Sylvia Plath and the Monthly Tide

Catchy tag line, hey?

I sort of had a meltdown over the past few days. This isn't totally new to me- happens fairly often, actually. There are a lot of things in my life that I don't feel like I have a whole lot of control over, which often leaves me without much motivation to control what I can . And my slight depression over it all is much exacerbated once a month. It's a hormonal thing that seems to affect me to the extreme. Some months are worse than others, and every so often, like during this past week, it all turns me into a pretty-close-to-suicidal mess that can't see how my life can possibly ever be worth living. It is frustrating, so frustrating that it makes my head come close to exploding, because even in the depths of despair when I am trying to think of painless, foolproof ways to end my life, my rational mind is still there somewhere underneath it all. I know that everyone in the world doesn't hate me, I know that there are ways for me to take control of my destiny, and I know that somehow, somewhere, sometime, I will be able to achieve the greatest of my desires: love. I even know that my own darkest thoughts are what keep me from getting where I want to go. But there is a much, much louder voice that roars at me that I am worthless, that everyone else is better than me and smarter than me and more beautiful than me, that all I do is drain everyone around me of their joy. This voice tells me that no matter how hard I try to change, I will always be as dirty and disorganized as my house is, that I will always be underemployed, and that no one with any intelligence at all will ever see any good in me. It isn't a voice-voice. Not actual words spoken, like the voice of god inside my head. (I'm not THAT crazy- I don't think.) They are more like ideas, thoughts, concepts that I cannot forget, escape from, or argue with. It happens every month. Most months, if I fight hard enough, I can overcome the blackness and stop it from settling in. I have a few days where every little thing makes me want to punch someone in the face and then run away and cry about it, but I can control myself until the urges go away.

But then there are months like this month. I knew it was time for my hormonally-driven insanity to attack me. Even in the midst of it all, I could rationalize it. But the aching, hysterical insane sadness drowned out my rational voice. And it was worse than usual, much, much worse. I think I have an idea why, though. Because I know the exact moment that it started.

I have been reading Sylvia Plath for a while, and her writing, like her life, is rather heavy. I read it slowly, in little pieces at a time, because that's all I can handle. And I've been reading The Bell Jar, which tells the tale of Sylvia's insanity, in a fictional format.

I was at the park Friday with several of my friends. We had gotten supper and were eating it near the yacht harbor, where we could enjoy the pseudo-summer weather and gaze out over the boats tied there. And I was emotional and a little depressed, but mostly just irritated by everything from the calls of the seagulls to the way the picnic table felt under my elbows to the fact that I accidentally got the wrong kind of potato chips. Irritated to the point of hearing blood rushing in my head and feeling my heartbeat gradually gain speed and strength until it felt like I might fly off of the picnic table bench in rage. I finished eating, and everyone else was feeding the rest of the nasty potato chips to a duck. I know that when I am in a mood like that, I have to stay busy. If my mind isn't fully occupied at all times, the depression sets in and I cry and cry and cry, right in front of everyone, no matter where I am. I try to hide it by claiming allergies or letting my hair hide in front of my face, and no one ever says anything to me, and so I can pretend that I have succeeded in hiding what I know is a touch of insanity. And watching a duck eating potato chips does not fully occupy my mind. It takes a lot to do that. I have watched TV, chatted online, listened to music, and texted people on my phone all at the same time and still not felt fully occupied. (It isn't easy to do all those things at the same time that you are solving a sudoku puzzle, by the way. Trust me.)

So, already teary-eyed for absolutely no reason, and irrationally angry because I was teary-eyed for absolutely no reason, I went to my car and got The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's novel that I was reading. I sat back down at the table and glared at everyone's backs for a second, incredibly angry at them for having fun doing something so stupid as feeding a duck while I just wanted to cry until I was out of tears, and then I opened up to the page of the book that I had left off on. (And this desire to cry developed en route to get my book- it sprung up out of nowhere, the way it always does.)

The part of the book I began reading was the saddest, most intense part of the book- where Esther, the main character, is in the depth of her insanity and undergoing a terribly painful shock treatment. It is incredibly authentically written, probably because it is basically autobiographical. The sentences begin to not make much sense and the thoughts are choppy and hard to follow, but they fill you with intense pain and empathy. And when I am reading a good, intense, well-written book, I get totally lost in the character, just as I do when I am writing. So I missed out on the fact that everyone was leaving the park until someone tapped me on the shoulder on the way past. I looked up, startled, and was horribly upset that I was not Esther Greenwood, and even more upset that I had to stop reading. I stood up and followed everyone, but immediately, before I had even reached the car, the tears came. I was sure that the fact that no one had said anything to me before they started walking to their cars was proof that they really didn't want me to be among them, that they liked each other far more than they liked me, that they hoped I would stay there where I was, reading, until the day I died, and not ever speak to them again. My rational mind told me that they probably HAD said something, but I hadn't heard them because I was so far gone into my book, but the other, hormonal part of my mind argued that even if they had told me we were leaving, and even if I had just not heard them, that I should know fully well that they all hated me anyway. And that was the part of my mind that was louder, clearer, more powerful, and so I believed it.

