The Breakdown Serves a Purpose
you might find it in lime green curtains
On the other side of a short-lived episode of dysregulation, I was sitting on my bed this afternoon absorbing the after-storm calm, observing my newly rearranged bedroom. I’ve pushed my bed into the corner so I can lean against the wall when I can’t sleep. I moved the desk I found on the sidewalk and carried on my shoulder while my dog tried to go in the other direction to a more prominent place because damnit I’m a Writer. Above it is a shelf I drilled too many holes in the wall to get level. I replaced the rug ruined by the minor apartment flooding with the most colorful one I could find, and hung new curtains. Well, new-old curtains: they’re the lime green ones I took from my childhood bedroom.
My brain did one of those fast-spinning rewind deals you see in TV shows. I suddenly felt like—was—teenage April cocooned under her covers with the Major Sads. It wasn’t one thing that had sent me here this time. It was a week (probably longer) of bullshit marked by the persistent undertone of feeling unloved.
It’s an interesting dichotomy for me because I know, at least on the surface, that I am loved. My students tell me daily, either directly through words, or indirectly through their delivery of smoothies and tchotchkes to decorate my desk, and repeated visits to my office. I know my friends love me because they will show up for me if I ask them. And my pets love me, because duh.
As the lime green curtains penetrated my psyche, I had an ah-ha moment. I stopped crying and audibly sort of gasp-spoke, ohhhhh fuckkkk, exasperated by the realization that everything that had led to the breakdown mirrored the same feelings I couldn’t name the countless times as a teen I sought solace on my bed under the windows adorned with these same curtains.
This is that, I thought. Except not exactly that, but that, you know? The same sunk feeling.
I wrote in my journal last night before I went to sleep: I am so tired of having to be everything to everyone, and I don’t have anyone who cares enough about me to make me everything to them.
Yeah, that is dramatically sad, but that’s how my brain works. I have the privilege of being able to name the feeling now after so many years of not being able to. It just took me a little longer to name the feeling this time, because I’ve been very busy being everything to everyone else on a drastically heightened level.
My students have issues that I need to address and then translate into advocacy. I am fiery about this because adults tend not to take kids seriously enough or at all. I spoke with spitfire and tears puddled in my bottom eyelids but didn’t drop as I said with conviction to the administration, I am not going to stifle the needs of my students for the comfort of adults. I smiled and therapized and helped edit papers for at least 75 of those students for whom I’d just gone to bat. I counseled four friends with serious relationship issues like I was in MarioKart trying to make sure I hit every tank to help them refuel. I shampooed my recently skunked dog a dozen times and tried to wash out the lingering scent of old, musty skunk that had rubbed from her fur onto literally every surface (what is with that???). But when it was time to sit down and be replenished, it was all silence. I had nothing left for myself. And I had no one to give me anything, either.
That was always what it was growing up. The built-in love wasn’t there and the silence was so, so loud. I’ve tried to explain it when people ask me how I continually do my job with such passion, and the answer is that it’s really, really hard, but it’s the love that propels me. But what I leave out because people are uncomfortable with truths, is that it’s even harder to do my job when I go home to an empty house. It’s even harder when the love I will towards me won’t, or doesn’t, come.
Here’s a poem I wrote a few years ago titled starving:
Twelve thousand nights without sleeping, my body drenched from the downpour of all the bad things. I remember that I am kind and good. I remember that I’ve not done a single thing to deserve what weighs me down. I invent past lives as karmic explanation. It does not matter. I grew up in a cold, cold house; I sought fire from whomever could make it. I aged into beauty and was borrowed by men who claimed to love me but never bought into putting me first. Now I watch them replace my place and move another up the rungs with all the force of the lessons I left. Good for them, I think, and remember that I am exactly where I was when I was born: alone, in a bed, unable to sleep. Everyone has gone.
*
Last night and this morning reminded me of how dire it all felt when I wrote that poem. The feeling I had was mostly the same as then, the loneliness of loving but failing to be loved well. But what was different, what surfaced when I gasped my oh fuck, was not pity for myself, but empowerment. I named the feeling. I recognized its origin and the triggers that sunk me to the dark place. I realized that I have to ask more of the people who claim to love me. I have to stop accepting breadcrumbs and I have to speak up for the love I want.
My immense ability to love and be there for others is the best and only way I know how to live. I know that pushing myself to the absolute limit in order to keep being everything to everyone else is a trauma response. I know accepting less than the love I need is also a trauma response. I am grateful that this breakdown brought me that clarity with such stark direction, that its purpose revealed itself. Now I get to say: Hey, can you try to love me better? Here’s how.
