life is better with friends (2)

"I wish you could just feel what I feel for a moment, so you could know what I'm going through."
"I'm not sure you understood, but as I said, I know what you mean. I feel this same way as you -sometimes -, and I understand."
"Yeah."
(Silence)
"I mean, obviously you don't believe me, but it's the truth."
"It's not that I don't believe you. But you're a functional human being. I am not. Since I was a child. I've never had someone to talk to, I've never had someone that I could trust, I've never had a family member who didn't attack me, I was never able to go to school or do Uni work for long before I felt the need to stab my eyes out, ... I just have a storm in my head and my body is so weak and I feel like this is nowhere in the realm of just being unwell, it's more like I have a brain tumor or something, and it can go on for weeks and I can't do anything against it and it's always been that way and I just sort of learned how to deal with it. It's not that I don't believe you, just I have this experience and yeah ... you wouldn't know what it feels like."

Ironic, don't you think, that I told you just yesterday about this paradoxical problem I have that people don't believe me my pain because I am too happy a person. Your answer to that was something like: "Yeah, you seem like a pretty happy person. Of course that doesn't mean that you don't feel unwell sometimes but, you know? You seem very happy, when you're happy." Pretty much ignoring the essence of what I said.

And I almost opened up to you - I showed you songs that make people who listen to music understand, or at least think, if they want to - I tried to explain - I listened to you, I asked, I was there, I held you, I never, ever, once questioned your pain or demanded something that "come on, isn't that hard, even if you feel bad" - I tried to be quiet in the right moments and I tried to say stuff that was helpful, maybe it wasn't - but I was there, and I listened, I listened to you, and I believed you, and I accepted everything you said.

I tried to explain, but you never really listened to me, I think. What you probably thought was something like: Cute, that 21-year-old, trying to emphasize with my depression, thinks she can relate because she feels sad sometimes. Obviously doesn't have remotely the same problems as me, has a mom who loves her, studies successfully, laughs all the time, has her shit together, has dreams, knows what she wants to do - sort of. Obviously can't know what I'm feeling, isn't on the same level of misery.

This is something I very deeply and thoroughly understood and embraced. Never fucking ever tell a person that their pain is less, compared to yours. That it's bearable, compared to your own. You have no idea. You can't know.  Even if you think: Come on, I'm crying about my failed bachelor thesis and they are crying about the fact that they need to go and buy bread in the supermarket - you have no idea what it feels like to them to go and buy bread in the supermarket. And in your case, Liam, in this case, it's not even like that. Imagine you would have told me what you told me and my reaction would have been: "Ohhh, cute, you're sad again. It will be fine." Imagine the way that would have made you feel. If you had ever listened, if you had ever tried to understand my sadness like I tried to understand yours, if you had ever asked questions about my eating disorder or my parents or Zac or my friends or my way of coping, you would maybe have heard something like this:

"Unlike you, I have the same feelings again and again, they recur in intervals of some weeks, or some months, if I'm lucky, and if the circumstances are good - even though, I can never be sure, and I am so glad if I have a year of relative normality and happiness without weeks inbetween that make it hard to exist. There are shades of sadness and anger and fear, and they all feel different.

My anger focusses all my energy on one tiny little ball of hate for everything and everyone, makes me wanna throw up, makes me wanna run or exercise ("You're so healthy!") until I'm finally exhausted enough to throw up, makes me stay up and stare at the ceiling until my eyes feel like they are going to pop out ("Oh, you didn't sleep well?"), makes me hold my breath until my lungs want to burst, makes me deaf and numb ("You're sort of dreamy today"), makes my head scream and lets a storm loose in my head that is too loud for me to think clearly.
My other anger makes me walk very, very slowly because otherwise I think I will fall into pieces ("I can't walk fast if I'm sad. You know, I mean, really sad [not like you]"), makes me turn into stone on the outside until I actually start to crumble on the inside, makes it hard to breathe and to answer people who ask the easiest questions, gives me a throbbing headache, makes me hurt myself, hit my head on the wall, pinch my skin until it burns and bleeds, scratch my arms open, pull out my hair, punch my hip bones, not eat until I feel light enough to disappear.
My sadness makes me cautious because everytime I am breathing out I'm afraid it could turn into sobbing. My sadness makes me feel so vulnerable and fragile as if I was just born, and so tired and old as if I had already lived a hundred lives. It makes me question everything, it makes my head and my heart and my soul empty, it makes me avoid mirrors, it makes me feel like an open wound, it hurts in my stomach and my head and my heart and my fingers, with my sadness I know that I am alone, alone forever, and there will never be anyone, anywhere, ever, who is going to listen and understand at the same time.
My other sadness is related to concrete things, mostly to things that end. It just makes me cry at every single little opportunity, and it doesn't go away for weeks, and all I can do is function in the day and lie in my bed at night and cry all the tears I held back in Uni and work and around my friends, tears that increased and increased from my stomach to my chest to my throat to my head, until there was probably fish swimming in all that saltwater, cry until I am absolutely empty and finally fall asleep with the feeling that I will never have a single emotion ever again, and wake up in the morning feeling as empty, drained, and unable to move until I command myself to, as if all I was was a machine with a conscious self.
My fear keeps me from organizing the easiest things, from looking at my WhatsApp messages because they make me anxious, makes my mind spin in endless circles of senseless discussions with itself and fights of what seems like ten personalities inside me, which is exhausting to the core, makes me wanna sit under a table and screw my eyes shut and cover my ears with my hands and rock back and forth until someone comes and puts me in a deep, dark container of blankets and carelessness.
My other fear turns up whenever I am happy and enjoying myself. "You will die someday", it whispers, and I freeze and as lame as this might sound, but the thought of death terrifies me so much that I stop breathing and my heart skips a beat, and whenever I allow myself to think about it for more than ten seconds thoroughly, I get a panic attack and I hyperventilate and my mom has to take me to the hospital where they tell me that I probably have some sort of stress, but nothing serious.

These are just my feelings. I am not going to try to relate them to actual events in my life, or make people around me responsible for one thing or the other, because I have always been very bad at being a convincing judge, I have always scrutinized myself a thousand times more than anyone else, simply because I spend most time in my own head.
The only thing I know for sure is that there has never been a person that has listened to all this and accepted it. The only thing I know for sure is that I keep believing that at some point, someone will have the courage and patience and understanding to do this, and everytime I believe in someone and instead of understanding all this, they say or do something that puts shattered glass in my mouth and stones in my stomach - because either they listen, but they have no idea what I am saying, and they turn it into shit, or they understand, but they are too busy comparing what I am saying to themselves and are too absorbed in their own issues to take mine serious and actually relate to it -, some part of me dies and walks away and I keep constructing and deconstructing my shell. The only thing I know for sure is that I've always been alone and I always will be."