Tag: #depression

The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence

Athena DionLeave a comment

What if I were actually somebody who liked me? What if I actually believed I was a lovable person? What if I actually approved of my own reasoning for the decisions I make? What if I considered myself to be responsible and educated enough to make decent, although imperfect, decisions? What if I saw myself for the loving person that is displayed in almost all of my behaviors? Inwardly, I logically know that I’m a good enough person, I just never allow myself to inwardly feel like I’m good enough. This is the training I received in life: how to hate myself completely. That’s about the only thing I’m very certain I’m good at. Out of nowhere, I can suddenly be consumed with an overwhelming feeling that someone somewhere doesn’t like me for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter if I know them, like them, or respect them, for some reason their opinion would always matter more to me than my own opinion of me. This is the only way I knew to evaluate myself… by gauging who I am off of the opinions of others. It is my duty to maintain the status quo of my worthlessness. That has been my life’s path, up until around the beginning of this year. I promised you, guys, that I would slay the fucking lion in my very first post, and here you are watching me do just that.

The insights I’ve been having over the last six months to a year have had me making an incredible amount of positive life changes. I am handling the massive amount of responsibilities I have by using various self-care techniques, I’ve been practicing more kindness with myself, and I’ve been comforting myself during the hard moments.

This has been the pinnacle of the process of mourning the loss of my living mother.

I have finally learned how to be my own mother.

Even though she never did, I am learning to comfort myself, I am learning to tell myself when to relax and how to relax. I am the one making sure I meet the responsibilities necessary for a happy life. She never bothered to get me in therapy, even after I attempted suicide multiple times. But as an adult, though, throughout much of my life, I’ve been broke as fuck, I have never given up the search for the right therapist.

I could have given up after the first few fucked me up even worse with all the drugs they were prescribing me. They have put me on nearly every SSRI, sometimes many at the same time. They have put me on antipsychotics and even stimulants. But they would only give me an anti-anxiety pill when I was in a psych ward because they were afraid I would become addicted. Most of these doctors had known me for less than an hour before they would write at least one prescription. Guys, they are corrupt as fuck. Using state money to buy drugs to fatten the wallets of Big Pharma, while what’s wrong with me could only truly be fixed by someone talking to me long enough to learn about all of the trauma I was dealing with. I never needed any medicine. I needed human contact with a responsible and trained professional familiar with the signs of childhood trauma. I literally fell down the rabbit hole that is the mental health system for decades, spinning my wheels and wasting precious years that I can never get back…

Because no one would take to the time to see the truth about my life… to understand what I was living through, and to validate to me that I could trust my own instincts that told me there was something wrong with the way I grew up. That it all left me with some unfortunate coping mechanisms which, although they were what saved me as a child and teenager, are not acceptable adult behavior.

Meanwhile, each trial run with, not only ineffective, but worsening psychotropic treatments, was causing me tremendous interpersonal problems. When I was put on multiple SSRIs by a psychiatric clinic while attending college at age 18, I became zombie-like just before my semester finals and ended up missing at least half of the tests.

I lost my full-ride academic scholarship because of that. I was hospitalized for suicide watch, and I lost my job soon after. I had to move back in with my narcissistic Mom, who I knew secretly felt better about herself when she saw me failing. She liked feeling like she was smarter than me because I’m the reason she couldn’t finish high school.

When we were alone once, in my bedroom when I was a teenager, she asked me, “You know what I would have done if I hadn’t had you? I would’ve been a high school coach.”

You and I both know she could have become a coach while raising a child. So, how is it that my birth, or my very existence, stopped her from following any of her own dreams?

Because dreams take hard work on your own part in creating them. It was much easier for her to be lazy, and just blame me for all of her problems.

Since starting my new job in the last month or so, I have widened my social connection quite a lot. I have made friends with some new people. I have been accepted into a new circle of friends. This is such a big positive for anyone… except when you (and your son and husband) have been all but abandoned by ⅔ of your family. We’ve barely heard a word in five years… dozens of relatives. Your belief in the security of relationships becomes completely diminished. When the people you have spent nearly every holiday, wedding, graduation, and funeral with, your entire life, just suddenly drop you like a rag doll they’d been carrying, you begin to doubt whether people who don’t share your DNA can love you any better. It becomes incredibly hard to open up and trust new people. It is just too much of a risk.

