Suicide Note Interrupted by Laundry and Catholicism
I miss myself. It's weird, growing up and moving out and being independent. I haven't really felt like a person since I was 16. I was real in a way that mattered when I was stealing moments for myself, finding love and care in a cruel environment. The lifeline I found in microwave mac and cheese, in letting myself care about the child they made my responsibility (I was a child too. I forget that often.)
I feel like a person now. The small luxuries are the same in prison and poverty. The fear and struggle to figure out where I fit is the same. It's getting cold again and I can feel the ghost of every man that violated me. I can feel the shame of not even knowing their names. I was eighteen and scared and lonely and sometimes the only time I made sound was when they were fucking me. I couldn't even comprehend that it was wrong. I was too grateful that someone saw me, touched me, heard me, spoke to me. I stopped saying "no." I ignored the way I wasn't allowed to not want something. I don't know how to want things anymore.
I'm exhausted. I can't put this feeling anywhere but here. I can't associate this feeling with who I present myself as. I haven't written the note yet, but I've stopped caring about what happens after. I don't imagine death will be peaceful, I don't imagine I'll be happier. I know there will be consequences if I fail. It feels absurd, saving money so I can afford to die. The chemical cocktail has to be irreversible, and that means getting drugs that narcan can't touch. It means a lethal dose of every substance, so that a reversal of one doesn't touch the others. That an adrenaline shot to the heart only speeds up the effects.
And then there's the question of where. Certainly not anywhere it could be ruled a suicide, nowhere shocking. A place where someone would step over my body without a second thought. The best place to die is in the city, alone. God, but I don't want to die alone. I don't want to kill myself.
I miss who I was when I thought I wasn't real.
I took a break from that spiral and devolving mess to swap my laundry and stare at the website for a "local" benedictine nun cloister. I keep coming back to that website. I've kind of kept this part of me off of my blog because there's no reason to write about God. I don't want to turn people off of reading due to genuine religious mentions. I barely talk about it with my therapist, and he doesn't know the depth of it. My family knows I disappear at 6am sometimes and my mom knows I'm going to mass when I do that. I don't want this blog to be about Catholicism and my slow path to possible conversion, but I also want to talk about it right now. I want to talk about my disillusionment with what the Church is and the people that attend.
From everything that I've read and seen at mass and heard from priests, I fit in the Church because everyone does. When I went to OCIA, I was met with skepticism and scorn from the laypeople there. I like the dogma. I agree with a lot of it. I see kindness and love woven into the doctrine and teachings, and yet when I spoke of carrying narcan I was met with bafflement.
The Pope recently published Dilexi te, about poverty and inequality. I feel inexplicably called towards the Church. And yet, I feel so far away from Catholics. I resent their abandonment of those they claim to care for. I resent that they think prayer alone will help those who live on the streets. I resent the jokes they make about the man in the last pew taking a nap during Mass. I resent the way they look at me and see something that needs to be fixed, not because of my sins and the things I have been subjected to, but because of my short hair and the things I've had to do to survive. I'm deeply envious of their privileged lives, of the way they scoff at my burned and scarred arms, secure in the knowledge that their callouses are from keyboards and coffee mugs. I feel subhuman under their scrutiny.
And I am scared. I am terrified to admit that my major hang ups on devoting my life to God are as trivial as enjoying my vices. My barriers to conversion are essentially sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It feels impossible to let go of this idea of youth I've built in my head, even though I'm not living it. I take shots in my living room and lay down in bed to read gay werewolf fanfiction. I smoke weed to watch How It's Made on my couch. I enjoy talking shit about people I don't like. I'm also a lesbian, but asexual at that so it's really not much of an issue. I actually talked to a priest and he said it was fine and that he sees value in non-sexual gay relationships.
This has devolved to an insane level and I need to go to bed. I need to go perform personhood tomorrow and I need to stop haunting the dive bar (where I work) with my depression. I apologize for the incoherence tonight and hope you come back to read something I'm actually proud of. Leave a comment on the Guestbook on your way out, okay?