I used to be convinced that my father wasn’t capable of being vulnerable without alcohol.
When I was younger, I would batter my mother with desperate pleas, begging her “Please, please, please fucking understand me! Please - I need your empathy, your compassion, I need you specifically to understand me” until I ran out of air.
My father though? God I never even really tried.
My grief felt like a parasite - both part of and exclusive to myself, growing bigger and bigger as my uncle’s situation got worse. I was visibly unraveling, but I kept the reason why to myself. I didn’t know how to talk about it.
To call this mess of interconnected micro and macro near-obsessive anxieties overwhelming is an understatement. At some point, I just snapped - like a rubber band that’s reached its breaking point, all of a sudden my already waning grip on reality broke away and I fell into a level of dissociation I had never experienced before.
Losing people is hard. (Understatement of the year and yet it's only January!) I've lost a handful of important people in the entire course of my twenty-something years, each one a different level of heartbreak. I think a piece of you goes with them wherever they go. Or maybe that piece dies. Either way, you … Continue reading 1/10/2020
I called it a “social cleanse” back in college. I uninstalled all social media applications, including messaging apps. Granted, I left out Skype (so my then-girlfriend could reach me) and other apps that allowed me to anonymously scream into the void (i.e. Tumblr, Reddit). But that was it, I told myself, that was all I needed.
"It's fine. I just need to let some stuff out. I'll be fine again after this." It's always the same thought pattern, you know. I wonder sometimes if I think this way because I'm too naive to recognize when I need more than a 5-minute cigarette break, or because I've gotten quite hopeful over this past decade of dealing with my less-than-ideal brain. Either way, it keeps biting me in the ass. I keep thinking if I do these small tasks, I'll be back to normal again—you know, whatever my "normal" may be. But it's never that easy. The roadmap keeps changing, and I'm getting a bit burnt out trying to figure it out each time.
Emails and letters are a lost art. Messaging is so instantaneous now, and that has its own perks but for someone like me, who likes to reminisce with "artifacts" from the past, long-form letters are still king. I like both the act of writing and re-reading them, feeling like my very own historian. (Peak narcissism, sure.)