Slowly, I am…

I am learning to trust others…

And I am learning to trust myself.

I am trusting that someone out there can be helped by something that I write. Even if you haven’t read this yet, I know there are at least some of you suffering the horrible plights, and I know that you feel alone. I’m here to tell you, if you are suffering silently with incredible emotional pain, even to the point that you can barely function in your daily life and responsibilities…

You are NOT ALONE.

This post inspired by The Sound of Silence (Simon + Garfunkel cover) by Disturbed.

Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay 

Jane Says

Jane Says

Athena Dion2 Comments

Why does it feel so fucking bad when it’s exactly what I need? Because progress means change, and change FEELS TERRIBLE. At least, it does at first. Change of any kind is stressful on the body and psyche. What you have to focus on are the results. Yes, this feels shitty right now, but what might be the long-term benefits of allowing myself to feel some shittiness right now?

I’m scared to death to be suddenly working 5 days a week while homeschooling my autistic child. But, I’m not gonna give up on the homeschooling, that’s one thing I am willing to make the biggest sacrifices for, I believe that much that it’s the best thing for my son. But the thing is, homeschooling is fucking expensive. I pay taxes for the public school system, but I buy all of my books, pay for all of our online subscriptions for various educational resources, pay for all of our field trips, extracurricular activities (physical education, art, music…)…

What I’m really coming to right now is an understanding that my feelings are very often exaggerated from a normal emotional response to common situations. Because of past traumas, I am braced mentally and physically for the expectation of the worst. From other people, from situations, from whom I had believed to be god, from the universe at large, and from myself. My entire being, at some point, became overconsumed with a sense of tragedy and heartbreak. The human psyche can only take so much abuse before it alters itself to just help you get through the rest of your life without risking going through it again. You make yourself really, really, really small. You squash your own talents and intelligence so you don’t risk being brought back down. You don’t want to expose yourself to chance. Your entire life eventually becomes ‘how not to get hurt again’. And then you live in that mode.

And then there’s the other part of you. The part that wants to live. It keeps fighting with that other side, trying to find some level of freedom. You live this internal struggle that the smothering side always wins.

Even with all of the wonderful changes I’ve made lately, I still feel clenched like I have a glass torso. This tension actually runs from the top of my head to the muscles in my ankles. Something still has me blocked. I still can’t trust.

This post inspired by Jane Says by Jane’s Addiction.

Image by Steve Miller from Pixabay

Plush

Plush

Athena DionLeave a comment

My body can never relax because I never actually feel safe. In any given situation I will see a reason to judge myself or worry about something that may or may not ever happen. My mind will always find something terrifying about every single situation I find myself within.

There are voices of a thousand judgmental, hypocritical assholes living in my head, and I believe them as if theirs are the only true opinions that count. The tricky thing is, they are AUTOMATIC. I don’t literally hear them. In reality, I feel what they say, and react to it, without even acknowledging that a negative thought had crossed my mind.

This self-damnation happens constantly without me even realizing it. Then I wonder why I’ve felt depressed and anxious for decades, why no psychotropic medications seem to help. I am not chemically imbalanced. I am not in need of mind-numbing zombie meds. All I have needed to do is just ACKNOWLEDGE IT. I had to see my true reality clearly. I had to accept it.

This is extremely hard to do when the thing you need to accept is that your mother doesn’t love you, and that she never will. Our culture puts so much pressure on children to honor mothers. But this well-intended cultural expectancy is based on the idea that mothers are infinitely loving and giving as our hormones are built to harness within us. Yet, we all know how disgusted we are to hear about a mother killing her own children. We know there are horrendous instances where this doesn’t hold up. And a lot more of these instances involve sadistic abuse rather than outright murder, which, unfortunately, can also feel like death.

