Connection

I have been stuck with the image of a young woman I met in New Orleans. I have written about it so many times in different ways, and today I had kind of a sad day. I don't know that it was like the old depression, but I just didn't feel good, but it was for good reason. I talked to one of my best friends Dawn. She just lost one of her best friends. It broke my heart talking to her. I actually listened for once. I always want to give advice or help people, but frommy experience most of the time that is not what people need. I just let her talk. I told her I was just as confused as she was and I couldn't say anything to make her feel better, but I could listen, and I did. It broke my heart, but I felt a spiritual connection. I have missed that so much. I also was sad, because one of my only real friends up here is suffering from depression and still not better yet. She had a really rough day today, and ended up skipping World Peace Initiative to go home. She just left Central, which was needed, but I wished I could have done that when I felt like that. I talked to her for over an hour late tonight trying to keep her mnd of how shitty she felt. I guess, all ot the sadness is what made me feel like I needed to finally write about this image from New Orleans in a way other than just journaling and talking about how crappy it was. I am going to regret staying up so late tomorrow, but I feel a little relieved after the sadness I felt today. I am glad I have writing to help me feel better.

The Conection

In broken streets walked by broken souls and Tourists
with happy faces and college sweatshirts. I hate this place.
New Orleans is too damn cold. I close my eyes, but can't ignore
the image of tortured, screaming souls and floating houses.
It slaps me in the face with a reminder of undeserved suffering,
cruelty, and a careless government. I see her crying alone.
She wipes Her tears on Her sleeves and avoids My eyes.
She walks fast and determined, like Me. Her boring sandy
hair is like Mine too. It could hide traces of the sun if she saw it,
if we saw it. We prefer the moon, anyway. It does not burn.

She disappears in a crowd of empty faces. I hope for her safety, even though
I don't remember what hope is. The hours escape without letting me grasp them.
I find her in a t-shirt shop. Her gray sweater hangs off her shoulders like Mine.
Her despair is paralyzing me, like Mine does my mother. I want to die and she is
dead. Empathy forces a smile at her. She walks toward me. Her request is small, but
the alcohol she breathes makes my burning stomach turn. I hand her my cell phone.
My fear distracts me from the moment when Her hand and My hand Connect. She
hangs up after no Connection. Vulnerability is flooding out her pores the way flooding
poured her soul out into the ocean. She looks around desperate and scared like Me.

She asks for the time, but looks to her watch. She looks at her left wrist.
I look at her left hand. It's swollen like an inflated rubber glove, but there is
no doctor to bring her back to life. My heart races in fear for Her, for Me.
My blood turns cold as hatred flows through it. Hatred for the cold world,
hatred for what she has done, but mostly hate for myself, because I know that
immobilizing darkness she lives in. It is blacker than the blood that has broken
inside of her hand. She is hopeless like Me. We are no longer Beautiful. I am naïve,
a mere idealistic student. I do not know heroin like Her and she does not know
heroines like Me. She might have in brighter days, before depression killed her soul.

I try not to imagine her first shot, but I can't block out the image of a young
girl unable to cope with broken dreams and hearts. Her arm shaking from fear,
she pierces the needle into her skin. She is anxious to fly, even with broken wings.
My mind hurls dark images at me, darker than the blood broken inside her hand.
The blood that feigns for it's fix, it's relief. I try not to see her lying lifeless in a
dirty room. Her weak arm betrayed her. She jabs the relief into her thigh. I hate this
place. I don't want to be here. I don't want to see this. I close my eyes, but can't help
but see her shaking, sweating, moaning cries of Death in a dark alley. It is darker than
the blood that has broken inside her hand from when her veins refused to take that
heartless narcotic. She stabs relief in between each finger. I stare at Her hands. The
hand she pierces with is small, like Mine. I need to vomit like Her, the night before.
Tangled, sticky hair reminds her of the suffering and tears she does not remember.

