So Sad Today: Personal Essays

I wake up scared and I'm scared all day. I'm scared of being scared. Scared of "losing it". Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home - that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.

There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.

I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?

But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?

I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I have always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue – a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn’t someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn’t someone have said, “Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it,” so I didn’t have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says ‘I’m alive and it’s real’. It says, 'I’m going to die, and it’s real.

I am a superficial woman of depth.

Just saw two ants drown together in my bathtub and it reminded me of us: a love story.

I'm in love with you and you don't want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.

I'm always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.

What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can't it just become something else?

I am giving you permission to tell the truth about where you are in your process of dismantling your fucked-up schemas. I am not pressuring you to dismantle anything. I am saying let’s be here together, undismantled, and just accept that this is where we are. Let’s love each other right where we are, even as we compare ourselves to one another. I am saying, yes, baby, I know it’s hard.

Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.

I feel bad about my struggle, because it is nothing compared to other people’s struggles and yet it still hurts.

Let's pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.

For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet you anxiety.

When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It's like, "Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let's start by getting into imaginary fights with people from the past. Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have—and everything you should be scared of losing. Let's begin!

In this moment I resolve to kiss my husband with an open mouth forever. I want to freeze him the way I see him in this instant: dark eyebrows, sexy, sleepy hair and sleepy eyes. But we can't freeze the way that we see the people we love, as much as we would wish. I know that I will kiss my husband with a closed mouth again, at some point. I know that I will even kiss him with a closed heart. I pray for our love. I pray that even if I kiss my husband with a closed heart, my heart opens again to him. When I desire my husband. I am grateful to desire my husband. What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.

I think it’s time for you to drop back into my life, ruin it, then disappear again: a love story. The

We're going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head: a love story

In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.

An external attribution exists to make you feel less shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your fault.

What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness -- to transcend myself and my human imperfections -- but this has yet to happen.

Definitely thought I was a lesbian until we dated and then I thought I might just be asexual, or not asexual, actually, but even more deeply fucked up than I ever knew: a love story.

I guess you aren't going to rescue me from my life: a love story.

I feel like my life has a lot of caves and they are all filled with your hair: a love story.

Validation is my main bitch.

Text me back: a love story.

Our single friends say they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives and we tell them they are crazy. We tell them they are definitely going to find someone. But how do we know? We know nothing.

Maybe we do better when we see each other simply as beloveds.