Desperate.

I wrote this in October 2018, when I was beginning to understand the difference between surviving mental illness and actually living with it.

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I figure a person does not know what real pain is until they have felt desperate. You know the kind of desperation that will alter you. For better or worse, it is something that changes you. Desperation reveals itself in many ways. There are no “proper” or socially acceptable ways to feel desperation. But there is an area of the many shades of grey making up the colossus of desperation that only the people who have ever felt or been privy to its torture will understand the prose in my letter to you, my dearest friend. Annie, I know you have made acquaintance with this grey. I dedicate this to you.

I think when a person comes out the other side of that desperation, if they are lucky enough to have survived—survived inwardly—there is still an ember of something. Do not know what it is, but you feel the burn. Your eyes are clear for the first time.

You are tuned into life and all its torment. The shit that made sleep evasive does not even bother you. You simply do not lose sleep. You have slept in your rental car (if you are lucky), on the park bench in Southside Park, in the rain. You are grateful for what you once saw as a right. Food, clothes, makeup. You just keep going. Because although, from all appearances and logic, your eyes cannot see, your heart cannot find, your hands cannot fabricate, your vocabulary escapes you.

There’s nothing, anything. There is nothing to live for. But there is one thing you think of. It could be as stupid as an oil change. The oil change is a promise there is going to be a tomorrow.

Then you remember the day after, you have a room full of monsters to pack up to send to Goodwill.

So, like Dorothy Parker said, “you might as well live.”

I am on my own without my bloodline in my life. I had a choice to make, and I chose life. The jury’s still out on that statement. I am a business owner. I have a son, Jackson Marcellus Smathers. He is 8. Life is hard. Being an adult is hard. But every day—not all day, every day—I am happy. I do not know why I just wrote all that, but I had a hard afternoon, and the writing thing is cathartic.