when living is painful

a photo of young Ant, likely captured by mom or sis.

dear young ant,

on FKA twigs' "thank you song", she puts the pain of just being alive so simply: "i wanted to die, i'm just being honest / no longer afraid to say it out loud"

i've struggled with a deep-rooted sadness since i was an adolescent. this sadness takes the form of a sort of rumble. until recently, i thought the rumble would accompany me throughout my entire life. no matter how much work i put in to heal it, address it, tend to it, run from it, nurture it, uproot it, i had long since accepted that the rumble was a part of me. not the fault of any one person, group of people, event, series of events, and so on. not the fault of my parents, my siblings, my childhood bullies, or me, merely just a fact of my life. a permanent existential plague, a sort of omnipresent nihilism.

for at least a decade now, i've been on a journey of learning and ignoring and observing and

listening and heeding and dismissing and

healing and forgiving and hurting others and

feeling feelings but mostly intellectualizing them to avoid feeling them and

self-harming and living and loving and

surviving not thriving and avoiding and

taking breaks and overproducing and

oversharing and

undersleeping and oversleeping and

disappointing and people pleasing and

not nourishing my body and avoiding and

avoiding and busying and avoiding and

searching for love and being unkind to myself and

not allowing most people in, especially when they loved me more than i loved myself at that moment.

both formal and informal, i have tried so many healing modalities and activities to lessen the pain of daily living. cognitive behavioral therapy, regular talk therapy, art, dancing, acupuncture, cupping, deep tissue massage, venting, writing, medication, reiki, spiritual limpias, prayer, mindfulness meditation, avoidance, exposure therapy, physical exercise, sex, creative expression, better sleep hygiene, herbal supplements, herbal teas, plant medicine, sweatlodge, isolation, immersion, volunteering, teaching, cooking, less screen time, positive self-talk, transcranial magnetic therapy.

that last one stands out for me, mostly because i don't know if either round of it worked: sitting in a chair for 30 minutes a day, five days a week for multiple weeks with a large magnet tapping on my head to help retrain my brain away from the frequently felt depths of depression and the apex of anxiety. weeks of this treatment and many copays for a method that does not work for everyone. that could have worked for me, but i really don't know.

no matter the intervention, the rumble continues within me every day. and when i get quiet, when i let myself rest, when i don't use sleep as avoidance or busyness as avoidance or working as avoidance, the pain can overwhelm me. the rumble is everything—emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual, material, shit it's even structural. and unsettling all around.

so. life often feels like a series of distractions that i and those in my life curate for me to feel the rumble less, think about the rumble less, hear the rumble less. i can be present with a friend or a partner or a family member for hours, genuinely present. but the rumble does not dissipate, it merely bides its time, i'm distracted from it. and the rumble is patient. persistent. so comfortable, at this point. so familiar, even if dysfunctional. precisely because it's dysfunctional. people often tell me that the rumble is not visible to/audible to/felt by them, but the rumble remains nonetheless.

a few months ago i told someone i love that it hurt to live, that i felt like a black hole, like a pit of negativity taking others down with me. it hurt to live. it has for a long time but it was feeling particularly bad most of 2022. and even though i knew i was not a black hole, that's how dark it was for me. i was in a bad place. not actively suicidal, not actively planning death by my own hands, but definitely welcoming a painless, quiet, and uneventful death to release me from the pain of living. i did not quite want to die but i definitely did not want to be alive.

just like i told him at the time and my therapist later, i was not in danger of harming myself or anyone else. i just didn't want to be here in any way. mind-body, body-mind, spirit, anything. i wanted out and it was not the first time i had felt like this in my life. things were going well in my life on paper but it sure didn't feel like that internally.

i'm not there anymore. i'm not there anymore and i'm so grateful, so proud of myself. but because of my familiarity with the rumble, the persistent nature of it, the comfort with it despite how fucked it gets, it took me some time to admit aloud and to others that i am actually doing well for the first time in a long time. i feared that it was just a fluke. but after weeks of feeling like this, i know it is not a manic episode or just a peak. it's not just the absence of stressful events either, because i've got plenty of those and a lot of pain i still feel. but my rumble means that the highs do not feel very high but the lows feel extraordinarily low. so the idea that I’ve had a peak at all was and still is...strange.

but something shifted. and—i'm practicing an optimism that is contrary to how i typically think—i can maintain this shift. the rumble has quieted a bit. i still feel sadness and anger and pain and hurt deeply, but they're not all-encompassing nor are they ever present. i also have started to feel joy and pleasure and contentment much more frequently and for longer stretches of time than i am used to. i can see my growth, i can see my achievements, i can see the love that i am and that i give. i can see what i deserve and how unkind i have been to myself for so long. and not just cognitively see them, but emotionally feel the weight of them, the warmth, the contentment, the sadness, the grief.

i have hope?

i try to be as honest as i can with myself and other people, and I’ve had hope for people, groups, ideas, movements, non-human beings, all of that. but i had resigned myself to not hoping the rumble might ever disappear. but i have hope? not that it'll disappear, no, because i think there are some core wounds that might not ever heal enough to scab and scar. but that the rumble will one day hold less power over my life. that the rumble will not pull me so deeply into despair, at least not on a daily basis. grief is hard and i cannot predict the future, but i do know i'll be low again at some point. but low in a situational way, like when someone you love passes. not low in a daily way, even when things are going well. not low in a daily way where you want to be well and you just aren't.

i have hope that there is a future where i am consistently and comfortably content. so not just content on the regular, but content in a way that i actually embrace it and find comfort in it rather than fearing it or remaining in discomfort. these hopes are not things i could picture for myself prior to around the summer of 2021, even as i tried my best to live a content and full life. again, caveats feel necessary. postscripts feel necessary. because i'm so used to the rumble. because i don't know how i'll feel in a day or week or month or year. but at the very least, i want to capture this glimmer of hope. and at the very best, i want my future to exceed my most outlandish dreams.

love you, proud of you, hopeful for you,

ant