Reflected

The woman at the crisis hotline tells me Trump is picking his new supreme court justice tonight at nine. She expects this to cheer me up, but it is dicey information to murmur to a desperate person. When my ethics do not register this as a cause for celebration, she tells me that I ought to start journaling. (Everyone always suggests this as though the depressed need only a Lisa Frank diary and gel pen to be set right.) When I immediately assure I am just about the most fervent diarists one could wish to meet, she asks again my more specific location, though I won't go closer than a county. If you get too exact and are too liberal in admitting your dysfunction, they are apt to send the police. Given that she has marked me as too liberal already, I wouldn't care to give her the excuse.

I've been mentally uneasy. I went to the library to work but lasted only through the typing of notes and a pass on an article I am writing for Fate. After that, I stalled on writing self-pity on the computer and, when that grew too onerous, on paper that exists no further than my notebook.

The day before, I had gone to see Kimya Dawson at The Beverly in Kingston, which I expected to be some light, poppy anti-folk and which turned out to be Dawson ripping our hearts out because she had just been to a memorial service and couldn't break away from a funereal mindset.

At the concert, I noticed this pixie of a girl. At first, I mistook her for a slight college student, but subtracted a year every time she flittered in my eyeline until fourteen was my optimistic estimate. I loved her a little and wanted to protect her free spirit, though no one here threatened it. And I hated her a little, too, because she was young and pretty, not wrecked with guilt and mental illness. I will never be that full of glorious potential again, light and lovely. I doubt I ever was. Aside from her girlfriend and a guy in a dress (not proper drag), I could not describe another stranger in the crowd, but this sylph in pigtails and a gossamer baby doll dress stood out. She was something good out in the world when the universe behind my eyes roiled dismally.

I felt as though I imposed on Amber by bringing her to the concert, but I warned her in March that I wanted to do this when I bought the tickets and I gave her several exits by which I would give the tickets to someone else. Amber came, and I was sorry that she didn't seem to get much from it, though I am not sure how much there was to get from sitting on the crowded floor in the back of a bar.

She has started a new job and is studying for the VTNE, which is a test whose results will decide her fate in a way that a standardized test should not be allowed. She is under pressure. She is busy. She sees me less now than at any other part of our relationship since we moved in together. She will go to Marist in the fall, only one or two classes at a time in pursuit of her second and more useful bachelor's degree. Distance builds and she may find fewer reasons to reach back.

When the woman on the crisis hotline tries for weak small talk, I tell her that I am going and disconnect the call. I have decided to stop consulting people for anything I am going to do anyway, since it suggests the other person must grant me their permission when it doesn't need to involve them. We have not formed even a three-minute relationship. When I confessed to worrying Amber will come to see me as too great an emotional burden, the operator all but assured me I likely am and should ease up on depending at all on my wife; the operator and I were not capable of operating on the same wavelength.

One of the archetypes I hate most is the stupid husband, the Man-Child, barely endured by a long-suffering wife whose contempt is a fraction of an inch beneath the surface. The love has ebbed, so things grow septic, but nothing really changes. He is but rarely aware that his actions have a lasting impact on her and rarer still executes some grand gesture to make it all worthwhile to not file for divorce.

This trope is one of my greatest fears, that Amber, who has erstwhile adored me more than anyone, whom I nearly worship, will come to dislike me. In her eyes, I will become unworthy, a burden. If I had to guess, this would be owing to my mental illness, which I must have had in other relationships, but for which I did not have the means or confidence to seek medical and therapeutic help. I've dated plenty, had long relationships with women plagued with disordered eating, borderline personality, self-injury, and other unenviable conditions. It made them no less worthy of love, but it would be a lie to say it did not make it harder to love them at the worst of it. I don't want to complicate Amber's life.

When Amber comes home from work, she does not know exactly who I will be. She has a good idea of how I might be. If I have not slept well for days, if my job was especially trying, if I have been sick, I may be moody (or I may not be; it's fickle). I usually regulate or can explain what I am going through and what I need.

Amber doesn't deserve to bawl because I am so deep in a depressive spiral that I audibly talk myself out of self-destruction. She doesn't deserve to be on eggshells. She doesn't deserve my telling her I need reassurance over some tiny misstep.

The nurse who refills my prescriptions - not my therapist - says that the fact that I am okay what I estimate to be ninety percent of the time (estimate rendered when I am in a performative or brighter mindset because I wouldn't show weakness in front of her; I have cause not to trust her) means I am fine. If once out of every ten times one reaches for food one received an electric shock from a mousetrap, one would not be inclined to dismiss those odds. It is naïve to handwave my mental health because I am not nonfunctional.

