. My meds are working, maybe.

I’m tough as nails.

Don’t fuck with me.