What frustrates me the most is that you want to understand, but every attempt I make to explain, you don’t understand.

You never understand.

You don’t know what this is like. You can read all the stories. You can live the life. You can live in the house, in the same material, physical, tangible house as I do. But you don’t know a single thing about what it’s like.

Not until you feel worthless, hopeless, useless, helpless, crippled, paralysed with your brain screaming so much hate at you every single second, more than the people who have hurt you. The voice in your head is a collection of all those voices. The voice in your head remembers everything they’ve ever said and the voice will repeat it to you. All day, every day, every week, every month, every year. They’ll tell it to you whether you like it or not and you have no control over that voice in your head. You can try to ignore it, but you’re weak. You’re crippled. You won’t last long against the voice in your head.

Do you know how hard it is to believe you can’t do anything, but have people tell you that you can? So you struggle with whether you can or can’t, you struggle against the voice and it screams and repeats and chants that you can’t, until you give in. You give up. You tried so hard to do everything everyone wanted you to, but you still failed. You still couldn’t do it. 

You think my mind is weak, don’t you? You think I could cure this all on my own if I would just change the way I think, just think a little more positively, just work on this little by little, just take the tiny steps to recovery. You think this is all a state of mind.

You seem to think I have control.

But I don’t. I’ve lost it a long time ago. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to wake up in the morning and not think, in disappointment, “I’m still alive.” I’ve forgotten what it feels like to wake up in the morning and feel, with happiness, “I’m still alive.” I’ve forgotten how a natural smile feels. I try. I try so hard in all my smiles, but they’re still not beautiful. I’ve forgotten how it feels to look at my family and feel, “Thank the fates and destinies that I still have these people with me.” I want to love but my heart doesn’t move. I want to feel happiness, gladness, all the joy in the world, but my mind cages my heart and I don’t know how to fight myself.

How do I fight myself?

Tell me, please, how do I fight against the voices in my head telling me I can never do anything. I want to believe that I can, but I can’t. I’ve tried so many times before. I promise, I swear, I tried.

It’s come to a point where I can’t even miss the person I used to be, the life I used to have, because I have no more memory of any of this.

Do you even understand how deeply mired I am into this wound?

It’s a wound that’s always fresh, that never heals, that never stops aching, that never stops paining, that never stops torturing.

You make me feel sick with myself, did you know? Did you know you make me feel so sick with myself because of the things I can’t do? I can’t leave the house. I find it hard to even leave my room. I find it hard to eat. I find it hard to sleep. I find it hard to do nothing. I find everything so hard to do. Even escaping, even running away, even trying to find a safe place for myself is so difficult. There is no safe place for me anymore.

These things I worry about all day, all night, all week, all months, all years. Have you ever thought of this all before?

Have you ever been so sick of yourself you don’t even dare to look at your own face?

Do you know I’ve tried to hide from my mirror, from any reflective surface at all, for the past week?

Do you feel my shame? Do you feel my wretchedness? Do you even begin to feel the kind of hate I feel for myself that only worsens every time we talk? Every time we talk, anything we talk about, the voices in my head find a reason to twist it into more self-hate.

I don’t want this. I don’t want this at all. I want to scream this to you.

I DON’T WANT ANY OF THIS AT ALL! CAN YOU TAKE IT AWAY? CAN YOU PROMISE YOU’LL TAKE IT ALL AWAY? BECAUSE I CAN’T. I’VE TRIED SO HARD, BUT I CAN’T. AND YOU MAKE ME FEEL ALL THE WORSE BECAUSE I’M SO FUCKING USELESS, BECAUSE I CAN’T. 

CAN YOU JUST RIP THIS OUT OF ME AND CLEANSE ME PURE AGAIN?

But you can’t. You say you can’t. You believe you can’t. You believe only I can fix this. This, to you, is my battle alone. This, to you, is a fight only I can fight. This, to you, is only something you can support me in.

Change that mindset. Change how you feel. Change it all. Believe that you can rip this out of me. Believe that you can fix this all for me. Believe that you can take it all away for me. Believe that you don’t only support me, but you have a direct hand in this.