A few weeks ago, I put on music that I knew would make me cry. I needed to have a breakdown and get it out of my system before Amber got home. I wept as I sang along, I paced, I flailed. I still worked to make dinner - browning turkey meat for tacos and preparing rice - but I didn't stop my breakdown until my voice was hoarse and I was exhausted. Amber came home, I shut off the music, and I confessed my breakdown. The rest of the day, I was more or less fine. We had dinner, watched some Netflix, took a walk into town to hunt Pokémon, had rainbow sherbet, were caught in a sudden thunderstorm. It was lovely and might have been more possible because I purged my emotions before she could see me.

I would like to tell someone about this, but I am aware their reaction will be closer to pity and revulsion than understanding. I do not want Amber to have to perform this emotional labor again, particularly not as soon as she walks through the door.

I've been in therapy for years now and I don't understand why, in the summer heat, where I have no more responsibilities but to my literary work, I am not getting better. Amber claims I am, but I think she says this more from kindness than honesty. (I make her promise to just tell me if there is a problem so I don't have to mind-read.) I am, at best, aware that I am not what I should be. It is something, but a sickly green something. It is looking at the bone jutting out of my shin and suggesting aloud that this is likely to blame for my limp, but it is not a splint, not a cast. I am still limping - it's a miracle I manage to walk - but I can point to the broken bone as reason. "Do you see?" I cry out to those trying to ignore my hobbling. "I have sharp edges I shouldn't. Say, you wouldn't care to help me shove this back in, would you? At least until I can get to a doctor? No, I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to do it either."

She says she loves me because of my mental illness, because it is a part of the man she loves, but I find this to be weak tea. My anxiety and depression are the part of me I wish most to excise. If they made me into the man I am, they are done with this task and are now trying to unmake me, trying to take from me what I value the most.

When I disconnect from the hotline operator, I call my father to square away some financial concern about our coming vacation to Lake George. It shifts into talking about my mother and the stresses in her life. There is, in this, a small revelation: my mental illness isn't patrilineal, at least not entirely. I had spent the day feeling miserable intermittently and he told me my mother felt almost identically, though I spent the day fighting it and she seemed not to have the strength for it. I feel a few pressures she has put on me over the years lessening their grip because they were never about me, just desires she wanted met through her sons. It is a stinging cliché to see that clearly in my late thirties, but better now than in my late forties.

Talking to my father helps even though I am not venting my problems. I hint a few times - "wow, suicidality runs in the family!" - but he doesn't seem to notice, and it doesn't matter in the long run, as I feel better.

I often take what other people say in struggling times as a lasting truth, avoiding its context. This has never not been a mistake, but I return to a damned credulity. I would openly ask people not to judge me by the nadir of my mentality, but believe people mean what they say when they are low. I internalize something that was never about me because it speaks to an insecurity or uncertainty, but I don't have to accept their baggage. I don't have to let what happened to them influence how I live my life.

It bespeaks how disconnected I am from support structures or even people to whom I can casually chat. I trust too few people beyond a certain level. Or I have decided I understand how they function enough to only trust them for small uses, when I want to talk about books or mock movies, but not when I have a mental or relational issue I need to hash out with a third party. I cannot talk to Amber about everything, as some of it either involves her or is too painful to hear again. Daniel, to whom I am next closest, is largely a voice on my phone to whom I confess myself monthly. In person, I would feel too weak to admit myself in gross totality to anyone to whom a copay for confidentiality isn't required. I want to be able to love people better than I can. I can't expect people not to gossip to one another about my sickness and fears, possibly because I personally do not shut up about what people say to me.

These are not new ideas, but persistent ones because my progress toward alleviating them has stalled; I complain about a lack of connection, but I have not pursued creating new ones recently. Even though I feel warmth and fondness for Susan and want a closer relationship with her, I haven't pushed for this. I haven't seen her since Amber's graduation party, and by the nature of the setting that contact was divided.

My mother's depression mirrors my own so much in that moment, the dark half jokes, the emotional instability, the neediness for external validation, the insecurity, that I feel as though I have discovered a clue to why I am the way I am. I credited my malaise to my father's charge of DNA, but at least its patterns are cribbed from my mother. Where did she get these? I learned my brokenness at my mother's side, but couldn't see that until our cycles synced this one time. I wouldn't have been able to describe my outlines so precisely, but I found them from her, emulated them without knowing it. If I see this, I maybe I can know how to set my limping right.

Soon in Xenology: Probably more aimless fretting, knowing me.

last watched: GLOW
reading: A Confederacy of Dunces
listening: Kimya Dawson