Breaking the Habit

Every day it fades and it fades and it fades.

The happiness is fleeting, and I embrace it when I can with underlying trepidation. I know it's only temporary, and it will bring with it the darkness I know all too well.

I know this darkness more than I know my own flesh and blood. If there is ever a time when I truly know myself without the underlying confusion, it's when this void envelopes me.

There is no gender, no sexual or romantic orientation, no sense of self, no constant unknowing of who I am intrinsically and what I do or don't desire. I don't have to go in circles endlessly about why I'm frightened of intimacy, why I find myself so repugnant I can't even bear to think of my naked body, or why my sense of self changes from day to day.

All of this uncertainty is what society fears, and they deem you suspicious because who in the hell doesn't know who they are at their core? Who changes from day to day?

The truth of my identity is too dark, too scary. So I lock it away inside my house and I never leave. I make bedfellows with it and I sing it, and I write it, and I bleed it out, and I draw it. I express the only part of myself that I know so clearly in so many different ways, all of which I am mediocre at.

I do not have the beautiful kind of pain other artists have expressed. Mine is messy and distorted, ugly and frightening. Mine is too honest and unstable, and I cannot shape it into something romantic or pretty. I don't want my pain to be romantic or pretty. I want it to be real.

I can write poetry with flowery words, and I can attempt to sing songs by others who have felt the same pain as me, although I don't have the ability to sing well. I can draw the visions I see, as well as the symbolisms in my waking nightmares.

I will be seen as toxic, edgy, an attention-whore, a monster who makes too many mistakes and cannot be forgiven for them.

Maybe it is because I cannot forgive the mistakes of others from my past. Maybe it is because I cannot forgive my past abusers, or myself, for the wounds I inflicted on my own skin because of them. I certainly cannot forgive myself for the things I've said and done when psychotic, afraid, and alone. Nothing I say about any of it will be deemed as anything other than deception.

I fear every day that pouring out my soul, or talking about my pain, will make me seem like an attention-seeker. A toxic trauma-dumping asshole who can't keep it inside. Who can't stop making mistakes and saying things in ways I did not mean, but they were said and I hurt people I loved.

My abusers have caused me to become toxic with the weight they put on me at such a young age. Others do not deserve to be given the same poison, so I lock myself away with the darkness.

Just like Chester Bennington once sang about locking himself in his room while trying to break the habit, I, too, have done the same in different ways over the course of my life. My room at night was safe away from abusive children at school as a child, and although I never had a lock on my door growing up and my room was not private or sacred as it should be, I found ways to hide myself away. I hid in my diaries, in my stories, and in my drawings until they were invaded by those who denied me privacy.

Now, I sit here in my home with the doors locked at all times. I double, triple, quadruple check them every night out of paranoid fears that someone will want to break in and hurt me or steal from me. Now that I can truly be alone, though — solitary without another sound around me — I have that privacy to lock the door and no one can come in unless I allow it.

And I rarely allow anyone. The friends I still have I rarely see, although that is partly my fault. I choose to lock myself away from others so I cannot make more mistakes. No one deserves my toxicity. I can't make anymore mistakes. So I isolate, and I've decided isolation is the best decision for myself and others.

My health is declining, but I neglect it because the effort would be more than I have the energy for. It's too difficult to work around schedules and fight through the chronic illnesses and daily panic attacks to see a specialist or a regular doctor. Half of the time, I don't even feel my psychiatrist truly listens to what I'm explaining.

They say I need a trauma therapist, but will it just be another year or more of trial and error until I find someone who works well with me? I don't have the energy to get to know anyone new to make friends, let alone go through the mental gymnastics to tell multiple new therapists my trauma over and over and over again.

I am rotting away slowly, and I feel that is where I'm meant to be. A doctor from an insurance company once told me that I was just going to eventually kill myself anyway because of the statistics, since I'd attempted to kill myself before. So maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fate. Eventually. Not today.

We lost Chester Bennington to this void. I understand and love him now more than ever, more than I did as a suicidal child, and I feel that's my destiny too. I just won't have anything as beautiful to leave behind.

©2022 Shane Blackheart