That's when it all started. For the rest of the night, I chatted online, telling a few different people how terrible my life was because my friends didn't want anything to do with me, that they were all horrible people who wanted me to die, obviously, because I was sitting among them crying openly and none of them would even talk to me. I tried to distract myself in a thousand ways, but none of them worked. I cried and cried and cried because the reality that I would never have a decent job because I look too fat and slobby for anyone to hire me, and reality that I would never find love because anyone intelligent and insightful enough to "get" me would never be able to see past my horrendous and hideous body to love me, hit me all at once. Of course, there was that small, shy, and quiet part of my mind that told me everyone was ignoring me because they simply didn't know what to DO with me, and that I would probably react the same way. It also told me that I don't always look slobby and dirty, and that someday, I may well find someone both intelligent and accepting to love as I am, but I didn't listen. The mean, ogre-ish part of my mind slapped the better, brighter part in the face and told it to shut up.

When it was time to leave, I tried to plan for the next day so that if I wasn't up to doing the things I needed to do for other people, they would still get done. I would have given anything to not go home, but everyone else was going and I didn't have anyplace else to go, and I couldn't ask anyone to stay with me because I had convinced myself that they all hated me, and so I had to plan ahead in case I found the courage to end my pain by morning. The same sentence kept repeating itself, the way that the lyrics of a song do when they're stuck in your head: "You have no future, so there's no point in surviving the present. You have no future, so there's no point surviving the present."

I spent the entire night crying, screaming into my pillow, following the terrible thoughts around and around and around in my head, rocking back and forth, trying to find a way to end it all that would not cause me any pain. I knew, in the few tiny pieces of time in which I could find my way to rational thought, that it was all hormonal and that better times would come and that I had a million reasons not to end my life, but it was hard to find those thoughts and they slid away quickly when I did. Luckily, even the irrational part of my mind was able to focus on my fear that if I hurt myself physically, the physical pain might be even greater than the mental pain I was experiencing, so while I generated ideas and pondered Google searches, I never let myself formulate a solid plan. And eventually, I fell asleep. In the morning, I was better. Not 100% better, or even 50% better, but better enough to stop crying for fifteen minutes and even a half an hour at a time. Better enough to know that I had promised people I would be at a party and that I should go there, out of respect to them and in order to salvage myself. So, I dried my tears, and, puffy-eyed and blotchy-faced, I stopped at the store to buy myself some liquid courage and pushed myself into the midst of the party.

I decided to let myself try a little experiment. I had never had enough alcohol in me to be drunk- never any more than a drink in a night, actually. And since suicide- in my sane moments, now that the storm is over, the very word makes me shiver in horror- was on my mind, I decided that drinking away my sorrows was a better alternative than that, anyway. I thought out my decision carefully, because I know a lot of people who have struggled and do struggle with alcoholism, and I'm smart enough to know it isn't the best idea to get drunk for the first time during a depressive episode. But I knew that I was along friends who wouldn't let me do anything terribly stupid, and I knew that I had enough self control to stop drinking if I anything I didn't like started happening to me.

I drank enough to get tipsy. I wasn't ever what I would consider drunk, even though I've never been drunk, so I can't really say, but I had to think a little harder than normal to walk through the grass in the dark and say a sentence that made sense, and I giggled a lot. And I'm glad I did it, because once I started giggling, I knew for sure that life was going on. And I also learned that alcohol doesn't really do it for me. Yeah, I got giggly and had fun and the pain started to lessen, but that was because drinking gave me an excuse to giggle, and a way to slip slowly and discreetly back into normal life while testing the waters, seeing if I could still smile and laugh and talk to people, and if they were going to react to my drastic change from sad, self-pitying, sullen stranger back into Me. They didn't react, really, other than seeming happy that I was okay again, and I could still laugh and smile and talk. And I learned that drinking didn't CAUSE me to come back into myself, it just gave me an excuse to LET myself. In the future, I will cling to the knowledge that a slight smile, a quiet burst of laughter, is all it takes to enter myself again and rid myself of the dark spirits that sometimes take over. I don't need alcohol to do that (I was never really drunk, after all, or even numbed- just a little less focused on myself) and I don't need permission to do that, or even an invitation from someone else. My friends and family are all there, waiting for that moment in which the light lets itself back in, even if I convince myself that they are not.

I realized all of this tonight when I finished reading The Bell Jar. Because the book ended on a happy note, and I wondered if things would have been different if I had finished the book on Friday, in the park, instead of stopping in the midst of Esther Greenwood's insanity. I really don't know. The drink-induced laughter, the onset of my monthly cleansing, and the end of the book all came in quick succession, and so I don't really know if any one of those things, or all of them, or something else altogether, brought me out of the darkness and back into life. But I have a feeling that Sylvia Plath and the onset of the Monthly Tide should probably not be combined in my life again.