Don't Worry, You've Always Got Me

Photo Credits: my sister

To me:

To be honest, i know that writing this letter to yourself already feels wrong, you are already visualizing the hateful comments being left, whether they be overt or unspoken - you sense it all. Anxiety creeps in and you worry like hell as you struggle to stay silent, posting your true feelings on Facebook, yet taking it down just moments after posting it after not having the support that you had idealistically crafted in your mind. Your thoughts run wild

"They think I'm attention seeking."

"I am attention seeking."

"What have I done."

"Great job Candice. You screwed up again."

"You disappointment. You shithead. Just shut up and keep everything to yourself."

"Hah. You actually thought that this would be a good idea? What an idiot. You need to vanish from peoples' lives."

"Stop being a nuisance."

All in just 10 seconds flat.

I know that the real reason why you stopped using Ig was because you didn't want to continue to contaminate the rosy lives of your friends. You thought of yourself as a toxic and hypocritical piece of shit who should disappear. You didn't even want to kill yourself anymore because you did not want to be hated on even as you turned into ashes for being weak and attention seeking. So, I see you walking on albeit the stumbles because even when you feel far from ready to confront the day, you know you have to be ready, or at least act like you are as ready as an energizer bunny. It’s tiring isin’t it dearie? It’s utterly exhausting to pretend that you are strong.

No one sees except the nonchalant passers-by along the streets or public transport as your face is strewn with hot tears that you force out of the way with your windshield wiper fingers. This helplessness silent pain is so familiar to the point when you feel guilty for characterizing it as something that makes you sad. You think to yourself that with all the pain you have endured (or so you perceive), that you ought to deal with this triggering encounter with ease.

You beat yourself up over feeling; simply feeling.

In the immediate aftermath of a distressing event, you hold your tears with no problem, you are so trained in putting up that façade as routinely as you get out of bed everyday – similarly, even if you have zero heart to stand back up on your feet, you summon the strength every time.

What jolts those streams down your face is the anger you have towards yourself for feeling upset over something so small. Embedded in a setting where people are around you who have no clue about your history, you feel compelled to continue putting up an act of constant joy and your perfect “I’ve-got-my-shit-together” performance. You do not want to let them down and let them see you the way you see yourself – an utter failure and disgusting weakling who has zero chance of surviving in the working world. You fret because they ridicule your decision to be vegan – what would they say or how would they view me in a biased light should they ever find out the real me behind all those smiles? Would I be fired or simply given the judgemental look/comments of “you don’t look thin enough to have an eating disorder” or “your self-harm scars are nothing.” You don’t want to risk it all and lose the bonds you formed with them or damper their image of you – which let’s be honest, is already tarnished with your obvious inadequacies as you pale in comparison to the professionalism they’ve all mastered. You are always behind; and you wonder if this is the way it will always be.

As much as you wish to share, you crave that understanding, and that embrace of acknowledgement from people around you, you shroud away in silence in fear of being viewed as a desperate attention whore who will never deserve a second of peoples’ time to divulge your inner pain. Flashbacks of past lists of cyberbullying comments telling you that they wouldn’t be bothered if I’m trying to kill myself, or jeering from people who negated your pain, attributing my despair to the fact that I am pathetically weak. You know you should never listen to them, which makes the inner conflict even more intense as you fight between your raw emotions and rational thoughts. You continually think “this should be easy. Why am I the only stupid loser who can’t get her finger around this basic way of coping in life.” As you harp on how you are far from reaching the standard strength of people, that social comparison drives you further into depression, perpetuating the cycle of self-hate because you know you should know better than to compare – yet you still do.

I know you want people to realise the amount of effort you put into every goddamn day;

All you want is for someone to see from a distance that you are drowning, only to throw you a life buoy but not near enough for you to grip onto to save you.

All you want is for someone to care enough to point out to you that they see all the pain you hide behind closed doors and tell you that they appreciate that you’re still trying like hell to stay alive despite it all. No one does, but I am going to tell you that I see it all darlin’.

I know that although you have major episodes of depression, you try like hell to selflessly keep it to yourself and not bother people. Sure, you may argue that it’s really for your own sake so that you avoid more hateful comments but you are trying your best to please people even when you are hankering after death at times. That my dear, takes so much heart and hardly anyone can do what you’re doing so give yourself the credit you deserve alright?

I see how you have intermittent bawling sessions to accommodate the life you force yourself to continue leading in fear of disappointing people with your mentally-handicapping illnesses. I saw you on your days to work as you trudged on with an endless stream flowing down your cheeks, sniffing adamantly and tilting your head back to force the tears back where you thought they belonged – inside. I saw your face of grit as your clenched your fist and bit your lip, breathing out heavily before putting on your apron to serve customers for the next new hours. I saw you as you left work, proceeding to uni, with the desire of catharsis, yet constraining it as much as you could because you felt ashamed to be an emotional mess in public. I heard your fluent lies as you told your friend in class who inquired why your face was incredibly red and forcing a smile just to make crying impossible. Again, after class, you revert back to your usual melancholic self on the bus ride back (sometimes walking home because you feel undeserving of that convenience and you feel the need to punish yourself further by tiring your body out more than it already is). I see it darling, don’t you worry even no one does – right to the moment when you flip your hair up and force a “hi!” to your dad as you enter the house, when you were mainly concerned with sucking in all the tears, eager to finally let it all out after locking yourself in your room and writing furiously in your diary in the dark, with ink smudges your tears as your sole companion.

I know that you still struggle with elements of your eating disorder as much as you put on an amazing show of how you are completely over it. You tell everyone just how much you adore food and how much you eat to feel less embarrassed by using that mammoth intake you pronounce to everyone to justify your bigger size. You toss aside diet talk flooded your eardrum inboxes with a laugh, saying how amazing it feels to eat in an unrestricted manner. Gosh, this just shows how far you’ve come – remember how you used to combat that diet talk with “oh I used to starve for 5/6 days straight”, as if you’re still sickly trying to one-up those “wannabes” who you perceive as trying to take your position of the girl with the “most self-discipline”.

As much as you can combat all that talk and even emaciated figures who pop up like unwanted lollipops in your life now, at the back of your mind, that accumulated effect of exposure to triggers does take a toll on you on nights when you’re struggling to stay motivated. How brave you are to get up in the middle of the night to follow your heart (to the kitchen LOL) and get a whopping bowl of Weetameal biscuits to snack on simply because you feel like it. I see you lying on your bed at 4am, and you think “it’s technically the morning and you darn well know that there’s no food after midnight till the evening the next day.” But recently, you are deliberately trying to defy the voices and break all those ludicrous rules ED had planted in your mind amidst your state of denial and pretense to be completely over ED. After finishing your first bowl, I notice the swarm of thoughts that circulate in your mind as you tirelessly contemplate whether you should defy the voice yet again and get another bowl – and you do, comforting yourself that this is the way to be healthy and live the life you were meant to. You figured that you could cope with the guilt regardless.

Gosh, that spark of self-belief, though seemingly minute in the grand scheme of it all, is a cry to the heavens of awestriking victory that you my dear, have all the reason to love yourself for.

There is so much more you are battling with that I mayn't have mentioned because there is simply no way in the universe of stringing together alphabets eloquently enough to bring justice to your victories that are definitely not cast in the oblivion of imagination nor instances of invented suffering.

You are hurting but don’t worry darlin’, I see your tears and…