A Note On Being Alone

Distractions. Distractions are what I seek. Its distractions that I need, otherwise again will I fall into this disgusting and painful pit. And of course, there are healthy distractions and unhealthy distractions. I’ve become terrified of the life of the mind and so I seek refuge in the physical world. It has been a painful and unhappy transition to such a world. I am an intellectual, an introvert, and an inappropriately quiet individual. For two decades I have sought safety from the world around me, its pain and embarrassment by creating a life entirely within my head. My thoughts kept me company. I fed them with copious amounts of reading and they repaid me with friendship and stability.
But now I have been living a life where my own thoughts are my harshest critics. It is something like having a group of arch enemies entirely within your brain. Remember those bullies in middle school and high school? The ones who had tortured you for so long that they didn’t even need to say anything anymore, they merely needed to look at you and they could break your spine. It’s like having all of them in your head at all times. They tear you down and make you cry. That’s what my brain does.
And so I have turned to the physical world. To the pain and the pleasure. I need distractions. Alcohol is a distraction. The wonder of alcohol is its numbing quality. Coming from someone who only very recently began drinking recreationally, wait let me say something. Can I just say that “recreationally” is not at all the appropriate term for the kind of drinking I did. I didn’t do it for fun. I did it because if I drank a bottle of wine in twenty minutes then within half an hour I’d be vomiting into a toilet. And let me tell you, when you’re vomiting into a toilet you’re not thinking about how depressed you are. Yes, I drank to forget. But more than that I drank to feel pain. I drank because vomiting up your guts is a fantastic way to hurt yourself. And physical pain is a shitload better than emotional pain. Anyways, what was I saying? Right, alcohol is wonderfully numbing. Numbing to the mind, that is. It’s a depressant, of course, and I’m cool with that. Being clinically depressed, I find depressants oddly stimulating. It seems to legitimize my sadness somehow. When you’re drunk out of your mind you’re still depressed but you have less self-loathing. Which I guess is helpful.
When I’m depressed my jaw hurts. My jaw hurts because I’m clenching my teeth. I do this because otherwise I’d scream. A pressure builds in my chest, it presses down on my heart, squeezing it, making it difficult to pump its blood. It forces the air out of my lungs. My arms and legs seem to swell as the pressure inside me continues to build. My muscles begin to spasm and I can’t keep my hands from shaking. My face burns. I wake up on the floor, shaking, pulling at my hair.

My hope. My heart. My fear. They are all the same. A trinity of personal failings that together inspire everything I do.