an ode to the vacuum cleaner:

clean your fucking room.
just, get a fucking garbage bag and start sorting your shit out.
stop turning molehills into mountains
just because you're looking for reasons to hate yourself.
clean your fucking room.
stop ruining places that used to be safe
just so you feel validated for lying in bed all day.
get up and go.
clean your fucking room.
you hate this mess.
it's embarrassing. it's disgusting.
it's not a reflection of you and stop telling yourself
that maybe it is just because
it's easier to feel sorry for yourself
than it is to plug in the vacuum.
clean your fucking room.
clean your fucking room.
clean your fucking room.

when is crying yourself to sleep alone in the dark supposed to become romantic

crossed

you described it as "alarming."

oh,
i realized,
too late as always.

that was it.
that was the line.

shit

i want to talk to you about suicide.

it's the great dirty "s" word;
selfish, sneaky,
sad.

the problem with depression is that there's a misconception therein -
a misunderstanding that makes people think that i'm sad,
and that's not quite it, it's not -

the problem is that when people think that depression means you're sad,
they think all they have to do is make you happy.

people think that if it's not one, it has to be the other,
and that's all well and good except you're trying to measure me
on the wrong goddamn scale.

i'm not sad - i'm.

i'm tired.

i am tired in a way that sleep cannot cure,
and trust me, i have tried -

spent days in the dark pretending to be dead,
but pretending isn't good enough after a while.

i want the real thing.

so let's talk about suicide.
let's really, really talk about it, and i want you to try to understand
how depression kills people.

my story is simple:
my mother was depressed,
my father was too stupid to be depressed,
toss in some mental instability and substance abuse
and voila: a recipe for my gene pool.

i came out about as well as you'd expect.

therapy started young,
medication soon thereafter,
and as i got older the appointments decreased
while the dosages climbed.

i've been diagnosed with a few things:
manic depression, obsessive compulsive disorder,
borderline personality disorder,
and vague sociopathic tendencies.

i'm real fun at parties.

the thing was, for a while, it was enough.
having a name for these things, knowing it wasn't me -
it was okay.

"a fault in chemical, not in character."

it wasn't my fault that my brain wasn't programmed right.
it wasn't my fault that i was broken;
i was born that way.

i have never been whole.

you can see how quickly this line of reasoning
can turn from comforting to condemning.

this is how terrible a person i am:
there are days that i wish i had cancer
so i had a valid reason to die.

or, if not a valid reason to die,
i could know that at one point in my life
i hadn't had cancer.

even if i had it now, it was okay -
it wasn't always like this.

i have always been depressed. i have always had whatever various
chemical screw-up happening in my brain that makes it so that
i can't do the things that other people can do.

there are days that i can't get out of bed.
there are days where i am lucky if i remember to feed myself.
there are days when i cannot stand my own existence.

and the problem, the pervasive, ugly truth of it
is that on the days that i manage to do all these things,
all i can think about is killing myself.

i'm on the side of the road and a bus drives by and i think,
i could have been in front of that.

i'm home alone, cutting up vegetables and i think,
i could open me up. i know how.

i'm counting out my prescription medication,
adding milligram by milligram and i think,
i could do it. i could go.

it is always, always, always.

suicide.

i am writing this on november 13th 2013,
and i have 1140 milligrams of escitalopram and 450 milligrams of quetiapine.
likely not fatal dosages, to be honest, and i won't risk waking up.
so here we are.

today i had to weigh in at the nurse's office,
and she kept telling me there was "nothing to me,"
and i wished that it was true.

i am suicidal. and i need you to know that what that means is not that i wish to die,
but that i wish i was dead already.

more than that, i wish i had never been alive.

i wish i had never had the chance to know people
and do and see and and touch and think and feel things
and have an effect on the world.

this is it:
a suicide letter from someone who is still alive.

because here's the tricky part, the hurtful truth, with suicide:
you will be accused of being selfish for not staying alive for other people.

this is true, trust me -
i've had it thrown in my face time and time again,
that shouldn't it be enough that other people want me to be alive?
never mind what i want, no - how could i do that?

how could i hurt other people like that?

and i have to admit that i've never fully understood this argument
because you have to know that i'm not trying to hurt you -
how can you not know that i don't want to hurt you?

and if you do think i'm doing it to try to hurt you,
how the hell am i the kind of person you want to stick around?

it's a pretty precarious situation, because the bare bones of it is that
if i kill myself, i hurt you in the process of getting what i want.
if i don't kill myself, i hurt myself in the process of giving you what you want.

correlation may not be causation and all that,
but it literally hurts me to be alive.

the only reason i am here still is because i don't want to hurt other people.

my own father called me selfish.

i don't want to cut myself because i'm scared that other people will find the mess.
overdosing seems easy but i don't want someone else to have to clean up my body and my vomit.
guts and gore were never my thing, and i shudder to think about the things
the human body releases in sudden death,
if you catch my drift.

on "danger nights," when i am scared that i might hurt myself,
i sleep in full and clean pajamas in case someone has to find me.

and these are just the big ways i might ruin someone's life,
but every day of living with depression is me chipping away
little pieces of other people who have to deal with me.

friends who have stayed with me all night to make sure i don't do anything,
my dad, who calls me long distance every 4 seconds to make sure i do something,
my mother, who hasn't spoken to me in 3 years because
i am literally volatile.

i don't understand how people don't see
that i am hurting everyone around me and inside me every second of being here,
and if i could just rip it off, like a bandaid,
just - let me, let me.

depression is killing me.
it has always been here.
it will always be here.

and i am tired of trying to fool the world into thinking
that maybe somehow i will "get through it,"

because depression isn't curable. it's only treatable.
and i will never "get through it." i will never be done with it.
i will have to treat it for the rest of my life.

that is exhausting.

and i am so, so tired.

i am sorry for suicide.
i am sorry for those who are hurt by it,
and i am sorry for those who end their hurting with it.

i'm sorry.

add it to the list of dirty "s" words.

higher education, lower self worth

i am a participant in a system that introduces me to friends
who literally do not have time to care about me.

and why should they?

the problem with hating yourself
is that you make yourself a very easy person
for other people to hate too.

and i am so tired of waiting
for somebody to prove me fucking wrong.

it's not fair of me to pin this burden on anyone else,
and yet lord knows i can't be trusted
to bear the burden
myself.