Her

I’ve been depressed for the past three years. It’s changed me on the inside, and you could almost say that I’ve developed, maybe grown for three years. But it’s odd, and I feel like as if most of my depression is from myself. This post is basically a boring recollection on how my depression has progressed, but hey I feel like posting here. I appreciated this website the moment I set eyes on it. I just don’t know how to sort myself out, and there are a lot of things that are difficult to express with words. I’m starting to get anxiety attacks because of her, and I’m not sure what’s going on in my head.

My parents began fighting the year I was born. I grew up with it, yet I was cheerful and bubbly until the end of 7th grade. I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember what flicked the switch all of a sudden, because I was a straight-A student in 7th grade in a gifted-and-talented program, but suddenly I could barely keep my grades above a 3.0 in 8th grade. I know, I know, 3.0 isn’t the worst GPA in the world, but in the eyes of tiger Asian parents, I was an academic failure. You could say I don’t have it that bad, but I really don’t know how to respond to that. I just don’t.

Anyhow, the first two years of my depression were not what was significant. I’m hitting a parabolic curve here, and it’s gotten much worse in the last few months than it had progressed over the two years before that. This was also the few months when I moved away from my mother to live in a separate apartment with my father, went to three different therapists, and changed my diet to be healthier. I guess I just kind of snapped midway an argument with my mother. I was trying to explain our financial situation to her (she didn’t believe my dad), that my dad didn’t just ship $30,000 he got from a loan to his family; he used it to pay off a lot of our debts. She didn’t believe me either and we started arguing. She called my brother (her and my brother were closer than family; they were emotionally codependent), and when I talked to him over the phone as well, he told me that both of our parents are losers with low intelligence. He told me that he only relies on them for the money and for occasional relationship advice. I don’t know; I guess hearing my perfectly happy, sane brother saying that just did it. My brother was always a health nut, and he told me that all of my mental issues would be solved if I just ate a tip-top diet. Sure, he lost a hundred pounds off of it by eating until he was full, and I lost a few pounds myself, but nothing changed in my mind. But he seemed to have become a completely different person. He was happy no matter what.

But I don’t even know if my case is depression. I’m just horribly hollow. The emptiness is a tight feeling on my chest, as if it’s about to cave in at any moment from the vacuum inside. I hate it. I started cutting a year ago because the rush of adrenaline from the blood calmed me down, but now I do it because it hurts. I don’t enjoy the pain, but it fills me with something, and the empty feeling goes away. It distracts me from…everything else. I have no motivation to do anything. I have goals that I know I can achieve through effort, but I always have a nagging feeling I will never achieve any of them.

The weird part is, however, that in the past year my emptiness has caused me to be emotionally absent in a lot of ways like a psychopath. The irony is that this has actually helped me–my insecurities have made me prettier and more fashionable; my I-Couldn’t-Give-a-Fuck personality has made me smoother and garnered me more friends; my lack of motivation has made me come up with cheating methods that actually improved my grades; the fact that I never felt compelled to talk to people unless they talked to me first made me seem more trustworthy and has made me the person people go to for secrets. I don’t know why, but I’ve grown a superiority complex and people mistake it as confidence. More for me, I guess. I even got a boyfriend who cares for me for more than my body. Sounds good, right?

But goddamnit I’ve sealed myself off. I can’t even tell my two best friends, who come to me with all their secrets, anything unless they caught me. They don’t know that I cut, that I feel empty, or even that I moved out with my father. I feel like a brat. I have people who care about me all around me now, yet I can’t seem to improve myself. My mother has calmed down, my father has improving motivation, and my brother is a motherfucking med student with tip-top grades and girlfriends all around. I’m just so, so empty. It’s either that or Willy-Waterworks streaming from my eyes at the most random of times.

Now I’m not sure if I’m just really depressed or I’m going crazy. I invented “Mother” and Mr. Parston when I was young to create an explanation for the ghosts in my room I was afraid of when I was young. I used to pretend that they were just guardians who watched me from the shadows, but now I’m relying on them. I feel their presence sometimes when I cry, their arms wrapped around me. I feel like there’s a separate “me” who is growing in my mind like a malignant tumor. I experience the depression and try to make something of myself from it, but that “me” has recently made another presence of herself. I don’t know if I’m even making sense anymore. “She” is just…something else. When I lie by myself in silence, she emerges. She tells me to cut myself even when I don’t want to; she enjoys the sight of blood and is always pressuring me to cut into a major artery. She keeps chanting at me that the pain is pleasurable. In a way it helps me blank out as my hand keeps dragging the blade, but I don’t like how I have to hide lots and lots of scars. I don’t know if she is just a product of me pushing my sadistic nature into a corner and blaming it on a separate entity, but her presence is an expanding mass inside my head, not a physical one like that of Mother and Mr. Parston. Paired with the caving emptiness inside my chest, sometimes I break down when I’m by myself just by hearing her voice.

I want to die, but I don’t want to hurt all of my friends and family. But every time I refuse “her,” she yells inside my head and it makes me panic until I cut myself. She wants me to go out with a bang, to take a large knife and cut out my entrails. I attempted that once by getting hammered on hard liquor and stab myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even while I was drunk. I got scared last second and diverted the knife so  I cut my side instead. I scared my parents and had a wicked hangover, and I began to sob when I heard that my mother developed a fear of large knives since then (she uses small, serrated knives now, even for cooking). I almost wish I was successful at that moment. But anyhow, “she’s” still pushing, and I just want her to stop, the emptiness to stop, everything to stop. I want time itself to stop so that I can catch up. Everything to just…stop, even if for just a little bit.

I know that my parents were a factor in my depression, but I blame myself for it. Often times I would yell back at my mother and a few times I returned her hits. I know she’s controlling, but I often break the rules she sets for me out of personal grudge. Besides, I talk myself down a lot, too. It’s like negative thoughts come into my head and I agree with them and encourage them. I just think pessimistically and it makes me more down than before. I used to be excited for school because then I could escape my home, but now I just loathe it because I dwell on other people’s flaws, forcing myself to hate people. But in the end, I’m afraid of what “she” might do. I fear nothing else. Not death, not pain, just her. I’m trapped. Time just inches forward regardless of what I do, and I can’t keep up anymore. I don’t want to sleep because I want time to pass by as slowly as possible, not swiftly like the way sleeping makes it.

Augh this was so long! I’m sorry if it was boring. There’s been a lot on and in my mind recently. Just my two cents. Or maybe twenty.