Please stop saying to people, “Yeah, but that’s your mother! She gave life to you!” Not all women who give birth are mothers. Let’s get that clear right here and now.

This post inspired by Plush by Stone Temple Pilots.

Image by andrea candraja from Pixabay

Under the Bridge

Under the Bridge

Athena DionLeave a comment

It was five years yesterday since I have spoken to my mother, and it has FINALLY sunk in that none of it was my fault. I couldn’t control what she or my siblings did. They broke my heart. They crushed me. And they didn’t even care about that enough to talk to me about what was happening. They dropped me and my son like a damn mic, and walked away. Relationship radio silence.

Well, let me tell you how much these people who said they loved me and called themselves my family knew about me. None of them knew that I was molested, spanked with belts for someone’s amusement. That I saw my mother bust out one of the windows of the house because my dad wouldn’t let her in. That before the age of six, my sexuality had already been shaped by HBO movies like Bachelor Party and every single one of the Porky’s movies. That I was running around the neighborhood SMOKING at that same age. That when my grandmother and cousin died within two years of each other, that I was so stricken with grief that I had recurring dreams of my grandmother sitting up in her grave talking to me, and that I secretly believed my cousin was speaking to me through country songs on the radio. That I was date-raped. That two different men have tried to kill me. Do they know that in high school I slept in my Geo Metro at a truck stop because I felt SAFER there than I did around my own mother?

She was emotionally and medically abusing me, and she was GETTING AWAY WITH IT!!! Not only did I suffer from near-crippling PTSD, major depression, and extreme anxiety from ages 12 to 16 without any intervention and care, but when she FINALLY did take me to a Christian clinic that prescribed me Zoloft, she also told me suddenly she was going to stop taking me (WHILE I WAS ON THE ZOLOFT) because I threw a party while she was out of town. I had to run away after that because it was so unsafe to live there.

I was smart enough to read the information with the Zoloft. I knew that stopping suddenly could cause me to become worse and MORE SUICIDAL. It was absolutely vital that I get the hell away from anyone who would do that to me.

By the age of 7, I was already exhibiting signs of trauma for a child such as suddenly regressing to wetting my pants in public, faking a broken leg all the way to the x-rays, PIERCING MY OWN FUCKING EARS IN MY BEDROOM. I have memories of being left home alone from the age of six. I remember this because that’s when I started singing and dancing in the living room for the imaginary audience on the couch. This was a technique that I created to cure the loneliness. It was a coping mechanism that helped me with the trauma I was experiencing. I was alone so much that I had to pretend that people were with me. That’s also why I started writing. It was a way to talk to someone when no one would listen or no one seemed to care. It started with suicidal poetry when I was twelve. And yes, I did attempt suicide for the first time when I was twelve.

Back then I was the only one in my family who went to church. The church van would pick me up and bring me home. Bobbie was a guy who went to my church who was (I think) about fourteen. We were ‘going out’, so we made out and he became the first guy to feel me up on the back of that church van. He used to call me and try to get me to meet him somewhere where we could be alone. I knew why. Well, after trying a few times and failing, he moved on to another girl who was more accessible. He asked my best friend to call me and tell me he didn’t wanna go out with me anymore. I was home alone when she did.

I went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and took at least 12 aspirin from the family size bottle. Then I took a handful of Midol.

At that time, we had recently installed new carpet. When they finally took the room-hogging waterbed out my room for the installation, I wanted to continue just sleeping  in a sleeping bag on my floor so that I had more room. (I gotta hand it to my mom, she might not have shown true love and affection, but when it came to certain things, she really did give me my freedom. I was bred to be rebellious and independent.) So, I laid down in that sleeping bag right in front of my vanity with no stool. I remember distinctly having the thought, “Either I’m gonna wake up in a hospital or I’m not gonna wake up.” And I was okay with either.

Maybe a couple of hours later (I really don’t know I was so out of it), I woke up and vomited on my sleeping bag. I remember my mother washing the sleeping bag, and her saying that I probably vomited because I was so upset over my boyfriend breaking up with me.

