“AND A BODY WITHOUT A HEART, I’M MISSING EVERY PART”

(OR, HOW MY EMOTIONS ARE EATING ME ALIVE)

I haven’t written anything because I’ve been out of town at the convention.

The convention is a three day long conference about applying the Bible to our current lives. There are demonstrations, skits, meetings, discourses and baptisms. It’s a pilgrimage every Jehovah’s Witness makes over the summer. The convention is like a spiritual retreat, a reset button.  This is one of the things that I do in order to get closer to God. This is also the kind of event where I stretch towards extroversion, forcing myself to meet, greet and smile at others. Needless to say, after three days of that, I need two days of rest, but I what I learn is worth the effort.

I have been feeling emotionally drained for weeks. 

I got fired from AllState.  Too few people were buying insurance from me, and my boss’ boss wanted to start paying me by lead instead of hourly. Considering I spent 3 hours a day commuting there, the possibility of not getting paid for a day’s work was unacceptable. My supervisor and I split amicably.

I haven’t exercised in a week and I’ve been eating horribly. This week has been full of fried chicken, pizza, cheeseburgers, ice cream and other nutritionally dubious food. I’m terrified to weigh myself and see how much progress I’ve lost.

My car is still dead and I have no means of repairing it, which means going back to college this fall is out of the question. I love and miss school and I purposely picked a college an hour away in hopes of moving closer to Ann Arbor and Chicago.

I was supposed to be having my housewarming this weekend. Instead, I will be cleaning my prison cell room and following curfew. I feel like a child.  I have $185 dollars to my name; mostly because Brianna repaid a debt to me I had forgotten about.

I have been tortured by the ghost of Sal. Perhaps it is just my own confirmation bias, but no matter how much I try to stop thinking about him, I cannot.  I am surrounded by people, places and things that constantly remind me of him, and by extension, his absence. I spend a lot of time with Jon, Jon’s fiancé Noor and his mother.  Almost everyone new I’ve met around here is already friends with him, and so talk about spending time with him.  Sal and I have similar taste in music, so there are entire playlists that I’m avoiding on my iPod so I can spend time thinking about something else, anything else. I have hidden and unhidden his posts on my Facebook newsfeed a million different times.

I can’t deal with this depression on my own anymore.

“the great divide will swallow me whole”

My family knows that I am sad, but I won’t tell them the reasons why.  Other people in my congregation knows that I am sad, but they don’t know why either. I get all choked up trying to go into it.

Bro Z. and I have talked and he wants to talk to me a bit more on Saturday afternoon.

I confided in him (and also Brianna but no one else) that I’ve been battling thoughts of suicide. This alarmed them both, to the point where they are coddling me. I sometimes regret saying anything, and I sometimes regret not saying something beforehand.

Bro. Z and Jon are meeting me at the Hall at 12:30.  I am feeling nervous.  Not because I don’t trust these two lovely men; that is not it. They are among the best elders (read: spiritual counselor) that I know.  I am nervous because I am not sure that when I am in that little room with those guys, I’ll have the courage to say what is on my heart.

It’s hard to talk about depression, suicide, existential dejection, and madness. It’s hard to talk about how I feel about my parents, and my shrinking group of friends, and about how the lack of a proper job eats at my identity as an adult. It’s hard to talk about addiction (yes, I have one, just not drugs or alcohol) and introversion and obsessive love.

Jon is Sal’s first cousin. They are very close. I am not ready to sit across from him at a table and tell him that I am madly in love with Sal and know for a certainty that’s not how Sal feels. I am not ready to tell Jon how I can’t sleep at night because I’m agonizing. I am not ready to tell Jon that I only have eyes for Sal, and I dream about a life that we will never have together.  I am not ready to tell Jon that I’m afraid to go away for too long because I do not want to come back home and find out he’s found someone else.

I’m just not ready.

But I can’t keep struggling alone. And I know for a certainty this is a step I have to take before I will go to a doctor for pills, or an asylum and take up room from people who are more sick than I am.