1ETitOUT

I cried and cried at my counseling session last week because I have kept everything in. I keep everything in, and I expend my effort to keep it from escaping because it is the truth, and I am deeply terrified of the truth.

Carrie Fisher died with a shit-ton of drugs in her system, and people will use this information to denigrate her memory. They will let it stain their pristine image of the wonderful woman who didn't take shit from anyone. These people are fucking assholes, products of the great machine that works to rob us of our basic human decency.

Carrie Fisher was an actress. In Hollywood. In the 70s. Of course she got hooked on drugs. How the fuck else was she supposed to cope with the plethora of social constructs that told her she was fucking worthless because she had a fucking vagina? Why is it so hard for you assholes to fucking see how shit we have been to each other? What senseless process did you allow to take your soul? What pressure did you let be the excuse as to why you look down on people that don't fit your narrow-ass view of 'good'?

This is Carrie Fisher's Truth: She was a fucking survivor of the worst form of materialism. It threatened to swallow her whole decades ago, and she fucking fought it off, and she survived to be 60 years old carrying that fucking stone of indignity. Where so many others fell young, she survived. And yet, people will feel a reflexive sense of spite because she was on drugs. Just as bad, some will tell you to ignore her drug use, to remember 'the good things' about her. Fuck those people.

It's not 'the good things' that made Carrie Fisher amazing. It was all of the things about her. It was the interplay of light and dark within her mind, and the struggle to endure the ache she felt on a daily basis. It was the good times and the bad. It was her life, and it was her death, which some of us felt came far too soon. It was her need to use drugs to cope, and her battle to escape them. It was that she fought the good fight, and eventually lost. It's the precious stories that she's left for us in doing so, things that might make such an existence seem worthwhile.

So remember the drugs. Remember the pain. Remember the system that fought so very hard to break her, and her awesome defiance in continuing to make a life after she was broken. Those are the things that made her amazing.

This is my Truth: I fucking hate you. I have so much fury and anguish locked within, and I fight so hard to keep it there, that I don't have the energy to make a life for myself. I hate that I get this urge to share it, to scream it at the top of my lungs. I hate that I feel like I can't do that because I'm afraid the few friends I do have will recoil, and I'll end up as alone as I feel most of the time. I hate that I resent you for that, that I project all this self-loathing onto you so I can hate myself vicariously through you.

I hate that none of you were fucking there when I needed it the most. I know that's not your fault, but then you ask me what you can do to help, and the only answer I can give you is fucking nothing. The time for people to help me is long past. All you can do is sit there and fucking watch, waiting to see if I actually manage to make something of myself. You will either watch from afar as I succeed, or you will watch with a broken heart as I go down in fucking flames. Either way, you will be watching from afar.

That is my truth. That is my sickness, and it is one I know will kill me someday. That is all I can believe at this stage; I might succeed in fighting it off for a while, but I have no real reason to expect that I will win in the end.

Now we come to the thing that I keep buried, the thing that so terrifies me to speak of. It's the thing I need to expose to you, because that's the only way I can think of freeing myself from it. As the days wear on, this kind of naked self-expression seems like the only thing that will let me do anything with my life. So here it goes.

I do not want to win. I don't want to overcome this. What I want is to lay down and die. I cannot adequately describe to you how exhausted I am. I go to sleep exhausted. I wake up exhausted. I am exhausted when I think about tomorrow, let alone years from now. I do not want to live to be 60; another 30 years of this just seems like hell.

The only things that keep me around are my friends. I don't want to hurt my friends, and sometimes I feel like that's the only reason I have any desire to do anything with myself. Sometimes I only want to write stories so my friends will believe that I've made it somehow.

As I sit here, I wonder if that's why I project. Maybe I convince myself that my friends don't want to hear about my struggles as a means to whittle away at that solitary support. Maybe the hope is that one day I'll actually believe all that, and it'll be easier to go.

I'm gonna publish and share this shortly, and I am terrified. I imagine there's a good chance some of my friends my be hurt by all this. I fear some may get angry at me, and understandably so. What's worse, I may feel completely different about all this tomorrow, and that random reversal is one of the things that's most frustrating about my disease.

Whatever the reaction is, this is what I know in this moment:

I cannot continue to bottle this shit. I cannot bear to keep repressing these thoughts and feelings. It very honestly makes me more likely to kill myself because it feeds this sense of detachment. So I want to add in this message at the end, here, to my friends:

I love you. I love all of you, with every ounce my heart can muster, and even though this is the way I feel sometimes, I want you to know that I haven't given up. Not completely. I still have some hope, even if it's just the barest spark on days like today. I am deeply sorry if this post causes you pain, but this is the only way I can think of to do this very necessary act of sharing myself with you. This is the only way I can do it and not feel like I'm a piece of shit who's wasting your time.

This is me. This is how I feel a lot of the time. I wish I didn't, and I'm trying not to, but when my life is complete, this will be an integral part of my story. If you'll excuse the melodrama, this is the darkness that gives my light form. It's the bad that gives the good any real meaning. When people think of me, I hope they will remember this, as everything I will ever contribute to the world is a direct result of it.

Thank you for reading. You'll hear from me again soon enough.