The next day I confided in a couple of friends what had happened. One of them (thank you for caring) told the school counselor who called my mother in for a meeting. We both sat in the counselor’s office. The counselor told her that I threw up pills after attempting suicide. She told my mother that I was suffering from depression and needed help.

After the meeting, my mother took me to the mall. We never talked about the incident again. 

I was never taken to a doctor or a counselor regarding the incident. Family were never informed. I was still left home alone during business hours all summer long.

And that was far from being the last time I would do a similar thing.

The song “Under the Bridge” came out about that time, and every time I would hear it I would think of how, symbolically, the vanity in my room was like the bridge to me, and I  was under it the first day of my life that I confronted my own death. And Bobbie kind of looked like Anthony Kiedis. So, this song, in essence, is the theme song to my first suicide attempt… which I survived. Physically, at least. Enjoy.

This post inspired by “Under the Bridge” by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Listen here.

Click image to purchase song.

Love It If We Made It

Love It If We Made It

Athena DionLeave a comment

I must admit that my intentions with this blog are not purely to share my story and help those who can relate. I’m gonna lay it right out there. I want to make money off of you. The fact of the matter is that I’m probably not going to make any positive change in this world as a poor person, so I have to stop being poor.

Meanwhile, in the sky up above us, there is some asshole riding around in a private jet, drinking champagne and snorting coke off a hooker’s ass. The money that he’s wasting in an hour on animalistic frivolities could feed an entire village of starving children for the day. For me, it could make the difference between me being able to take a stress-free breath for once. That’s the world we live in. I can’t even imagine living in a world where everyone could be financially comfortable because human greed is so deeply rooted that the wealthy will almost always selfishly ignore the needs of the less fortunate. There are a few amazing exceptions, but never enough to improve the overall situation. It’s going to take more than a handful of the ELEVEN MILLION millionaires sitting pretty in our country to want to help mankind rather than sit on their dragon hoards.

Of the three people living in our household, all three needed dental surgeries within the last two years, and my son was evaluated and received therapy for autism. So, that’s a third of our income spent on medical bills on top of the premiums we pay each month just to HAVE insurance. We had to take out loans and credit cards that we just can’t pay. If you are living off even less, I REALLY, REALLY feel for you. Poverty feels like every opportunity is always just out of reach, and every second of every day is spent worrying about how your family’s needs will be met today and tomorrow. Poverty is an all-consuming stress that you just can’t escape. That’s why poor people break laws, that’s why poor people use drugs, that’s why poor people ‘milk’ the system, that’s why poor people try to sneak into other countries. That’s why when poor people finally strike it rich, they blow all of the money before they can blink.

I don’t want that to happen to us. I want to do the Sam Walton thing, and continue to drive the same older model cars and wear the same thrift store clothing… but not feel guilty when I buy groceries because the money came out of our mortgage payment, or it’s going to trigger an overdraft fee with the bank that we can’t afford. I’ve been so worried about money for the last 7 years that I can’t remember the last time I was able to take in a full, relaxing breath. It’s about finally pulling my family up out of poverty. It’s about me, my husband, and our son being able to move up to the next level of living.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not JUST about the money. I also have finally realized that I’m not gonna live forever. And I don’t want to die with all of this left inside of me. I don’t want to waste any more of my life wondering why my mother couldn’t love me. Why my brother and sister just let me and my son go without even a conversation. I know now that it was their loss. I just haven’t forgiven myself for all of my anger. I hate that I feel anger and violence over the things that have happened to me. I resent it so much, which just makes the anger worse. I’m bitter inside. I can’t help it. Life has really left a terrible taste in my mouth, the bittersweet of finally having the family that I’ve always wanted, but having our freedom and patience eroded by poverty. I am so fucking tired of being broke. I’m so tired of my son missing out on things just because we don’t have the money. I’m done with it. I. Am. Done.