Can you do that? Can you believe in that?

Can you even hear the sound of my voice speaking to you through this all? Did you hear it? Did you hear my cries? Did you hear my screams? Did you hear anything at all?

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of helping you to understand when I have to deal with all my shit. I’m tired of helping you when, as evident, I can barely help myself. I can’t help you to help me. I’m done with that.

There’s nothing left to do. There’s nothing left.

And I’m hollow again. No more emotions. No more strength.

Nothing I could control. I didn’t even have a chance to even think of trying to change the way I think.

I want you to see my heart, my soul, my mind, my being for what it is.

But you can’t.

It’s a blindness that can’t be fixed unless you fall as deep as me.

You are blind to my depression, but you will only see if you wear your own glasses of depression.

But let me tell you, you won’t want this.

I bet, you know, in your mind, you’re telling me, I don’t. Yes. You don’t. I’m going to assume this like a cocky bastard and say you don’t.

Because I have never met or seen anyone who has ever wanted to be this way.

As a kid, I wished I’d get some sort of serious disease so that there would be drama in the family, because it seemed fun. As a kid, I wished something dramatic would happen in my life so that it would be like in the television.

I was foolish.

This is my karma.

This is God answering my prayer.

A serious disease to kill me, to kill the family. And the divorce was that something dramatic.

God does answer prayers after all.

School is debilitating. 

It makes me feel sick. It makes me feel unwell.

The thought of it. The thought of going to school. The thought of being in school. 

The actions.

They all make me feel sick.

I don’t want to go back to the place where every single second feels like cold, dry ice ripping off of my skin. I don’t want to go back to the place where I’m so numb, yet so much in pain.

I just want to numb it all.

Numb everything.

Take away all the feelings, so I can take away all the pain.

Take away all the thoughts, so I don’t have to torture myself anymore.

I never wanted any of this. Which person would? What kind of sick, twisted person would choose to become this way? 

You may think I have a choice to change, you may think there’s a way out of this, but from where I’m standing there is no way. I can’t see the way. I can’t see at all.

I never made the choice to become like this, so just as that, I can’t make the choice to leave this place.

This place that I call home.

Do you remember my home? Do you know of it? Have you ever been inside, truly inside, of my home? 

Shall I invite you in? Since it seems like you’re so eager to visit.

But you’ll regret it. The locks on the doors don’t belong to me.

And you’ll learn to distance yourself from the world outside of home. You’ll have to distance yourself from the world outside of home. Because this is how this home works. You didn’t choose to come in, you don’t choose to lock yourself in, but it conditions you to never want to leave.

My home. This is my home. 

School has a different kind of meaning to me. For a lot of people, school is some place where they hate to go. Only because of teachers, classes, grades and maybe some people they don’t want to see. School is boring, tiring, useless and meaningless for some people, so they hate school. They hate homework, they just don’t want to have to put in the effort for something they don’t see the worth in.

Then there are some people for which school has a different kind of meaning, like me.

School could be the place were your social anxiety disorder kicks in and you’re completely mentally paralyzed and there’s nothing you can do, except maybe try to remember to breathe or try to remember not to just pass out and put yourself in a more embarrassing situation. I say this from what I know of my friends who have social anxiety disorder, but I apologise if I made a mistake in what I say.

School could be the reminder of all the bullying your schoolmates, classmates or just people in general, have inflicted upon you. School could be the grounds where you got raped by someone. School could be the place where they silence you every day with violence and threats. School could be the place where people taught you to smoke, do drugs, drink and now you can’t turn your life back to the way it was before, even if you wanted to.

School, for me, is a place full of trauma. At the time when I was most miserable in my life, when my parents were separated, when I was upset but I had no true friends to really talk to, when I couldn’t express myself in a way I could be understand, I was stuck in school for hours every day. I’d try to make it as short as possible all the time and eventually nonexistent at all, but school was a place where I had to keep myself from crying or getting angry because no one else knew what was going on and I didn’t tell them. I don’t know why, but I never told anyone.

