On a Life Un-lived

I honestly don’t know how to keep … being here … doing this … this life has been so fucking miserable. I’m tired of the lonely, of the empty, of feeling like there is nothing here for me. I have always done the holding, as far back as I remember, it was my role to take care of others. I did it well. In the small town I grew up in, people knew me as ‘the girl with her head screwed on’. Nobody saw what was underneath – the mess, the despair, the deepest exhaustion. Nobody knew I sliced into my skin for years as a teenager, or that I couldn’t stop myself from eating until I was ill. I was a good girl. I never went to parties, or had a toxic teen romance. I worked twenty hours a week and had perfect attendance at school. I helped my mother pay the rent. I bought my own school lunches. I didn’t have the option to fall apart, so I took care of everything. My mother, my friends, my job. I never expected someone to fix me. I did all the things right … I did all the things right.

And now, I look around at my life, and I am deadened by what I find here, how I find myself to be. Hopeless. Exhausted. Alone. Empty. Desperately longing to feel differently, to start over, to make my world look like that of others. And yet, so discouraged from even trying to do so. Because I am too tired. Because I don’t see the point. Because, at my very, I don’t want this life. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to fight so hard. I don’t want to ache like this, every fucking day for the next however many years. I never got the chance to live a normal life. I haven’t been able to do what people do – become a person, fall in love, go to parties and enjoy being there, be held without my body and mind collapsing into a state of terror and exhaustion. All that I’ve done, all of this time, is survive (and hold the pain of others – help them survive). All that I’ve done is scrape by because I’m not brave enough to end it. I don’t want this life. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t know how to fix myself. I don’t know where to go or how to be or what to do in this world. I don’t know what the point is of any of this. I don’t know why I’m still trying.