I’m learning that you have to believe in yourself a whole hell of a lot to make it in this world, because there are hoards of people who will try to bring you down and hold you back, just out of sheer habit. Getting support from others is so hard because we are all so involved with our own agendas. The sooner you start being your own champion, your own cheerleader, your own warrior, the sooner you will find success. No one else is ever going to drag you to it. That’s why we respect and live in awe of celebrities. Because we all know how hard it is to believe in our own selves. It’s the hardest thing in the world to truly believe in our own capabilities. Most of us find it easier to live and die in mediocrity. Those very select few push themselves past the self-doubt, into the elusive realm of genuine confidence.

The advice we all heard growing up doesn’t help either. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Don’t burn your bridges. Interpretation: don’t take chances. Don’t risk. Play it safe because you’ll probably fail. Sometimes you should put all of your eggs in one basket. When you really, really believe in something. Yes, you might fail. If you do, you will learn. But if you cower away from living your passions, you will risk living a lifetime half-assed. This is your one life. Time is of the essence.

Quarky is my masterpiece. I’ve turned a business into my work of art. Quarky is my proof that I have finally learned to trust myself. Quarky is my belief that everything will finally be okay. How ironic is it that I’m edging closer to failing my Entrepreneur class at APUS because I’m too busy building my business that I’m not doing my homework? I’ve been so obsessed with this idea that I didn’t want to entertain other ideas anymore. I’m on fire right now, and I’m using the momentum. I’ve been in bed, literally, for a week straight doing nothing but creating ads and adding product to this store. I told my son we are taking an early spring break from his homeschooling because I wanted to get my Quarky Shop to making money again. When it hit big a couple of years ago, we would celebrate every time I made a sale with dancing and running high tens. Then when it slowed down, it started costing me money each month just to keep it open, and I thought about shutting it down. But my son told me not to give up on it. So, I didn’t…

I’m not a scientist. I consider myself to be a scientific philosopher. Science is everything that we think we know, for sure, but it’s not everything. New things are being discovered and proven by science all the time, and the possibilities of what may be proven in the vast future are almost beyond human speculation. For me, science is even better than religion at inspiring personal beliefs about the meaning of life and its mysteries. I find my spirituality as I marvel at the beauty and wonder of the universe.

The known and the unknown mingle together to create our realities. Welcome to Quarky.

Logoevensmaller

 

This post inspired by “Love It If We Made It” by The 1975. I think this is the music we should be sending into space. Listen here. 

Click image to purchase song.

I’m also gonna throw this suggestion at ya. I haven’t read very far into it, but the last few weeks, whenever I read a few pages or a few paragraphs, I have felt more like a badass each time.

I’m An Animal

I’m An Animal

Athena DionLeave a comment

I can see my platinum blonde hair framing my face from the corners of my eyes. I step onto the opening of the runway stage wearing a long, black, sheer dress held together with ties on each hip. It’s actually more of an Egyptian-style goddess dress, rather than a Greek one as my stage name indicates, but I don’t think anyone really cares about that but me. I start taking steps onto the stage in my high-heeled, laced-up, patent leather boots. I reach the end, where the pole waits for me. Lights shine in my eyes, and all of the people watching me are muffled in darkness.

To my right, is a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors where I see the image of a gorgeous, blonde bombshell moving with grace and flawless keeping with the music. I grab the pole with my right hand and begin to move around it, twirling myself as if the pole were my dance partner and we were in love. I stop and raise my left leg and wrap it around the pole. I arch my back and dip away from it. The music starts moving faster, and I follow it. I feel the rhythm, the bass, the lyrics with my entire being, and I become one with them. For a moment, I close my eyes and give in to the experience. A person approaches the stage with money in hand, so I move toward them and include them in my erotic, spiritual experience with the music. They pay me for it.

I repeat this process until the first song ends. Then I walk back to the stage’s opening and pull my dress up over my head. I turn around and approach the pole again. I tune out all of my nagging insecurities, “Do I have razor burn? What do my boobs look like when I do this move? Do they look saggy? Can people see my stretch marks under this light? Are my moves entertaining enough? Am I getting too old for this? Have I gained too much weight?” I squash all of that down, and I trust the process… a process I have repeated at least 8 times a night, 2 to 3 times a week for the last several years. I am at the top of my game, and I know it. I also know someday it will end, and that terrifies me. What would I do then?