School became a place where people gossiped about me behind my back, but since I had no friends, since I had no people who were concerned enough for me to tell me, I never knew what the rumours were. I only had people whispering behind my back, whenever they thought I didn’t notice and the looks they sent me made me feel inferior and sub-human. School is a place where, I feel, I had to watch everyone grow up happily while I stayed stunted socially. I grew in other ways to make up for my lack of social growth, but it doesn’t make up for it. It’s just not the same.

School was the place where I was repeatedly told I was “irresponsible” for two years, when I was 11 and 12, by the teacher who simply wanted me to apply myself. She did a great number of things she thought would motivate me to work harder, but she only made me feel worse. I had no friends, I had poor grades, I hated the things going on at home, I had no one to talk to, I bottled everything up alone and now, above all that, I was irresponsible. I wasn’t working to my full potential. There was so much they said I could be, but I saw none of that for myself. Even back when I was 11 or 12, I saw no hope in the future. Even if I took a look ahead, everything was a blur. I just did what I could to get past the situation and that was that. I barely even did the bare minimum. I just struggled with what I could.

Then school became the place where not just your friends matter, but your looks, your clothes, your hair, your status in school, what you are, who people think you are, who you present yourself to be. But never who you truly are. I made friends when I was 13, I guess. They weren’t friends I could really confide in, but they were my friends, sort of. At least I had people to talk to and hang out with in class, as much as they preferred hanging out with each other than with me, or that was the feeling I got in school anyway. The constant feeling that no one wanted to hang out with me, but did so anyway so that there wouldn’t be any problems.

I continued to be “irresponsible” and I angered my teachers all the time. I wouldn’t finish all the homework set. I would skip days at school without giving a proper reason or excuse. I didn’t do anything right. At that time, I called myself lazy. But I couldn’t give a shit. School was too tiring, just the attempt to wake up and to go to school, I hated it. I hated every morning. I never really looked forward to school. I tried, but it was truly a hard task to get myself to look forward to school.

Then the year changed and the classes changed and things changed. I was put in a new class, this year was better because there was finally someone I could talk to, but then my form teachers in class were my co-curricular activity teachers so I had to go for club activities, if I didn’t, there would be punishment. I hated my co-curricular activity because I hated being scolded, I hated the way I didn’t know what to do because I’d never been a regular member in the club, but there was no way to be excused and to learn from scratch. I hated how they would scream at us, demand us to do things perfectly, demand us to be completely and entirely synchronised and well-organised. I thought back then I hated it because I was lazy and didn’t want to put in the effort. Now, I’d give a flimsy excuse and say I hated it because every time they screamed at me for my flaws, I felt even worse about myself and it reminded me so much of the way my father was. He was always fierce, always stern, always strict. Even when he had his kindest smile on his face, I feared him so much. I would toe the lines with him, I’d push his limits, but he was never kind about that and I was a foolish child for trying.

So I hated after school club activities and I hated school for having them. Before that though, I had been in the school choir, I’d auditioned like everyone else and during my audition, the teacher had even told me that he definitely wanted me to join. 

Then, during the first ever choir session I had ever been to, this is what he said to me: “How did you even join the choir? Who let her in here?”

I was stunned. I knew I sounded bad, because I had been laughing really hard throughout the session when he’d make jokes and when the other girls said certain things, so my throat was a little croaky. And the songs were all songs for girls with high pitched voices. I couldn’t hit the notes without using my falsetto, but I didn’t want to use my falsetto because that wasn’t singing right. That, to me, was cheating. I didn’t want to cheat. It was because of this one choir teacher that I ended up switching clubs to a club that was even worse than this one. Two clubs in a row that I couldn’t handle. It was probably just me. So I just tried to escape instead of facing reality.

School is and was my reality and I was always constantly escaping from it. From the girls who studied in the school along with me, to the teachers who said hurtful things to me (justified or not), to just the mere environment of school. Thinking about it now makes me feel horrible, this twisting, angry, burning feeling in my chest. School makes me feel sick.

I feel trauma every time I go into school or just the thought of trying to go, it traumatises me so much. Every time I remember all those girls from before, even if the girls from now are different. I remember those teachers from before even if the teachers from now are different. I remember all the days from before when the days now are supposed to be fresh and new. I’m stuck. I’m stuck in the way school was and I’m too afraid to go back, to face reality, to confront it. Even the thought of doing those things terrifies me to the core. I don’t want to go back.

