wasn't meant to

My boyfriend is done with pumping gas into the tank, so he goes out to pay for it and I’m left sitting alone in the car for a little too long. There are certain days when the most absurd, minute details suddenly assume the power to start a spiral. Most often when he drives me somewhere in his car, the tank is full and I can pretend like every material thing around me just happens to exist, like it hasn’t been laboured for by someone. Then there are the weird moments when you have to pull over and spend a lot of money on a strange liquid that keeps the car going, and you’re reminded that nothing is really for free.

Currently, I do almost no paid work; all my time can be spent on studying and exploring what I truly love, which is unbelievably wonderful but also very strange. As many of my friends seem perpetually unable to have the time for a social life and unbelievably work-loaded, I’m often reminded that my life was not meant to be what it is. I should’ve worked hard for everything that I have, and yet I didn’t. I got lucky with a loving family with which I can still live, a country where going to college won’t make me bankrupt, and countless other things. I’m so happy right now that I get guilty over it; is that how it’s meant to be? Being well under these conditions seems like a state so artificial that it can fall apart anytime, like a construction made out of thin glass.

Some days earlier, I stand outside a bar, smoking with some people I’ve just met. One guy seems unable to stop himself from lighting up the next cigarette or talking bullshit. After he’s content with what little interesting things he could say about Sartre, he pulls out the heavy stuff and mentions the cheating ex and dead dad. The topic then transitions to the epic highs and lows of modern psychiatry and even though I don’t want to, I somehow mention that I’m currently on medication; there you go. I’m not sure why he seems like such an annoying person to me– is it because he can’t shut up, because he makes me realise how cruelly I think of someone who has a dead dad, or because he somehow makes me want to re-enter the trauma race I thought I’d left behind?

In my self-perception, I oscillate between an honest person, finally unafraid to talk about how I really feel, and a clown, dancing on stage. Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself; maybe I’m pretending like whoring for attention is bravery. Paradoxically, ever since I’m on SNRIs, I feel almost no desire to make depression a central part of my personality. And yet, it still creeps up sometimes. Well, I am happy. The visceral honesty of that statement doesn’t eliminate the need to remind myself of it out loud. Ha-ppy. Its truthfulness gets dimmed down sometimes, like a lamp light choked up by the cover of a blanket. 

Winter afternoons, when I come home on a bus and watch the dug-up road through a dusk grayness, I sometimes feel the sudden need to bring back into my life the pain, and with it– the truth. I could self-harm, I could leave the people I love, I could not eat or sleep. More often, I begin to imagine my loved ones dead. These are, no doubt, the most horrifying thoughts that could’ve ever been present in my head, and yet I can’t stop. Somehow, the pain comes with legitimization. Happy isn’t how I was meant to live; this is an artificial state that can be demolished anytime, revealing the true, hellish foundation life is built on. The deceitfulness of being happy lies, in my head, upon the fact that it is so fragile. It depends on such absurd details as whether the sun is shining or whether I remembered to each morning place a small pill in my mouth and then swallow it down with water (I didn’t). I wasn’t meant to live like this. Could I really escape it? The truth will reveal itself eventually, either when something horrific happens to me or when I simply forget to take my medication for a few days. These sudden moments are not intense, sharp realisations; they feel more like slow, profound discoveries. The pain is not like being stabbed with something sharp, but rather like a migraine situated somewhere deep inside your head, revealing something you’ve always had inside of you. It’s a slow, calm walk in the cold, when you realise that what you thought you’d outrun will appear from behind the corner within seconds; it’s inevitable, it’s the standard mode of life, it will always happen, again and again and again.