Pieces of my mind tumble down around me, shattered shards spiralling like the aftermath of an explosion. Total decompensation, like the bursting of a balloon. Too much pressure to bear. Too much force against an already fragile mind. Now I'm trapped inside this shell, as if my soul just burst and the pieces flew away. A shadow of myself, my potential dissolved with the last fragments of my tormented being. Too weak to even lift my head.
I tried. I tried so hard. But nobody understands. The lure of that release, the need to escape, it overwhelms you, wraps itself tightly around all that is you, and doesn't let go. It rips away all that you love, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but never, ever ceasing. An avalanche, or a glacier, wending its way down a mountainside. Ma was watching that Netflix film the other day, what was it called? Hillbilly Elegy, that was it. She pointed at the screen, looked at me and said “That will be you. Mark my words. You're almost there already. Hillbilly Elegy, starring my one and only daughter as she spirals out of control. The bottle will be the death of you.”
I wonder if she knows how much her words hurt. The negativity, the judgement. Always feeling as if I was never good enough. Never up to her standards. I would never achieve the leaping heights of academia like my brother. We are wired differently. He, the studious and disciplined intellectual type, while I, the imaginative, but somewhat disorganised creative type. Equally intelligent, yet wildly different in our expression of that intelligence. Why couldn't she accept that? Perhaps her own perceptions of failing in school fuelled her desire to see us achieve what she did not. I don't know. But I do know that her insatiable need for success was a leap I could not make. Her definition of success was not, is not, and never will be mine.
Now I am safe. Safe inside the featureless box where they take away your control for your own protection. What is safety anyway? My world is reduced to a single, windowless room until they deem me safe to be unleashed upon the world again. I am not safe in the world, or the world is not safe for me? Or perhaps both?
A fly butts against the door, over and over, it too trapped inside this prison-that's-not-a-prison. The tap-tap-tap of its frenzied escape plot the only sound in this abyss of dull grey nothingness. All I can do is stare at the ceiling and wait as the tendrils of that desperate need work their way around me, through me, out of me. All I can do is wait and hope that the tormented fragments of my mind will reacquaint themselves into some sort of functional order.
All I can do is wait.
