depression delugeulation, 2:08AM

It’s hard for me to be vulnerable.
Even as I write this I feel a highway[ofallmyhairthat’sbeen-falling- out in the word, “vulnerable.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve ran away from writing for so long; my pinky toes poke out of my worn nikes.

—

I wrote my college essay about the strength that arises from vulnerability. I wrote about moving into blizzards outside and standing in awe of the voices of earth that drowned out my own.
 I sold myself as “being able to be vulnerable.
 I prided myself in ‘being able to nudge my friends to trust because I was able to confide in them first.

My best friend thanked me for showing her how to share some of herself on my birthday sometime around that year of essays; she gave me two envelopes — one with random adjectives she thought of when she thought of me and one with little folded up pieces of paper, stapled shut — little pieces of herself that she was trusting my hands to open if I wanted to. It remains the most important gift I have ever been given.

As I sat on my floor against the closed door of my apartment with all these little papers, I did not think of how I had not told her yet of my sexual assault. I had not told her of my eating disorders. I had not told her of my parents telling me that love is not unconditional, that my responses to them unintentionally triggering me every night after my sexual assault did not earn their love or even their money on Chinese New Year.

—

The summer before Dartmouth marked a full year I had walked away from therapy the first time. I was in a space where I was to rehash every detail I could remember of my sexual assault twice a week. 
 Today I’ve never felt more removed from that incident during the day — I’ve never remembered his face and now I also don’t remember his paint-splattered boots or feel the transnational language of his calloused hands between folds of cloth and my bare skin (sometimes) — and in the late Dartmouth mornings and nights, I’ve never felt more traumatized. I am that girl again of a paralysis that won the fight while voice box took flight. I am that girl who ran halfway home and stumbled into slumber, alone with her tainted clothes and shoes drenched in moonlit bed-sheet waves
 and guilt.

—

On really bad days I can hear the seismic exhaustion as distance in my voice, see the dimness reflecting off my lenses into medication I’m afraid to take, people I’m afraid to ask.

—

I was in my therapist’s office last week. Sat there tired and on edge after not being able to make it to class again. Anxious, singed, and fidgeting with the elasticity of my hair tie, I lied and answered a question from her with, “Yeah I think I’m okay right now. This morning was bad, but I’m okay.”

I had every reason to trust. Her job is to create my space for trust and relief, yet I sit in the armchair across from her and fidget with my elasticity week after week. I wanted to trust. I always want to trust and to ask and be a person others can trust. But I find myself holding back during moments my sisters set aside for raw love. I find myself wanting to say words that I don’t say and wanting to hold people I didn’t/don’t speak enough to and really wanting to be held

often.

At the end of my session, my therapist asked me to look for things in myself to ground me. I thought of the rocks I used to bring to my classes when I entered late and abused by my own anxiety, performing failure. My pockets are filled with other things now; old tax return receipts, pen pieces, etc. Most of those rocks are gone.

— —

Though I rarely actually open to those around me, I am ever grateful for the basic knowledge that I can trust my loved ones. My best friend is oblivious to a lot, but when I didn’t know what to hold onto about myself I knew I could hold onto knowing her. As I ate less and more at the wrong times and broke into tears unexpectedly in the wrong places, I trusted her hug and the press of her shoulder into mine during United States History when I started slipping.

It’s hard not having her here. It’s hard that my best friend is so much more than a train-ride away now and the one I held onto most here was broken by this school into medical leave and radio silence. It’s hard to be broken by this school so that medical leave lingers in the back of my mind churning often with a sadness that I cannot understand or necessarily even want to. While I used to rely on long hugs, it takes a second for me now to let myself into a hug and by then the hug is more often than not over already. It’s hard to know people here don’t even want to sit close enough to press shoulders;
 and some can’t for safety.

But it’s nice to feel the small spots—

the pebble my best friend sent me from home to keep in my pockets in case;

the cinnamon rolls people bring me when I do come across the courage to reach out for help;

and the people who stay up with me silently working in my living room, unknowingly grounding me in my reality when I’m close to ripping all my hair out myself, in the hope of displacing some tears and agony with the strands that collect in my hands.

Thank you to these fugitive collectives from home and at Dartmouth, those who keep me here and learn with me a love of radicality and decolonization, a love of movement and critical complexity.
 As I’ll answer my therapist next week, some comment on my “passion” for justice, when in reality it is the only blizzard I can and must stand in now,

it is that movement of knowledge and action I can hold onto,

—

and maybe in that movement I’ll find a way to press shoulders with myself.