I may have lied to myself and tried to convince myself that I just didn’t have the motivation, I just didn’t have the drive, but to be honest, I’m terrified. 

There are so many scars from school, from the people mostly, from the memories, from the things I did that I can’t bear to face again.

The pressure from school that I briefly experienced back in January when I first returned to school, the pressure from myself to do as well as everyone thought I would. I was always that one girl in class with so much potential, but I could never get anything done. I was the one girl that sometimes did well even if I didn’t work too hard. I was the one girl that all the teachers thought would do well even if I didn’t do much. I’d scrape by just fine.

But I’m not. Everything requires effort and I want to do what I can, but when I think of all these expectations from my teachers, my classmates, my relatives, whether they are real expectations or just expectations I imagined on my own, I couldn’t function. The pressure was much too high and I can’t function. The thought of going back to that pressure, the thought of doing what I had been doing in January for the rest of the year. I’d die. I’d really die. And I don’t want to die over such a silly matter. Even if I’m not good enough, I don’t want to die. Every criminal wants a second chance at life, whether they deserve it or not, whether they are repentant or not. They may want a second chance to change, they may want a second chance to do more evil, but every criminal wants a second chance. 

I pull the rubber band of my endurance so tautly every time I go to school. Every word is a pressure, every move is a pressure, every question in class is a pressure, every lesson given is a pressure, everything my teacher says puts a pressure on me. Everything is a pressure. Every single little thing in school is a pressure for so many hours a day, for five days a week, for every week of the month. 

And whether it’s because I am weak or because the pressure is really that strong, I can’t face it.

Then I turn it all into more self-hate.

“Worthless, useless, scum of the Earth, piece of shit, good for nothing, waste of space, waste of life, waste of existence, waste, waste, waste.”

I hate myself so much for the things I don’t do, but more than that I hate myself for not even trying to do them. 

I hate that I can’t do it, but I hate myself more because I don’t try till I can succeed.

School is such a traumatising place for me. School stretches me thin and then expects me to bounce back as easily as a snap of your fingers. 

How can I even bring myself to want to go back to such a place like this? To me, school is a scene of crime. Not just my current school alone, but the school I was in before. To me, school is the place where I killed myself. Not literally, I never tried killing myself in school before. I killed myself on the inside. I killed the person who I was because of what happened in school, because of what happened with the people in school. I became the person who I am today, building up from everything I learnt in school. Everything that was part of the curriculum and everything out of it too. Learning that the person I was could not exist, I killed her. 

I’m not who I was anymore. I’m not the girl I was before all of this. I’m not the girl who I was from my birth till I was 9 or 10. I’m not the girl I was when I was 11 or 12. I killed her slowly. I poisoned her to death. It was like a drop of poison every day, always on schedule, never missing a day. I poisoned the person I was until she barely exists. She’s dead, she’s gone and I don’t miss her, but at least she’s better than me. She’s better than who I am now. She may have hurt others, but at least she could live her life properly. She wasn’t the best character, but she lived. She lived the way humans, people, are supposed to live.

Look at me. Look at the kind of person I am. Not going to school, fearing school, fearing the place, the people, the environment, the word itself is horrifying. I’m not living my life. I’m alive but yet not alive. I’m despicable.

School was the murder ground and the person I was is the victim. I am the murderer.

You could forgive someone for killing someone else, eventually, no matter what. It’s just whether you want to or not. But how do you learn to forgive yourself when you killed yourself? The person who was supposed to love you most, treasure you the most, care for you the most, above all blood relations, above all friendships, above all lovers, you were supposed to love you, treasure you and cherish you the most.

And you killed you. 

I could never go back to the murder ground without reliving all these memories, without reliving all the thoughts of how I killed myself, of how I’m killing myself. 

I want so much to try, but even the thought of trying is so hard.

I woke up because I could hear, or maybe feel, my pulse beneath my ear. I’d somehow gotten the exact, precise part of my wrist where my pulse is under my ear during my sleep and it woke me up about an hour ago.

