I’m clumsy.

If you get to know me, you’ll quickly learn I’m clumsy.

The truth is, though, that I’m not.

People who cut as a means of self-harm always seem strange to me. Of course that’s a cry for help. It’s both obvious and ineffectual. If you want to hurt yourself, just be careless. Just be clumsy.

I really thought I was doing much better, but as I find myself working with tools and I let a tool drag it’s way across the back of my hand, leaving a shallow furrow cut across my fingers, I realize that it’s not clumsiness. It’s deliberate. It’s an injury that will become nearly invisible to those around me once I say, “You know me – clumsy!”

I’d really like to tell myself that I am doing better and that these minor acts of careless injury are just a habit I need to break, but there’s acts that are more… deliberate.

My wife has mentioned the frequent bruises that show up between my knee and my hip enough times that I worry she’s on to me, so today I took a spraypaint can and pummeled my ribcage instead. Maybe it’ll hurt more and bruise less?

That’s… That’s not the actions of someone who has recovered from depression. That’s not how someone who is healthily coping with depression acts.

But I talk to my mental health professional and I say I’m doing fine because I don’t have any actionable plan in place to kill myself, so that really is an improvement.

I want to be better, but I don’t know how.

I want to be the man my wife deserves.

My son is a year old now, and I want to be the father he deserves.

That voice, though, the one my mental health professional calls my self-talk, keeps telling me that, in the long run, they’d be better off without me, that their memories of me would be of a better person than I could ever be, and that if I’m clumsy enough they’d never even know it wasn’t an accident…