That was me, living as the goddess archetype, a version of myself that existed when I was a dancer in my twenties. These days, I am homeschooling my autistic son, plagued with anxiety caused by past traumas. Since last April, I’ve been working with the same amazing therapist. Change is happening, and I keep flashing back to this same moment…

There on the stage, I was extremely vulnerable and yet extremely empowered at the same time. It was like the opposite of rape. Those people deeply desired me sexually, but they would never get what they wanted from me. I was fucking bulletproof. The music, the makeup, the costumes, the lights, the mirrors… they were the most comforting things in my life. Those things literally supported me, emotionally and financially. I felt safer in that strip club than I felt with most of my family.

Perhaps, I was primarily adored for my looks and unusual talent, but the only thing that mattered to me was being accepted and liked as a human being with flaws. For every salivating old man who hollered and threw money down at my feet, I gained an ounce of confidence that I was worth SOMETHING.

In my lifetime, I have been hurt so badly that I lost my faith in God and in my own fucking mother. I’ve harbored so much pain within me that it swallowed me up. It sucked the life out of me. I didn’t trust other people or myself. I didn’t trust events or circumstances. I didn’t trust any gods. I didn’t even trust the universe.

I feel like I’ve been rejected and abandoned by so many people, so many times, that at some point it became the constant focus of my mind… how to prevent myself from being hurt by other people. The pain is so deep that it cuts me up inside like a thousand knives. No one can see this happening to me, but it does, constantly.  I sleep with entire muscle groups activated, and have to play the same old comedy series I’ve seen a hundred times to keep me from thinking when I wake up for brief moments at night. The Office, How I Met Your Mother, That ’70s Show… those characters are my Ambien.

Most people feel anxiety at least some of the time, so most can relate to the pain an anxiety disorder can cause. Anxiety is the extreme of being uncomfortable. But let me explain to you in another way just how exhausting it can be. Imagine the fire alarm was going off in your home. You look all around and see no fire and smell no smoke. Even though there is no fire, the damn alarm just started going off for no reason. You reach up to turn it off, but it won’t turn off. You take out the fucking batteries, and it’s still going off. You try to pry it off the wall, but the thing is somehow fused into the very structure, and you can’t get rid of it without the whole fucking house falling down. You are stuck with this goddamn alarm going off day and night. Now fast forward a week, a month, a year, DECADES. That alarm is still going off, and you have to go to work, raise your child, pay bills, write school papers, and try to start a blog, all while listening to that damn alarm. This has been my life since I was nine years old. I am so. fucking. tired.

The weight of guilt that I live with over things I cannot, and have never been able to, control has become like armor on my small frame. I was born a product of my DNA. I grew up in poverty in the Midwest in a Christian-dominant, privileged, and ‘free’ country. This combination molded me. It shaped me beyond my control into the exact personhood that I am now. Regardless of my own wishes, there were certain facts about my existence which left me no choice but to succumb to this here and now.

I learned so many lessons from the painful things in my past. It shaped me into someone who can relate, and wants to relate, to the pain of others. It drives me. I don’t want anyone to feel alone… ANYONE. When I know that a person is silently hurting, I automatically feel connected and compelled to reach out, even if they barely know me, because I know that nothing makes a problem feel bigger than being isolated with it. I’m very aware that I’m not qualified to ‘fix’ someone’s problems, but I have some big ears (not literally), and I know from so much of my life that when I had access to just one person who was willing to listen to my problems, sometimes that was enough to get through the hardest of times. Sometimes it was a family member or a friend, or a teacher, or a therapist. Sometimes it was a stranger.

You are part of an audience I have imagined since I was a child; the people who might resonate with my writing, the people who could actually take something from all of this and use it to help themselves. I’ve had experiences that others may have been through, and they would know just how much it fucking sucks. I just want to let you know that if that is you, you are not alone. That’s all any of us really needs to get through this fucked up hell circus in which we find ourselves. We just need to know we aren’t alone, and then we can make it through.

