Chapter Text
I flop down on the firm, Victorian-patterned, scarlet bedspread. My stomach protests to the slap it receives until the memory foam begins to give beneath my weight. I sink into the bed and open the black composition notebook in front of me. The notebook is covered in pictures I printed, things that hold significance to me: role models adorn the front cover, a poem to my boyfriend I wrote on the back, a blue rose—my symbol, blossoming wisdom tinged with sorrow. When I lose heart in the battle I fight, I can always look at the strong faces of the women staring back at me, encouraging me to keep writing. With the book open, I click the bottom of the ballpoint pen, unsheathing my weapon of choice.
Words fly across the pages at a rate that cramps my hand. The pen dances in reckless abandon, wildly as though the preservation of life depended upon it, in spirals, and jumps, landing at the next sentence. Ink, still wet, smears its stain across the side of my hand, marking me with its blood, just as my own is reflected in its pages. They become saturated with ink, the sweat of cramped palms, and my own unedited shame. I choose ink for this very reason instead of charcoal; ink is permanent and unforgiving, forcing me to face the stream of consciousness that pours forth from my pen and cringe, to face that which is me.
The pain, which I reluctantly pour forth into the pages of my tattered journal, makes me wonder if this ritual is even worth the tears it elicits. It’s supposed to be therapeutic, or so I’ve heard. The practice is supposed to “clarify your thoughts and feelings, reduce stress, solve problems more effectively, and to know yourself.” This last part is true. I do this to better understand my own mindset. By tracking patterns and trends of my own behavior, perhaps I will uncover the path to recovery, at least that’s the belief I hold.
September 3, 2012
I decided to re-room with my freshman year roommate, but she’s seriously changed. She drinks and smokes more and more and has even gotten drunk in our room. I have spent several Friday nights babysitting her and making sure she and her friends didn’t get caught. I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand. What if she decides to hide her stash on my side? Who would they believe? The preppy girl or the goth girl? I came to college to study and learn, not be a counselor for other people’s problems. I have to think about what’s best for me.
“Are you mad at me?” Her eyes are bloodshot; she had just been caught with weed but managed to talk her way out of it. I hesitated longer than I should have. I took a deep breath; I had made my decision.
“I’m moving out.”
*********************
Suppression is the conscious exclusion of painful or difficult memories. It is because of this that I have a terrible relationship with my cousin. He was always considered to be the stereotypical “black sheep” of the family: flunked out of high school, dead-end job, even kicked out of the military. He is the reason I write poetry in my own blood across the pages of my journal—poems yelling, screaming to be read but never will be, never by its intended. Fear, sorrow, and rage painted on each leaflet of the tragedy of my childhood. This is not something that relentlessly gnaws away at me anymore, grinding my bones with molars of anxiety and uncertainty. Only once a particular phone call junior year with this particular individual was had, did my darkened mind allow the warmth of peaceful sunlight known as closure to pervade all corners.
“Everyone I try to get close to…it all ends in tears because intimacy terrifies me,” I sob. The words flow from my lips uninterrupted and unedited. Later, when I return to this conversation in memory, the words will have left me. Something else has taken the wheel and I am merely a passenger watching helplessly knowing there is nothing I can do to avert the possible car wreck we may drive into this night.
“You don’t know the pain you’ve caused me, the depression I’ve suffered, the isolation I endured, and the friends I lost because of it.”
“I’m really sorry, I know I screwed up, it was never supposed to happen,” he sighs. “But I don’t want you to live your life looking down the barrel of a gun.”
“I’ve thought about that too,” I admit.
“Don’t. Please,” he begs.
His apologies are sincere. He doesn’t shy away from the accusations I make. It is all so unexpected.
“I’ve played out this scenario thousands of times with a thousand different possible endings, all your responses being different. But I prepared myself for all of them: anger, indifference, laughing at my pain, cursing me, or just silence, but not this,” I say breathlessly. I have stopped digging a trench into the floor with my frantic pacing. “Regret. Sympathy. I thought there was nothing that I wasn’t ready for but you’ve managed to surprise me yet.”
“Maybe I’m not a complete screw up after all,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, perhaps you’re not.”
********************
Here I have returned, back to my old habits of suppression and a new set of problems requires the assistance of my journal. I have neglected it for so long that a layer of dust has collected on the top edge of the notebook, like mist over a lake. Every time I remove the journal, I look at it in dismay. Suppression is a bitch. The “I don’t wanna think about, if I don’t think about it will go away” mentality is what journaling was meant to cure, to force one to face problems head-on. To expose and erode our prejudiced thinking about given scenarios, that requires an open mind in order to see the solution.
