when sleeping at last said "I want to love you but I don't know how" and when bojack horseman said "I do love you, by the way. I mean as much as I'm capable of loving anyone. which is never enough" and when william faulkner said "perhaps they were right putting love into books. perhaps it could not live anywhere else" and when lorde said "my mother's love is choking me" and when siken said "if you love me, henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand" and when maggie stiefvater said "need was adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. love was a privilege" and when benjamin alire sáenz said "but love was always something heavy for me. something I had to carry"

You cannot live alone on the fantasies you feed to your mind, eventually you have to touch your life for real, assess and analyze your habits, understand your character, try not to hate yourself for your character as it was shaped when you were very young by circumstances outside of you, and begin learning how to cope with your character, how to build habits that work for you, finish small projects, finish big projects, expose yourself to more uncomfortable situations, assess why you want to leave that friendship before you leave it, raise your anxiety levels on purpose, so that you can grow, raise your work load on purpose, so that you can grow, so that you can build resilience, so that your life expands, and can be experienced by you in full and in reality

when benjamin alire sáenz said “but love was always something heavy for me. something i had to carry” and when phoebe waller bridge said “i think you know how to love better than any of us. that’s why you find it all so painful” and when richard siken said “here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed”

Perfectly explains it! 💯

What does heroin feel like?

Some people believe the afterlife or Heaven or whatever you want to call it is whatever you imagine it to be. Something like an endless and infinite lucid dream. I believe that’s what heroin is to people. It’s whatever you want it to be. It can be your lover or your enemy. It can be your Heaven or your Hell, your God or your Devil. When people hear about my past, the things I’ve done...the ones that never been in that world, at the edge of the world, the place where death holds your hand until it’s cold as ice: they always want to know one thing. They all ask the same question. “What did the high feel like?”. The fact that no one ever asks what the withdrawal is like shows that people really think addiction is a choice or people are just choosing over and over again to get high. Well, you know what the high is. Whatever you want it to be. Let me tell you about the withdrawal. It’s like being aboard a space ship that is running out of air supply and you know you only have 12 hours to live and right when you’re about to die, literally right at the end when you have your last breath, out of no-where the oxygen begins to flow again and you’re fine. Then the next day it happens again and then the next day and so on and so forth. To be on heroin is always knowing your inevitable demise within hours and then at the last second being saved. It is nothingness in waiting and all time is on a borrowed watch from a character in a lost dream you once had. The only way to escape is to let yourself die. That’s how the brain perceives it. So no it’s not like hitting a joint kind of high. It’s entering the realms of nothingness. For the first few times it’s whatever you want it to be to leave Earth. You can feel euphoric and free and loved until you can’t come back. Then you’re just lost in orbit. The oxygen begins run out, and you’re stuck. The only way to come back to Earth is to let yourself die.

It's been happening more and more often lately. Those creepy moments when I was looking into the mirror and didn't recognize my own reflection. Small changes in my face, my eyes, the way I was staring at myself. It just wasn't something I was expecting to see.

I got used to it, eventually.

Today I looked into the mirror just to realize the reflection I didn't recognize will never go away anymore. That it's different because I'm different. I knew that the happy, cool, strong, brave, lovely and funny person I remember being before my relapse 3 years ago, the person I've tried so hard to become once again in my sober life, the person I fought for, is gone for good. That I lost her somewhere along the way in the battle with drugs, relapses, needles, desperation, excuses, efforts and failures. That she had to die, because she wouldn't stand becoming this broken mess whose face and eyes are now my own.

Not recognizing yourself is creepy and scary.

But realizing and accepting why you'll never be able to see yourself again as you remember is just... devastating.

From Calvary (1920) W.B. Yeats.

No one will ever read this,

but it’s good advice:

When my brother was in his third round of rehab, and I was old enough to realize what addiction had done to him mentally, he did a project for his treatment and it’s stuck with me all this time. They told him, “write your will, write your suicide note, get ready to be dead.” He did as they told him. My brother went from practicing tying nooses to fighting everyday. Fighting addiction and depression and himself. I think it’s so powerful to have to prepare for the life everyone else lives because it shows how you are not alone. My brother, who thought he was alone, wrote his note to me. I don’t remember how old I was, and I doubt it matters. But I remember why he chose me and why he still is alive. 

If you’re struggling with suicide. Try writing a will. Try writing that last letter. But make sure you know why you’re doing it:

It’s not about everything that’s gone wrong, it’s the little things that will never be again. It’s about never feel the hot asphalt under your feet in the summer or the smell of a rose blooming by your door. It’s about the last sunset you see as gaze out your window holding a knife to your wrist. It’s about the time you treated yourself to a good dinner because you were tired peanut butter and jellies. 

