Noir

I have slid back into the pit. It's sad how this happens. Unexpected, slippery, mean. I forget sometimes how near I live to the precipice until I fall in, and then the battle starts over again. Depression is not a party game. I liken it to poison that spreads through my body and makes it difficult for me to breathe.

I went to New York last week with my friend Nalini, who was excited to share an adventure with me and to encourage me to take care of myself. What's not to enjoy? But somehow, I ended up sad to the last fiber of my body, tears pouring down my face, wanting to die, sitting in the center of Times Square just before midnight. It's amazing how being in the middle of people can make me feel like such a non-human.

I was reading Von's post over at Lost Daughters today, and was immediately struck by this sentence:
"Adoptees too may not always understand the triggers and as most of you can state from your own experience, they arrive unbidden, unexpectedly and unsurprisingly when we sometimes least expect it or are prepared for it."

I couldn't have said it better myself. I should have been enjoying myself, with a dear friend, and yet I was a complete mess. [I did manage to love The Book of Mormon, which cheered me up no end. Thanks, Trey and Matt. Now if only I could learn to do the following.]

What is going on with me? Rationally, I look at my life and I have done very well for myself--on the surface. But there is still that massive black hole called depression: yes, it has a genetic component, and yes, adoption is hellaciously involved in its exacerbations. Then another friend tells me that it's because I've educated myself within an inch of my life and carry those scars with me, too. You don't survive graduate school at Berkeley with its beatings and not have damage. Moreover, no one wants to hear me babble on about literature and art. Well, pretty much nobody. I could tease out a thousand reasons why things suck. And still it just hurts. Maybe it's the Topamax talking. It does cause suicidal thoughts in 1 in 500 people. That would be my luck.

So I have been curled up in the fetal position for about four days, wondering why I was ever born, wishing I hadn't been, and thinking it's all been a huge fucking cosmic mistake. The world would have been a better place without me: my mother would have been happier, I would have been happier not to bear the burden of eternal rejection, etc. Of course, my friends and family feel insulted when I speak this way, but there is no rationality in madness. It just is. I can fake things for a while, and then it all becomes too much of an act. It's hard work to pretend to be happy. And no, I don't want my cross in life to be bearing the burden of rejection. It fucking sucks. It doesn't make me a better person to "rise above" it. I am tired. Wake me up when there's a pill that helps make you impervious to rejection.

One more thing before I resume the fetal position: over at FMF, someone wrote in the comments that "on a [rejection] scale of one to ten I rate the experience of being given up for adoption a fifteen." I wholeheartedly concur.