you're engaged and i'm in the shock therapy chair

on things changing while i stay the same

Dana tells me to stop moving my head so much or we’ll have to restart. She doesn’t understand that if she’s going to ask me awful questions while I’m simultaneously having a machine shock the part of my brain that doesn’t work properly, I am going to uncomfortably move around. She restarts the machine and puts the “feelings wheel” into my wet hands, piled into my lap with nowhere to go. First I pick stressed as my word of choice. She asks what it is that I’m stressed about. I look at her like she’s stupid, which she might as well be. She’s asking me what’s stressing me out, like I’m not in her stupid chair that Lindsey says looks like a massage chair. Like I’m not in Maryland, rather than New York, where I am supposed to be. Working, writing, and being a normal person. Going to school. She asks me what is stressing me out and I tell her everything. She pushes me. I fight not to move my head to the side, but the way it’s positioned is forcing me to stare right into her eyes and therefore be forced to answer her stupid question. I think I might cry. In fact, I can feel my heart racing and tears in my eyes. She drops the topic, asking me to pick a new word. In retaliation I tell Dana that being asked how I’m feeling makes me completely unable to decipher a single thing that I’m feeling. She asks me to try anyway, so I pick bothered. Because I am bothered by her line of questioning, and I am bothered by the way she stands directly in my line of sight knowing I am unable to move my head. When she asks why I’m bothered, a quizzical look in her eye, I swallow hard and try not to move my head. It moves slightly, Dana catches the movement. Now the machine is probably drilling into a part of my brain that will lead to a seizure and I will probably die because I’ve spent years manifesting my own death. I am bothered because of a guy, I tell her, and the corner of her mouth lifts up. A guy? She asks, which I assume is probably a hilarious response to hear come out of the mouth of a girl who is quite literally having her brain shocked as we speak. I am on the verge of a panic attack and I think about telling Dana but I don’t because now she’s asking me what the guy did that’s bothering me. Instead of rolling my eyes and crossing my arms, I sigh. He got engaged, I tell her. She laughs. Dana is not aware of the years of turmoil and torture that led to his engagement, but I don’t tell her. Let her guess, let her write me off as another privileged stupid white girl with boy problems who thinks she needs shock therapy. While I know that telling her why I’m really upset would probably benefit us both, I don’t. I let her believe that I am a home-wrecking lunatic. She asks, then, if I am anxious. I’m always anxious, so I stifle a laugh and pull at my fingers, dropping the feelings wheel into my lap. Anxiety is a constant, I tell her. Ah. Yeah. Yeah. I list my coping skills, per her request. None of which I actually use. She startles me when she asks what coping skills don’t work. There she goes, being unpredictable and settling me deeper into the feeling of panic that is slowly arising. Calming myself down. It’s true. I can’t deescalate a situation to save my life. Once I feel panic, I have to ride it out. All of its physical attributes, the feeling of being unable to breathe, the shaking of my limbs, the slickness of my palms. There is absolutely no way out. I wait until it’s over and then I wait for it to happen again. The sheer thought of it happening again, and knowing that it will happen again, makes me ill with depression.

On the phone with Gibson I recount this morning’s TMS treatment, giggling while I tell him that I told her I was bothered by a guy who just got engaged. We joke about that being the real reason why I’m in the chair. I miss Gibson, who puts a true smile on my face and gets scouted for reality TV shows. I miss my disgusting room inside of my disgusting apartment. My big blue bed. All of my baby dolls. All of my negative energy. Pennsylvania is killing my spirit, I have no will to live. I’m in pure survival mode, and I haven’t written one coherent sentence in months. While I’m not actively bothered by his engagement, I am passively bothered by it. It feels like I should be, but really nothing is bothering me right now, because I am unable to be bothered, or really anything at all. I feel incorrigible and useless. Annabel the walking freak show. Someone ought to come along and kill her merely out of boredom.

It’s my year of rest and relaxation. I wake up just to stay in bed all day, reading on and off but mostly and most notably, I am sleeping. Sleeping off weed hangovers and taking hydroxyzine to escape my night time anxiety. Everything about myself renders me so speechless in disappointment. What a fucking disaster my life is. How did it get to be like this? Am I a bad person for what I did to him? I am one hundred and twenty five days clean. Four months of treating my sobriety like it’s a gun to my head. Nothing’s worse than that first month. Absolutely nothing worse. What a sore reminder to a girl who is trying and failing to quit vaping for the second time this year.

Possibly it is the unrelenting depression that I have been experiencing for the last nine months, but I am pretty sure that I am a bad person. Hopefully the shock therapy will shock me into realization. That I am or am not a bad person. I’m tired of the not knowing, the guessing. I wish I could just know so that I can deal with that. It’s like a diagnosis, part of you doesn’t want to know, but part of you needs to know. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I quit him, why can’t I let him go? Why can’t I just let him get married without feeling the brunt of it? It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t bother me, I swear to God. I swear to God.

My stomach hurts. Drinking cold tea with milk and abusing nicotine. I sit in the shower, I scratch at my bug bites until they bleed. You turn insolent with age. I turn violent. Whatever. Weren’t we always this way? Wasn’t this always the way it was going to end? I am one hundred and twenty seven days clean and I am unable to call myself an addict. Wasn’t this all part of it, addiction? My tendency towards him is as bad as a cut on the wrist. It is as bad as the cleanup, the maintenance. In my head he is sad and he is sorry. He wants my forgiveness and I don’t give it up. He is engaged and I do not know him very well at all. We are not eighteen anymore. Tomorrow I will get my brain shocked again, and answer more of Dana’s stupid questions and fight off another panic attack (which I will fail doing). Tomorrow he will still be engaged and I will still be stupidly bothered by it.