Don’t write a note to be hateful. Write to love. Find what there is left for you and live for that. 

“I know you’re not allowed to say it….but drugs are kinda cool….I mean, they’re cool before they wreck your soul, and your life…and your family.”

- Euphoria (2019-)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 1992

I don’t feel real anymore, I am hollow, looking in the mirror and I see straight through myself. I open the curtains, I look up at the sky and I feel nothing. This is how I knew that after he touched me, I grew stale, I grew numb. I stand over my grave and grieve my body. I was buried alive and I kept on living. I kept on living when all I wanted to do was sink into the bathtub and never be seen again.

— Hannah Green, from “Where Has The Girl Gone.”

9:18 am

I looked at myself in the mirror today

and I wasn't real anymore.

This time it didn't even take me hours to loose existence

I went with a puff

like I never existed.

Did I really exist?

Or was I just another phantom?

“Trauma permanently changes us. This is the frightening truth about betrayal. You never really get over it. At best, you grieve and make some kind of peace with it. But a major life disruption leaves a new normal behind. There’s no going back to who you were before.”

— Unknown

“so you’re saying you’re going to quit it just because you hate it? okay, cool. that’s a good reason to start with. you can hate what it does to your body, your mind, how tired you are without having it in your blood, or whatever. these are all good things to hate. but! let’s talk about something else. let’s talk about how it makes you feel when you register. how everything is suddenly okay when you have enough drugs to keep you functional. let’s talk about how calm these days can be. how do you feel about that? maybe we should stop trying to quit it for how we hate it, because we don’t. we don’t hate it while we’re on drugs, we only hate it when we’re not on them.

don’t try to leave your addiction behind as it was your enemy. try to leave it like your loved one, because some part of you loves it. you’ll go slowly at first, turning back to it, because oh, you will miss it, and it will miss you. it will call you back. it won’t stop. what you have to do is not listening to it. move on. eventually, you’ll fall in love with your life. with lots of other things, too. just never give in to the sweet call of your old love. you’ll never truly forget it anyway.

- someone who answered the call

there is a point in your depression where you just give up on getting better but you still won’t kill yourself. you just float around in this state of nothingness and don’t notice anything around you because you’re just so numb and you just don’t want to do anything about it anymore

To my dearest love Caroline♡

I become completely numb,

So careless towards everything,

Who am I? What have I done?

Can’t believe I lost control; over everything including my soul,

I gave up everything for you,

Sold my soul, took a toll,

Broke my heart in two, you bought me so low, only if you knew.

So ashamed of the choices I made all for you, the people I met. The things you made me do,

To be completely honest, I am in love with you, it is getting to be too much, the high you give me, the feeling of your touch, the ecstasy rush. Oh my love Caroline...

You will never know how far I would go just to feel you again & again.

You cure my deepest sorrows but leave me sick, hopeless, empty within; worse then I was before,

Being alive feels like a chore,

Now a days I only look forward for tomorrow, so I can feel you again.

So you can heal me again,

I feel like I hit rock bottom but it’s bottomless, crawling my way back to the top just to get thrown back down, all for what? All for this? A tiny fix. So what is the use? I feel like I live for the suffering, the abuse because it is all I’ve known.

I keep myself stuck in this vicious cycle because I’m too comfortable with being numb but baby, I am sick & tired, I’m tired of hating me & loving you.

It is turning me resentful & unlovable, so I have to let you go, I want to feel love & give love.

I am not the same person I was before, knowing that kills me to my core. I have to let you go before death comes knocking at my door.

So goodbye my Caroline...

Actually your name is Heroin.

The most painful kind of loss and grieve for anyone to cope with

Today I finally took the step that took me years and I accepted the abuse I suffered from my mother during my entire life.

I forced myself throughout the years to believe that she loved me. She only had hard childhood and it wasn't easy for her to be kind or sweet. I justified it.

Every memory of me with her, now I know it, I romantized it.

And today that I finally accepted it and looked back to all of those fantasy memories, I'm grieving a terrible loss.

It's not like I lost my mom and get to keep all the happy memories with me.

Nor like I never had one and keep fantasizing about the possibilities of of it.

It's unspeakable. All the happy memories I thought I had, those that made up for the bad ones, turn out to be even worse. They are all lies I told to myself. All of them and now that I see it there's a lot of pain in the parts I desperately clung to as the loving memories.

If you ask me, that is the worst kind of loss.