March 15, 2014
I had another violent dream. This time I attacked a girl I had never met but she was arrogant. I pushed her against a balcony and almost killed her but then realized this and stopped. What is causing these violent thoughts?
“You keep saying that you don’t feel like yourself, and your mom and I have noticed that you haven’t been acting like yourself lately. You’re a lot angrier than usual.” My dad glanced at me from the driver’s seat. “I went through the same thing and my doctor told me that violent anger can be a common symptom of depression in men. He put me on happy pills and I’ve felt such a change in my mood, happier. Maybe we should take you to the doctor and you can tell her what you told me.”
I have suffered depression in the past, not the clinical kind, but the “shit happened, time to deal with it” kind. I suffer the condition of rage now, all the time, at everyone. Between constant school work bordering on obsession to get ahead, a boyfriend whom I’ve been with for seven years—five of those being long distance—and constantly moving…this Mount Vesuvius is ready to erupt. The top 5 stressors of living are the death of a loved one, divorce, major illness, job loss, and moving. I have made five major moves in my lifetime. Bring on the pills and let’s see what happens.
The journal stares blankly up at me, its pages white and pure and unabashed by the harshness of the world, my world. I feel sorry for soiling its pages with my filth, my anger, depression, and self-pity—it must shoulder part of the weight for me since I cannot bear the load of my cross by myself any longer.
I realize how necessary it is for me to write and analyze through poetry and prose the inner workings of my mind. All the great poets and playwrights did. Oscar Wilde in a play wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman is just such an author that proves in writing that journaling is necessary for mental health. Her short story The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman who is prescribed the rest cure (being bedridden without being able to read, write or get up—this was mostly used as a cure for women who were discouraged from thinking too hard or they would pass out, which happened frequently.) She is barred from leaving the house or writing in her journal. Out of boredom, she slowly begins losing her mind and fixates on the ugly yellow wallpaper in the room until she believes she is a part of the paper itself. This is a partly autobiographical story since the rest cure caused Gilman much mental anguish until she refused the treatment and wrote this story. Therapeutic indeed.
If not for the sanctity of my journal, I too would crawl around the borders of my room, with my mind fractured like a stone thrown at a windshield, but instead of yellow wallpaper, red walls soaked in sorrow and guilt. This constant writing habit also helps form my writing style. It is said that to become a better writer, one should write every day no matter what the content or the method of writing. Journaling is one particularly popular method employed by writers, and since I want to be a creative writer when I graduate what better way to prepare than prewriting through my journal?
My right hand has grown rusty as I write cliché words on the fresh page of my journal. The words no longer flow with the fluidity as they once did; I am out of practice with so much on my plate to do. The constant stream of homework has stifled my creativity. The times I have opened the second drawer to retrieve my little notebook only to think, “I could be getting such-and-such done instead; is it really worth writing this right now?” And so I replace the journal and close the drawer with a thump that echoes the drop of another complaint or sorrow in the cliché bottle that is slowly filling up. Sometimes ranting is the best way to get something out of your system but through suppression, it sits stewing in its own putrid juices until it begins bubbling over the bile of hatred and anger that inevitably ends up lashing out at other people.
When I journal, my mood is much more positive and reflects that when I interact with others. But when I am too busy to journal, or too tired to relive all my complaints and concerns into the journal, they bounce around in my head and slip out in interactions with people.
This most recent spring break, my father was driving me home when he said he wanted to talk to me about something. “Your mom and I have noticed that you aren’t happy; this last year we’ve seen a drastic change in your behavior and how your outlook on life isn’t what it should be either.” With concern in his eyes, he recommended a doctor’s visit to inquire about possibly putting me on drugs to “re-establish the balance of chemicals in the brain” or something to that extent. Unlike some, I was actually pleased to hear this. Perhaps in conjunction with journaling more regularly I might achieve some much needed inner peace as I did in junior year of high school.
So I turn up the music louder in the confines of my room as the words “Oh, how I wish for soothing rain/oh, how I wish to dream again,/my loving heart lost in the dark,/for hope I’d give my everything” cycle around again. I listen in silence to Nightwish’s “Nemo,” as I sit cross-legged on the bed with my eyes closed dreaming up the words and feelings I will hemorrhage onto the page from my swollen veins. The plague of each criticism made by a friend, each failed test, each moment I’m outshone builds up to dangerous levels. Each artery aches for the release of this clot as it threatens to cause a heart attack to the rest of the body. And so I dissect and, using my pen as a leech, bleed myself of all the pain. After several moments of feverish writing, hand cramped, I click-click the pen’s bottom, again sheathing it for another day.