I have gone from one day to the next, not stopping. A certain kind of restlessness, an inability to let go. No panic, no racing thoughts, no irritation, just no need for sleep. I tried everything, upstairs downstairs, somewhere in the middle; but nothing. The effect however was soothing: I was kind to her, I was kind to the children, I was accepting of disappointment, not resigned, accepting. And there was value in that.

I look back on the last couple of months and I am confused as ever. Did I really say these things, did I actually do them? Who am I, over and over. Every stance I take, every utterance feels contrived and belonging to someone else. Nothing quite fits. And I feel a certain kind of resignation, that this is it, I have crumbled and there is nothing even spectacular about it.

he tells me he is moved to tears by my suffering. he tells me i look like four of my friends have died sitting in the waiting room.
he tells me to think about antidepressants. i say, no.
she tells me i am destroying her life. she tells me that all this talk about refinancing is about making it easier to get away.
she tells me why wouldn’t you at least try them. i say, no
but i am tired, and i am tired of trying to explain. i am tired of fighting and it’s taken its toll.
i give up, i am tired of being me. maybe this is the disappearing i’ve always longed for. maybe this is the way to be gone for good and for the good of everyone else.

Last night, I ask her what she was thinking. She replied, “this is the last time I will help decorate your parent’s christmas tree. This is the last time I will wish your mother a happy birthday.”

And we left soon after that and I wept and she wept and our daughter pointed out to us christmas lights and decorated storefronts and she muttered, “yes, we see them.”

And I choked and held onto the steering wheel and covered my mouth and wiped my tears and barely got us home.

The other day the therapist was really making it a point about how I wasn’t contemptible, using my thoughts and feelings as examples, and the next day, when I was pretty much determined to blow the session, he said to me, “u know, I’ve been thinking of another word to describe how u are feeling that isn’t broken or damaged.”
“Lost”, he says, “You are lost.”
Although he is right, it’s nothing new. And just like someone lost in the woods or a city, they try one direction for a few steps or even miles, then head back and start again, or abruptly pitch off into another angle. They end up in circles, grope for what’s familiar or, in turn, embrace desperately something new. But in the end, lost is lost, and I have no direction to follow, I have no guide, no one to rest on, to carry any of this for me. And I am tired. I am tired of being this way, of being this flawed, of beating myself up and feeling much too much to the point where I am defeated and numb. I am tired. I am sick of the sight of me, I am tired of the stench.

after every utterance, you see a contemptable person would be like this or that but not like you. and i get it, he’s trying to alleviate the guilt, the “intense” guilt and regret i feel, that i feel intensely, and he wonders aloud if the running i do, where i tap into it, this fucking sea of sadness, if i’m also literally running away, and i say no, i say it in my heart, i say no, i have never run away, i have always walked away or turned away, after all these years i have found myself having gone nowhere, i have always been right where i started and the bones have calcified, all these years and i haven’t taken any steps towards anything at all.

I am desperate for change, there is no poetry about it. Some drastic measure, sell everything off, looking at apartment in park slope, in astoria: all of it atrocious but better than this. Surely better than this.

He says to me, we have a lot of work here: we need to get you off this cross you’ve put and nailed yourself upon. This cross that you’ve also built.
And I laugh again inappropriately because the image fits: I’ve trapped myself, this is all my doing. But the image is wrong as well: I am no martyr, just the torturer and the tortured, the instrument and the pain.

He leaves me rattling: the difference between can’t and won’t. He asks me specifically, why not this, why not finish your dissertation? I volunteer the connection to my father, my propensity to abandon things I’ve started. He circles back again: can’t or won’t? He tells me of how he too didn’t finish his dissertation at first but found something that pushed him on, an approach, a field, but he finished and was outraged when he was questioned during his orals. He points out it might never be too late. And I find it difficult to wrap my mind around it, it’s been well over seven years, the field has changed. Besides I am this now, their lives depend on me being this now. He leaves me with can’t or won’t, sounds to me like you’re just bored.

Extraction requires excavation, a digging through the flesh to come up with bones. It’s a mess in there. The little one says, I want us to put up halloween decorations like a family. She asks, are we irreparable? My son struggles against my touch. My mother hounds me about my isolation. My father tries. And I am left feeling selfish and alone, gripping the steering wheel through one song after another, charging into the night, heaving and sobbing and barely able to see.