I am scared. I Disconnect, Detest, Dehumanize, like People who live in fear.
"I hope it all works out for you," I say out of politeness, not concern. She smiles a
hopeless smile like the one I have forced too many times. She is genuine, thankful,
and human. I don't know how to act. I don't know how to act. I swallow vomit.
It hurts my stomach, but I will not let it out. I will not let it out. She is broken and
dead; I am broken and dying. How can I pretend not to know her? We are related by
blood; we both bleed red. I know everything, but love her regardless (she's family).

I pretend not to notice the connection. I laugh when my friend says, "crazy druggie."
I laugh until I cry, since I can't cry any other way. I wipe My tears with My sleeves.

Kerosene

The wise words I once embraced mock me, "life is a circle."
I look at your enthusiasm and no longer feel it.
We both loved the circle before the dark nights
when I cried tears of blood as my soul died.
You can no longer see the light burning in me,
which causes you to sit and squirm; you're nervous and in pain.
I laugh at the awkward silence while wishing I could ease your suffering.

Remember the pure silence we used to experience?
We were both protected by innocence then.
You pretend it's still the same, like it's not burning you to sit and listen.
I laugh at your lies while you dance around the hellish flames.
You drenched your clothes in kerosene, but I lit the match.

You lock your arms around me and I inhale the moment.
I feel the only piece of my heart that is not stone, break.
I can't look at you, because I know you see the mess that I am.
Do you ever get dizzy from spinning around in the circle?
I can tell we are both drained from the ride we are on,
but you are high on adrenaline and belief.

I watch you embrace each revolution with your hands up.
My face is green and I am waiting for the ride to end.
I am continuously vomiting in my hair, but I do not cry.
We spin together, and you smile at me.
I force a weak smile that does not reveal that I have teeth.

You don't mind the acidic bile that is burning my throat
despite the fact that I can no longer speak.
You do not care, until I vomit on you.
Then I see tears in your eyes that I cannot cry.
Are you crying for you or for me?
You can't cry for me, because you are selfish like I am.

You're drowning in apathy, but you pretend to love me.
I see through your lies, but force myself to believe you.
Your belief and love is all that I have left to hang on to,
so I swallow your lies like I dry-swallow these pills.
They both hurt like hell, yet they're all I have to see any light.
I am sorry I lit the match, but why did you have to have kerosene?

Drowning and Crashing

I have figured out the way my depression has been cycling. I first noticed the pattern while I was on Spring Break, because I noticed for the first time that I felt okay sometimes. I used to feel depressed all of the time, and it still feels like I am depressed most of the time. I have figured out that my depression cycles in over a 48 hour time span. I start feeling extremely low in the evening. Night is always the worst anyway. The thing about feeling exceptionally crappy the first night of the cycle is that it doesn’t go away in the morning. I wake up feeling almost as bad as the night before, but it gets progressively worse as the day progresses. I then usually have a positive mood swing later that evening. That lasts until the next evening when I feel worse again. It just repeats itself. I am going to ask about switching from Lexapro to Wellbutrin.

Today was such a nice day that I skipped working out and walked across campus to my favorite coffee shop where I wrote like a madwoman for quite some time. I ended up with seven pages over the span of one tea. That may not sound like a lot, but I wrote the seven pages by hand, which I rarely do anymore, so I have major writers cramp. It was great to observe everyone so enthusiastic and full of energy because of the weather. I did not feel as enthused as I normally would, but it helps to see others feeling happy and I did feel okay, because I was on an upswing day. I am now experiencing my usual evening downswing though. My mood crashes in the evening, and it is discouraging. Especially when I know I will probably not feel better in the morning.

