I’ve been feeling dreadful for the past two days. I have a deep despair that I can’t place, or that I’m not willing to think about. This is like my own personal Inland Empire, trying to keep me from peeling back the layer to see where the smell is coming from. My subconscious knows it’s too much and I have to bloody myself to get out of the cave and see more than shadows. I started writing this because I noticed a pattern, finally on the third instance of being shown an illusion, of the despair that I fall into.
I’ve felt this strongly first when I was 19; kicked out of my friend groups house, because my landlord was my long term girlfriends mother, who did not fancy my attitude and demeanor. This quickly devolved our relationship but we dragged it along until the end of 2020. Along with the relationship decline, my friends vanished, as I had put all my eggs into one basket so to speak, and it was easy for them to write me off now that I wasn’t in the basket with them. I wasn’t yet able to do anything by myself so my mom found me an apartment and I moved in once my lease was up.
I was a miserable piece of shit with no aspiration, no sense of self, no friends, no motivation or charisma to find new ones, a weed and nicotine addict, all I had was my piss-poor relationship as my sole companion for close to an entire year. I tried kicking the weed and replacing it with alcohol, which I punished myself with by only allowing myself straight plastic-bottle vodka. This lasted half a bottle until I went back to my old drug of choice and rotted in the early stages of COVID. I comforted myself by watching the NLSS series from 2016 to 2018 endlessly, namely Ultimate Chicken Horse and Quiplash, since it made me feel less alone. And that was really what this feeling set into me for so long was: loneliness.
Watching the NLSS helped me because I didn’t feel alone, and yet I didn’t have to live up to their expectations. I didn’t need to worry about what they thought about me. I didn’t have to worry about them someday leaving me and facing social withdrawals. It was a reminder to me, nearly every hour of my waking day, that life can be normal and people are able to be happy. It gave me residual memories of the time of the episodes coming out, which was high school, where I had happily fit myself into a community with band class.
But why did it take me so long to realize this? How could I have not pieced together that what I was feeling was loneliness, and that I could overcome it? For months I engaged in self destructive habits, I switched back to smoking instead of vaping, I started taking acid every two weeks no matter the negative outcomes it gave me, I ate less than one meal a day, I thought about my girlfriend A LOT, and maybe that’s why I didn’t realize it. Maybe I thought I wasn’t alone because I technically wasn’t. Maybe it took me being in the exact same situation in Houston, where I lived with a long term partner that I felt was a stranger, to realize that loneliness is not about the physical person but about the connection. People fill niches in other peoples lives whether they want to or not. The NLSS connected to me because they were unconditionally loving when I needed them. This months long trance was erased the moment I let my girlfriend go, and I was far too excited with my renewed vigor to contemplate what had just happened. I honestly probably haven’t processed this until just now.
So, time passes, I cycle around in the same machine of partners to fill my loneliness, eventually landing on the partner I lived with in Houston, though we were both still in Denton at the time. I’m still high on being in a relationship and so I forgo friends for the remainder of my college experience. I don’t get another real friend group until 2024 when I moved here, to Columbia.
Something I should have mentioned earlier is that my mom was my best friend my entire life. She would be the first person I went to when I felt I couldn’t handle something, and she would have been the first person I told about my transition. I don’t think I would have gotten through 2020 without her. She was cruelly ripped from the earth on September 29th, 2021, due to multiorgan failure after a lengthy battle with cancer and one remission. I was in the very same apartment complex that she found for me when I learned that she was gone.
It is impossible to think about her without breaking into a crying fit. Cancer by My Chemical Romance causes my face to contort from the first chord. Every 5 minutes I had the impulse to ask her for help or reassurance about her own death only to grasp the air. The pain of losing someone this close to you this suddenly is unlike anything you will ever experience in your life, so much so that I’m unable to describe it without screaming into a microphone connected to 10,000,000,000 speakers. I’m having to take breathers in between writing sentences to regain my footing. The very last time she texted me, was to help me. I was one month away from donating my bone marrow to her and I still sometimes feel guilt, that I killed her due to my complacency and lack of urgency to get the lab work done.
October, November, December, January, at least these months afterwards are blanks in my mind, complete blackness other than the highlights I recall here. It felt exactly like my previous despair in this apartment but cranked up to the point of being entirely numb. I stopped brushing my teeth for the majority of my weeks. I was taking classes but don’t remember which ones or what I was studying, other than I had to drop out of physics because it was too much at the time. My weed consumption reached an all time high as I couldn’t cope with being sober for a single minute. Likewise, I never allowed silence to surround me, and like with the NLSS I would play Northernlions Slay the Spire videos to ground myself, day after day after day. It's still a coping mechanism I use occasionally. I watched BoJack Horseman and Lain, both shows that heavily explore loneliness. I stopped taking acid because I knew it would destroy me at that point. I felt like whatever was left of me died with her, and recovery is gradual and ongoing.
At least compared to the previous time, I knew immediately why I was feeling this way, it was too vibrant to shove away. But why am I feeling like this now? Why do I feel lonely? All I can think of is the times where I felt like this before. Maybe in two years time I’ll have figured it out and written it here. But, for now, I am watching a YouTube video of a man renovating an abandoned house on an island. Hearing him talk and seeing him push through the hopeless situation he finds himself in comforts me more than any person sitting next to me ever could.