I suddenly had the urge for something to drink. I intended to go downstairs and get a root beer, because that’s the only carbonated drink/soda that I ever drink these days. I ended up getting an orange flavoured soda and I didn’t even notice until I brought it up to my room, opened it and took a gulp.

It’s like I don’t actually give a fuck what I put into my body anymore, for sustenance.

Last night, the only thing I ate was dinner and I only ate because it was salty. At least it had a flavour in my mouth. 

Food for the past few days pretty much all tastes the same. I don’t know if food has always tasted the same or if I’m just searching for too much flavour.

School is the last thing on my mind right now, even though it should be first. I should be anxious about school, about missing classes, about falling behind, about not being able to cover things again this year. I’m not even thinking about skipping the national examinations again.

I just can’t even bring myself to care about my future when I can barely see my next tomorrow. Not that I don’t want my next tomorrow. Not that I don’t want my future. I don’t want to die anymore, I really don’t, it’s not just convincing myself, I really don’t. 

It’s just that the future seems so dark. I can’t even look ahead. I can barely look in my presence. It’s like there’s a huge, ominous shadow looming overhead.

It’s not wanting to die.

It’s just being so uncertain about the future. D

o I have a future? Can I have a future? Not because I’m worried about life or death.

A future is so much more than that. A future is hope, wishes, dreams, aspirations, desires, goals, achievements that have yet to be achieved, accomplishments that have yet to be accomplished.

I see no future because I have none of that. No hope, no wishes, no dreams, no aspirations, no desires, no goals. I don’t feel like I want to achieve or accomplishment anything. I just want to live my days until I have to die.

It’s not the way to live, but it’s my only way to live right now. Anything else is asking too much.

Too much.

I guess my problem for today is not that I’m angry, is not that I’m sad, is not that I’m depressed.

It’s that I’m empty.

I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel motivation. I don’t feel like doing things. I feel sorry, but only in the slightest, vaguest sense of the word. When I’m happy, I’m not really happy, I don’t feel the emotions reaching my chest, I don’t feel the emotions in my heart. I know, somehow, under all this, I do feel something. But there’s a thick, heavy blanket wrapped around me. I don’t feel anything.

I don’t feel the things I think I feel.

I just sit here numbly, reading all these stories that are supposed to be encouraging, about finding courage, about finding strength, about moving on, about surviving, but I feel nothing. I don’t feel sadness. I don’t wish I could be like that.

I’m just breathing. I’m just living. I’m just alive, but not really, at the same time.

When I talked to her, we talked a lot today, I was happy, I guess. I was happy. I smiled. I laughed. I had fun.

But then when she went to sleep, when she went off, I was left feeling oddly as though someone had stripped away a part of me. Like I’m a robot and my feelings are assembled as a part of me, ready to be removed as and when is required.

She was holding that flimsy part of me in place. She held the piece that helped me feel in place, but when she had to go, she let go, even though I know she didn’t mean to, and it fell out of place again. She’ll pick it up again and hold it back in place again, next time, if it doesn’t fix itself back somehow. But I wonder if it’s right for her to be holding it in place, instead of me, but my figurative robot arms have rusted, I can’t do anything on my own.

If we live in a multi-coloured world, I’m somehow stuck in monochrome. Monochrome is beautiful and easy to appreciate when too many colours become too jarring. But when it’s just monochrome, I lose my colour too.

I’m not interested in anything at all. I just want to voice me out. I just want to sound the words out somehow, because they don’t seem to come out of my mouth. I guess I do sound irritated when I talk to my mom, typical teenager, but the feelings don’t reach me. They don’t reach me at all.

I guess I feel sorry, when I can’t watch a drama with my sister, but the feelings of apology don’t quite resound so deeply within me like they usually do.

I guess I feel loved, when my sister comes into my room at night before I sleep to wish me a goodnight and tell me she loves me, but somehow something doesn’t seem quite right with how I feel.

It’s like I’ve felt so much, so intensely for so long, that I’ve suddenly forgotten how to feel anything at all.

Oh, I forget to feel hungry too.