I had an interesting experience with a priest on the trip talking to me about my sleeplessness. He suggested that I pray. When I told him I do not pray anymore, because I do not believe, he comforted me with a Bible story, which made me laugh. He was genuinely concerned about my emotional state of being and not Heaven and Hell though, so I respected what he said. The Bible story he told was also getting at that it is okay to question so he was supporting me. It just seems silly when I confess disbelief and people respond by assuring me they will pray for me. I do appreciate their concern and hope, but I feel like telling them that my god died and took my soul along with her. I am drowning in a hurricane of despair and no one is offering me a hand, because they are afraid of getting pulled down. They shout “I will pray for you,” from their safe rooftops, while my tiny house has been crushed and I am thrashing and gasping for air. No one dives in to save me, but instead they extend prayers. I think we all know how that worked for the people who got taken under by Katrina.

The seven pages I wrote at the coffee shop were mostly about disappointment from my new life perspective as a result of my depression. I can read people like I never have been able to. I can pick up on people’s vulnerability, shortcomings, and selfishness so quickly that it slaps me across the face whether I ask for it or not. This leaves me in a place with no role models or people to save me. My therapist keeps telling me that I have to stop trying to finding hope in other people and discover it in myself, but I have just as many flaws as everyone else, if not more…so what good is that? I want someone above me in every aspect to look up to and follow, but there is no one that I can find, because it turns out we are all just flawed humans. Speaking of therapy, I am very discouraged that my appointments are running out at the student service building and I have to look into a more permanent therapist. I think it could be good for me to go to a more experienced professional, but when I am feeling so low going through all of the effort of finding a new therapist and starting over seems unthinkable. I don’t have a choice unfortunately, and I hate the waiting process where I am just trying to get through everyday alone and everyone thinks I am fine, because I have no appointments until next week. I have to be fine until next week. It is draining though. I am so exhausted all of the time. I love sleeping more than I ever have before. I also love just lying down listening to music and looking at the ceiling. I don’t think my thought process is ever any more real than it is when I am lying down looking at the ceiling. I also have really started to enjoy looking at things upside down. It changes my perspective and shows how much I take for granted visually. It is amazing. I guess, I should go workout, since I know I am not about to do homework and I feel crappy. I skipped it earlier, so I might as well.

Hurricane

I am back to my everyday life in the real world. I am exhausted and drained from my week of service in Mississippi. It was about an hour from New Orleans. I think I would have been exhausted and drained anyway from sulking around the house all of break as well. Depression is exhausting no matter what the circumstances. It makes everyday a challenge to get motivated.

I was certain the first couple of days on the trip that I had made a huge mistake in agreeing to come. I didn’t want to be there. I was miserable and I felt far too weak to be in a location of such devastation. My day spent in New Orleans left me feeling so depressed that I was left wishing I could just disappear. I had no relief whatsoever during that time. I was feeling low as it was just from being on the end of a down swing from depression (I have days where I can at least function followed by days of complete apathy and suffering. It goes in cycles). We then arrived to New Orleans where I first saw some of the houses destroyed as well as packs of poor kids hanging out on porches. I was surprised at how little is left of the city. That was devastating enough, but as we began walking in the French Quarters, my friend Adam and I saw a young woman walking alone sobbing. I felt sympathy for her. I think I would have felt actual empathy, except for the fact that I am so numb and apathetic that I don’t cry anymore. Adam commented on how he had the desire to ask her if she was okay. I had the desire to help her also, but it seemed inappropriate considering we were walking opposite directions. I also thought about how if I am crying in public that I don’t want anyone to pay attention to me, because I am usually rushing to somewhere private. We went to lunch and shopped a little after that. Then I saw the crying girl in a souvenir shop. I recognized her as the girl that had been crying, and I was happy to see that she was no longer crying. I noticed that she looked a little stressed so I gave her a sympathetic smile, because I genuinely felt bad for her. She looked like the type of girl I would see in Ann Arbor. She had a tank top under a grey long-sleeved and off-the-shoulder shirt with her sandy blond hair half up and half down. I felt like I knew her, or maybe even saw some of myself in her. After I smiled at her she came over and asked Adam and me to borrow one of our cell phones. She claimed hers had been stolen the night before. Adam did not have his, and I was a little apprehensive because her breath smelled so strongly of alcohol that I was getting nauseous. I didn’t trust her with my phone, but she assured me it was a local card. She showed me the number that she was calling. It was scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper that she was holding. She was not very big and Adam is a bigger guy, so I realized that I had nothing to lose and that I could help her out. I let her use my cell phone and she could not get a hold of the person she was calling. She did not leave a message and she looked concerned. I asked her if she would be okay and she proceeded to ask the time. Before I could look she looked at the left hand her watch was on. As she held up her left hand to look at her watch I noticed her hand was extremely swollen and black and blue. I thought maybe she had been badly beaten the night before when her cell phone had been stolen like the naïve small town girl that I am. It turns out she was such a heroine addict that she could no longer inject it into her arms and legs, but had to move on to her hands and in between her fingers. It broke my heart when I apathetically responded to her thank you as she handed me my phone, “Well, I hope everything works out for you.” She looked like she might cry and she said “thank you. I really hope so too,” but the way she said it made it sound like she didn’t think things would work out. Her hopelessness scared me, but I think it was because for the first time I could understand what types of darkness could drive someone so low. For the first time I saw this heroine addict as another human being that was just as human as me, and not some scary monster that I can’t relate to. It really bothered me over the rest of the week. It made my stomach hurt all of that day whenever I thought about her. It wasn’t just her that bothered me, it was all of the homeless people. I wonder what keeps them going. I can’t keep myself going in a perfect environment. They must have some type of strength that I do not.

