how do you hold it together
without just laying down in the middle of the supermarket
or screaming at the top of your lungs that you hate everyone who loves you?
how do you hold it together
without punching pillows and then screaming into them
or going out binge drinking or binge fucking or binging on anything?
how do you hold it together
without sitting on the internet for 8 hours a day
or rushing to your bathroom cabinet for pick-me-ups, psychiatric or other?
how do you hold it together
without lying to yourself about the fact that everyone, including you, is going to fucking die
or that all of these things you find so profoundly significant might be absolutely worthless?
how do you hold it together
when you’ve felt like absolute and total shit for as long as you can remember
and every morning you wake up still feeling like absolute, total shit?
i wonder if you remember when I asked you if you ever felt well, you said yes, and I felt alone.
how do you hold it together
when it seems like everyone else just lives their life
but you ruminate about what age will be the appropriate age to finally end your own life?
how do you hold it together
when you’re constantly worried that your insides are going to cannibalize you
or turn against you - whatever that “you” is.
how do you hold it together
when almost every night your head pounds, like your brain wants to be aborted
and the common respite of sleep just makes your head pound even more.
how do you hold it together
when a panic attack can grip you at any moment - whether it’s on the city bus, in the supermarket,
or driving somewhere far away on your birthday.
how do you hold it together
when the amount of your debt is fucking laughable and you’re constantly getting medical bills in the mail,
or when those issues get rotely politicized and no matter what happens you still have debt and bills, and can’t rent a car without a major credit card to get the fuck out of this city to see your family and friends?
how do you hold it together
when you don’t feel worthy of the love and care that others thrust upon you,
when even with the best intentions the gift seems confining?
how do you hold it together
when the only thing you know is that you don’t know how you’re going to become,
that your only operating theory is: “Fuck, I don’t know.”
how do you hold it together
when the life you live feels increasingly not-yours, like you’re watching yourself live your life from behind yourself or that you’re immersed in some sort of dream-world and can’t stop focusing on how bizarre everything seems - from minute details like the way your fingers touch keyboards, or chewing and swallowing to the more coarse, complex processes of driving cars, having sex, saying words, or caring for someone.
how do you hold it together
when every single person, every single second, every single moment is a moment that you could be unalterably, irredeemably other forever: sanity gone psychotic, having a father to having a dead father, having a brother to having a dead brother, having a mother to having a dead mother, well-gone-sick, walking to paralyzed, or from driving in a car drumming on your legs to Minor Threat in an attempt to deal with anxiety of being a passenger in a car to ruptured spleens, two week bed rest, and shitting in portable toilets behind sheets. when every moment contains a multitude of ways for you to become disfigured, undone, radically other, and unrecognizably severed from the ways you once were - without meaning and without reason.
how do you hold it together
when you hate the body you have to walk around in - that it is always a statement whether you wish to say anything or not?
how do you hold it together
when it’s too difficult to find the energy to do much of anything
but for some reason, you can always find the energy to make your bed, sweep the floor, and construct a pot of coffee in the morning?
how do you hold it together
when your senses are too sensitive and everything is either too loud or too bright or too hot or too fast or too early and you don’t think that you’re being petty - that things just really are too loud or too bright or too hot too fast or too early?
how do you hold it together
when your future, to you, consists of being molded by people who have plans for you, empty deadlines, morgue-like conferences, unemployment, boredom, loneliness, and eventual death?
how do you hold it together
when you really, deeply, genuinely wish that you could affirm life, but instead you can’t stand it. it eats at you, corrodes you, abuses you, bothers you, and ultimately repulses you?
how do you hold it together
when sometimes the best part of your day is watching the 11 o’clock news and the tonight show?
how do you hold it together
when all you’re able to see, including you, looks like carp at a spillway, begging, open-mouthed for fucking scraps of horrible, poisonous white bread at a consumer spectacle gone horribly wrong?
how do you hold it together
when you realize that various people, spread all over the place, hold pieces of you that they could give to someone else without your consent, or, possibly worse, throw in your fucking face out of malice? that these people have shortcuts, cheat-codes, and special skeleton keys, that unlock and unfurl all the selves that you hate being.
how do you hold it together
when the depths of how terrible you can feel is incommunicable: like the best way would be through a type of animal alphabet consisting of grunts, screams, silences, punches, kicks, sleeping, crying, holding, touching, just being there, and who knows what else - at this point, anything but more words...