Gaping Heart

When I was still in university, I remember feeling this unexplainable hollowness right above where my heart would be. The last year of scrambling through assignments and seminars was one of the most difficult time periods of my life, with my health collapsing while the work pile on my desk only grew higher. And the strange emptiness did nothing but add onto the already agonizing existence. 

Something I thought about a lot at the time was “why do I feel so awful every day, all the time?”. I couldn’t explain it to myself in any way, I couldn’t do anything to make it better. I wrote a lot of journal entries during my last year in university, but even that didn’t help me understand myself any better. There was nothing I could do apart from just keep going and trying to make it through to the end of the semester. That task alone proved to be a lot more difficult that I could have imagined. So difficult, in fact, that I nothing but failed at it. 

I was 21 and didn’t have my BPD diagnosis yet. Thinking back on that year now fills me with sadness and regret — sadness of letting go of the future I had desperately tried to build for myself, and regret for lettings things get to the point where I was pushing myself so much that eventually there was nothing left of me to spare for anything or anyone. Endless nights spent crying, playing with blades, and writing journal entries, out of which only the second one did anything to help me feel better. 

And I just did not know what the fuck was wrong with me. I knew nothing but the immense pain I was feeling deep within my core, my heart, my soul. It was like there was a piece missing there, something that had once inhabited my being, but has been long gone for way longer than I could remember.

But it should have been obvious to me. Making connections like that in my head at the time was just not an option, I guess. 

It was always the Kid who made me feel awful whenever I would think about her. Going through old photographs, manga paperbacks I had bought with my weekly allowance…that was when the pain right above my heart would grow the biggest, almost suffocating me with the pressure it was applying onto my lungs and ribs. Looking around my tiny room in the commune apartment I was living in with my best friend and seeing all the plastic anime girl figures on my windowsill made me choke up with tears. And still, I didn’t get it. Still, I didn’t see the reason, even though it was staring at me right in the face. 

I truly feel like I have lost the person i was supposed to become. That Kid was never given the chance to grow up, to find themself, to pick up a path that was just for them. Instead of learning who I was, I was forced to create a completely new persona, against my own will, against my own actions. I was not in control of that creative process, which is maybe why I resent it so much. As an artist, I want to be in charge of the things I make. But this one, the most important creation? I was not even asked for any feedback. The final product was untidy, with uneven seams, with conflicting color palettes, with too loose and too tight stitches all across the fabrics. And that was all I have had to work with since then.

My heart aches for the loss of the little child every single day. It knows this is not the way things were supposed to be, supposed to go, but it feels lost in its lack of ability to do anything to fix the problem, to fill the hole. There’s nothing to fill it with, and I am only given the option to cope, as always. 

We all have our inner child versions living inside of us. But for the longest time, I have felt like the only remnant of that child is her shadowy figure burnt into the arteries leading to the chambers of my heart. 

And how do you console a Kid who is not here, not there, not anywhere, at all?

Patching up,

ichigonya