A diary entry
CW: This post discusses suicide.
It’s been two months since I last wrote here, and they’ve been strange ones. A few days after my last post, on Easter Sunday, my friend died by suicide. I’d been trying very hard to help her for the last few months of her life, but in retrospect her death felt like a speeding train I was helpless to stop.
My partner and I were the ones who went to her apartment and found out that she’d died. This fact still feels surreal, and detached from everything that came after. Talking about it is uncomfortable. I feel like I’m asking for attention, to be centered in a narrative that isn’t about me. But not mentioning it feels like lying by omission.
Strangely, I’ve felt pretty much fine in these last two months, better than I did in the months preceding her death. Some of that can be attributed to getting on medication that’s working pretty well (though not without side effects, more on that later). I haven’t really experienced a deep sense of grief or loss yet. Maybe this is all I’m going to feel, or maybe the worst is still coming.
This week though, I’ve been quite anxious again. I helped plan a party last weekend and got too drunk, and ever since my thoughts have been spinning. I’m experiencing some strange symptoms that may relate to clenching my jaw at night, a side effect of my new medication. It’s not great.
I don’t know why I feel comfortable sharing all this in a public newsletter with strangers. Therapists always seem impressed at how open I am, like I’m making progress just by sharing. I just don’t often worry about privacy. Maybe it’s growing up on the internet, or maybe it’s just who I am.
Daphne, my friend who died, was an oversharer too, much worse than me. Though she hid some aspects of herself from many people, if she trusted you, she’d tell you the weird or gross things about her life with glee, and without provocation. Today, I saw two stylish and tattooed teenage girls on the street who reminded me of her, joking about a “chonky” cat. I still can’t believe she’s really gone.
We’re back in lockdown here in Melbourne, while New York and the US in general is finally opening up again. I still have no idea when I’ll be allowed to go home, it could easily be more than a year from now. The future is still vacant.
This post is just word vomit, a diary entry, and part of me wonders why anyone would want to read it. It’s difficult to escape the pressure to succeed in a traditional sense or make “good” work as a creative person. I don’t want to spend my life crafting myself into a consumable image, or worrying about an audience of strangers, but that seems like the only way to make things publicly. The best you can do, probably, is make peace with it. Maybe by making intentionally unpolished work, like this. Maybe by taking breaks, having a day job, and internalizing that what you make and how much you succeed doesn’t define you. That’s what I’m trying right now, anyway.