We ended our day in New Orleans by visiting some of the really devastated areas. My heart ached with every X I saw on the doors with numbers of bodies found inside. We found a half smashed snake. It had crawled into a hole for cover and then only made it half in the hole. It was lodged pretty deep into the hole, but there was a good portion of it completely flat from the water. I don’t like snakes, but I felt sorry for it. There were watermarks on the houses from the flooding. The watermarks were all well over my head. I can’t imagine having to swim to get outside of my house. It has been almost two years and there is so much damage that is unreal to me. I couldn’t even imagine the type of devastation that was there without having actually seen it myself. After this trip my eyes have been completely open to what is going on down there. This split-level house really struck me. There must have been two families that lived there, but I was left looking into the doorless home with all of its windows shattered, including the second floor. The home was completely destroyed by the hurricane. It was marked to be bulldozed standing as a reminder of all of the losses. I looked through the shattered window on the second floor. I noticed a white ceiling fan, and I figured it must have been a bedroom. It made me think of my white ceiling fan, and what would happen if I lost my bedroom and my home.

The actual building on the trip made me feel like I did make the right choice in going there. When we started there was only a frame of the house. There were no walls or roof. When we left four days later, there was siding, floor being set down, shingles, everything was painted, and it was really looking like a house. We really helped build a house. I did things that I never thought I could do. I did all types of small tasks, a lot of painting, I got on the roof and helped to nail boards down, and I caulked a bunch of windows. It was really rewarding to see such amazing progress and get to see the homeowner’s excitement.

There were other nights when I felt I didn’t want to be on the trip, but Adam pointed out, did I want to be at home? Did I want to be at school? It was just the depression making me feel like I didn’t want to be anywhere. I felt like I saw a lot of hypocrisy and truth on this trip. That makes religion just as impossible as it ever has been for me. I began to realize that maybe everyone is not as above me as I had thought. I always assume that everyone is much more wise and self-aware than I am, but I am starting to notice people’s flaws quicker than I notice their strengths, which is probably a result of my new depressing lens that I use to view life. I am glad for the experiences I had on this trip. I think it is one of the most influential things I have done all year. It wasn’t some miracle worker; in fact it was a tremendous challenge to keep going every day. I am glad that I went though, but I don’t know that it helped my depression at all. I am thankful for my new relationship with Adam though. It is nice to have friends that understand where I am at spiritually and emotionally.

There is so much to write about involving my experiences this week. I have pages and pages of journal entries. I don’t think I can begin to decipher how I felt on this trip, let alone try to convey my experiences to others. I have posted some pictures to give you a feel of it.