Marry The Empty
Over the years, I have gotten relatively used to feeling the way I do. I was 17 years old when I was first diagnosed with depression, and 20 years old when I got the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. It has also already been three years since I was diagnosed with BPD, my main diagnosis to this day. Time has gone on, a lot of things have changed – some for the better and some for the worse – and I have grown sort of numb to a lot of it.
The feeling of slowly accepting your fate as a chronically ill and depressed person is a tragic outcome. It does not mean that you don’t try your best to make things better for yourself, but it is to become painfully aware of how much you have lost in your life to mental illness, and how there isn’t really anything you can do to get what you have lost back for good. It is to acknowledge the fact that the damage has been done, and now the only thing left for you to do is to make the most out of what you still have left.
bride of depression.
Depression itself has eaten a huge chunk of my lived life. So much I could have been doing, could still be doing, if only I hadn’t become chronically depressed due to all the abuse I faced as a Kid. Watching the people around you move along and start new chapters of their lives, while you remain stagnant, in a puddle of your own tears, without anything or anybody helping you back on your feet… it is a feeling so lonesome and isolating I wouldn’t want anybody to know how it feels like.
Trauma and the memory loss it has caused me has changed my perception of time, myself as a person, and the world as a whole. I struggle to remember what my girlfriend said to me just 15 minutes ago, while my brain keeps on replaying the memories I wish someone would vacuum out of my tormented head. Why can’t I seem to be able to remember anything positive, anything that would make me feel better and like there was actually a point to this existence, but instead my brain is going on a forever loop of assaults and attacks? It eats you alive; that is the only way I can describe it to you.
Borderline personality disorder and its chronic feeling of emptiness is what has led me to filling up the void with different addictions and unhealthy coping mechanisms. It has tortured my soul since I was a teenager who was desperately trying to cling onto anything that made them feel other than unfiltered Pain, eventually basing their entire personality on that one thing. Feeling an empty hole in my soul has driven me such desperation that the only way out has seemed to be to leave this entire world behind.
Creating art and this project as a whole has been able to change some of these mindsets I’ve had for several years of my life. Back when I was still in university and feeling overwhelmed under the immense pressure of academia and my unwavering perfectionism, the notion of there being a time where I would find some type of comfort or at least peace seemed completely utopian to me. But drawing, illustrating my lived experiences with childhood trauma, bullying, and mental illness has given me some form of a purpose in this life, I feel. That no matter how much everything hurts, at least I have the privilege of being able to share the hurt with others who know it all too well too. The sense camaraderie is an unusual one for me, someone who has been ostracized from every single community I’d been supposed to be part of.
And as strange as it feels to say this, I feel like there is a part of me that is finding some kind of solace or empowerment in being able to turn all of my suffering into something good. Not that I feel like I have achieved what I want to at this point of time, but maybe this road is slowly taking me to that direction, if you know what I mean. There is nothing to romanticize in what I had to go through as a child, and if I could, I would take it all way from that little Kid. But maybe today’s me has been able to take some of that suffering of hers and make something out of it.
And I feel like that is as poetic of an ending to this CHAPTER; a sense of fulfillment in something so empty and void of anything.
Burning holes in the road,
ichigonya
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