Sometimes that realization comes from hearing a song. That one song that encapsulates your experience of that moment in time perfectly. Music is always leading me in an eerie way. It inspires me to write suddenly, and for long periods, and the thoughts magically flow onto the screen like raw tender puzzle pieces of my personality.

If another human being can relate to what I’m saying, and no longer feel alone, then I have done my job as an artist. Any artist, whether poet, or painter, or musician, all of the genius ways in which people portray their emotions, their only purpose is to connect to people through their chosen mode. Art is the physical equivalent of feelings. It is the materialization of emotions through human beings. That’s what makes art art.

My list of heroes consists of people who were able to make a legendary connection with others, and most of the time, those kinds of heroes struggle in very real ways with their demons. Hemingway was a notorious alcoholic. Picasso cut off one of his fucking ears. Virginia Woolf drown herself in a river. Others were famously assassinated or overdosed. People who make a real difference almost always live different lives. I don’t fit into the ‘ordinary’. It hurts so much just trying. I am so utterly terrified of other people, it’s almost a cosmic joke. I know that we need human connection for proper psychological functioning, but every interaction with someone else is a possible trigger to the seemingly infinite wasteland of negative thoughts and feelings within me.

It’s so hard to imagine being capable of success because I see myself as equal with all other humans, and I don’t believe that I deserve MORE than someone else simply because I happen to animate this particular body. I understand that, at its basic core, life is random. The fact that you or I ended up in this place and time was not a reward or punishment. It was chance. None of us CHOSE to be who we are. We all take our first breaths holding our own unique set of cards, 46 to be exact. That mish-mush of ancient DNA sets the stage for your play, the setting and time are chosen for you. The curtains open, the bright light of the world outside your mother’s womb greets you, much the same as the white light rumored to greet us when we die.

I went back to college a couple years ago. I started pursuing Philosophy in order to sharpen my writing and critical thinking skills. It’s paid off. I can tell my writing is better, my research is better, and even my confidence has improved… within my school forum. But I still cower from the great internet monster. I’m so fucking afraid of you, reader. I hope you realize how bad my fingers shake as I type; how much wine I have to drink to get here. But, like any other type of artist, the writer in me exists whether or not I write. The words become stifled and stuck, trapped within my body as painful knots in my abdomen and shoulders, with a jaw like an iron vise. You’re so fucking scary. Your thoughts. Your opinions. You hold so much power from your side of the screen. Baring my body for gawking strangers was a cakewalk compared to this. You are witnessing the revelation of my broken, cauterized soul.

The very worst part of it all is feeling judged. It’s driving me crazy. I project these images of potential disasters almost constantly. Every new piece of external input can trigger an instantaneous threat response in me. But, this response can more easily be triggered by the alarming thoughts that creep up seemingly out of nowhere. I don’t even need external provocation, just the THOUGHT of danger can send me into an internal frenzy. My body is constantly on alert, like that moment when the prey darts its head up, startled by a sound, its neck stiffened in fear. Welcome to my constant reality. There. I am stuck there. There is always a lion staring me down. He never gets tired, he never gets bored, he never takes his fucking eyes off of me. If I stop worrying for one millisecond and try to ‘relax’, he will eat me alive in a heartbeat. So, I stay vigilant in preparation for the inevitable attack. It has been my experience that every time I have thought it was safe to let go, I was attacked again. At one point, my entire torso became so filled with tension that it was like permanent armor protecting my heart. I just can’t risk getting hurt again. I have had enough in this life. I have had more than my fair share. I just don’t understand why.

And my therapist told me just the other day to change that question, “Why?” She said to replace it with, “What now?” But I’d like to phrase it to be more like my own dialect, “What the fuck now?”

Now…

You are about to watch Athena slay the lion.

 

This post inspired by “I’m An Animal” by Neko Case. Listen here.

 Click image to purchase song.

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UNICORN