Catharsis

There is nothing more familiar than the feeling of wearing my old patch work jeans; with years of patches on multi colored thread, they cover my skin in a graveyard of shitty denim. I am used to the rugged scratchiness of the stitches rubbing my legs raw when I walk; they bear down on me as a reminder of how heavy it feels to make a life worth living.

If I have to introduce myself to the world again, the one thing I would say is I tried my best until I couldn’t, and then I tried again. When I was younger, my life had been a gamble with card sharks to survive, and it usually didn’t pay off. This can kill a woman slowly without her realizing she’s dying, and by some grace of God, I was the lucky one who was able to see it before it was too late.

Tuesday started as a broken day like any other; I fought my way out of the bed that had claimed me captive for a week. Filthy with sweat, I forced myself to shower and wash the previous night and all of its bullshit away. I put on the cleanest t-shirt I could find and the usual patch work jeans.

Ignoring the hopelessness in my gut, I drove to an appointment with my therapist; I had tried this a million different ways before and had my ass kicked over and over again until I became numb to it. This Tuesday morning would be no different, I was sure.

I had come to the therapist to find a listening ear to unload and leave. I sat down in front of her with a mouth like a full balloon of words I wanted to say. Despite this, they stayed fat and stagnant behind unmoving teeth.

“I feel like my mind is a little black book of secrets,” I had said in a moment of pleading desperation, “all I want is a way to unbox it all and mourn, and leave it in an attic somewhere and move on.” I had buried myself so far below the surface that I wanted to cry in frustration, but my eyes had forgotten how- my emotions were so practiced in numbness that not even the sharpest cruelties from people I trusted could break that deadened complacency.

The therapist watched my face twist with irritation and began to take notes, nodding with all the professional frigidity of any mental health specialist when their patient has a mouth full of lead.

When she completed her assessments, she said, “I think this is a good start. Hey, you’re trying! The concept of the little black book is interesting, though, isn’t it? Maybe on top of these therapy sessions, you could keep a journal.”

She paused to look at me for any signs of life, and continued, “I find it helps to write your feelings down.” I balked at the idea, as my feelings were like a knot in my throat that fought tooth and nail to avoid being turned into words. I mused aloud, expressing the fear that writing out my feelings would make them tangible, like a ball and chain strapping my ankles to a past I want to forget.

She shook her head and responded, “It isn’t about making the feelings real. They already are. This is about accepting them as normal and moving on. It’s a personal catharsis.”

I didn’t think too much of this in the moment- it was only afterwards as I was sitting in my car that I admitted to myself that I actually needed some release, as she'd suggested- I was one fried wire away from an explosion. On the drive home, I let my thoughts drift over the pain I had wrestled with for a lifetime, and in the midst of this stream of consciousness, I came to an uncomfortable realization.

Up until now, I had always thought of my pain as a ghost trying to possess me, a separate entity that craves its own flesh and bones. As my thoughts garnered clarity from the quiet of my car, I realized that the pain already had a body of its own- my body.

I had spent all this time looking at therapy as a way to exorcise demons, but, like the poorly sewn patches in my jeans, I had patched the wounds of childhood guilt using thin fabric and cheap thread just to get away from them; because of this, I had turned myself into a stitch work of haunts- a woman constantly running from all of the pain in her past, when all the while her mind is the real threat, striking to kill when she least expects it.

After a debate with myself, I decide that it can’t hurt to try my hand at putting pen to paper. I hoped I was better at it than I was at patching jeans. I sat at my kitchen table with a journal I had dug out of a drawer sprawled in front of me. I stared at its blank pages for what felt like hours; their barrenness taunted my inability to feel anything worthwhile when I needed to.

Finally, I huffed in frustration and gave up, my thoughts weary with the responsibility of breaking years of trauma into bite size pieces for my brain to digest. I had been trying to force words out for two hours when I heard a knock at my door; I answered to find my friend Gary had come to visit me. He asked how I was doing, to which I lied and told him I was great. The conversation dragged on to small talk, then died down entirely; the atmosphere between us quickly became awkward. In an unusual move, he decided to cut through the lull of conversation with a gift.

“It isn’t much,” he admitted, “but it seems like you need this more than I do!” With this, he pulled a shiny new lottery scratch card out of his pocket and offered it to me. I thanked him, saying that he should just take it himself, as my luck is not the kind that wins me any prizes- in response, he just laughed and placed the ticket in my palm.

“Keep it,” he said to me with a wink. “You never know.”

As soon as the door latched behind him, I stared at the golden ticket in my palm. It sparkled like a beacon of all the good things that I couldn’t have; me, the china cabinet bull, a woman with hands that break everything they touch- I couldn’t take risks because I hated to lose.

As my thoughts took a nihilistic turn, I threw the scratch card onto the table and cuddled into my living room couch to wallow in the quiet I had so much of; it was there in the comfort of my shitty apartment that my mind began to crack into another depressive episode. Internal monologues are only as stable as the lifetime of experiences that shape them, and mine had been beaten into the belief that love and abuse were the same thing. Thoughts like these become a grenade in silence, and people like me can’t help but to pull the pin.

This is how I slipped into the idea of death like a new dress. The open wounds in my mind I had shoddily patched up over time became fervently apparent in my thoughts like baiting a fish. I thought, a heart that doesn’t beat is invincible. A bull that doesn’t breathe means a cabinet full of unbroken china.

The more I turned these thoughts over in my mind, the more logical they seemed to me. I didn’t ask for this life. I didn’t ask for a father that I had to hide from in closets as a child. I didn’t ask for the bruises on my arms when he found me, or the way he yanked me around when he was drunk. I hadn’t asked for the men I’d trusted to turn yes into no and lay a welcome mat between my thighs when I begged them to leave me alone. I certainly hadn’t asked to make a shitty patchwork collection in my head like a hat full of traumas for my depression to pull from every day.

I get up from the couch and go take a long look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I want to give hope one last chance to make a home in my head, but the only thing looking back at me is a bag of bones crudely sewn together in the shape of a girl.

In this moment, I become aware of the constant itch in my knees from where my jean fabric has frayed; its sorry patch job of jagged stitches stare at me like a golden lottery ticket begging to be scratched out. Would I win a prize then? Would I be happy despite all of this bullshit?

I go back to settle onto the couch with a looming awareness of the silence that awaits me there. As I pass the kitchen, I can’t help but notice a golden sparkle in my periphery, like an open hand offering a chance to want something more for myself than just a quiet china cabinet. I glance over and spot the ticket laying on the table. In this moment, a glimmer of hope staggers my apathy, and I don’t know what to make of it.

A part of me still craves something more than another hole for my life to fill with stillness. What if I could rip the patches out and sew myself back together one stitch at a time? What if I let my wounds heal and become scars, like a monument to a pain that doesn’t hurt anymore?

I grab the lottery ticket and reach into the pocket of my jeans. At the bottom I pull a penny from its recesses and commence scratching away, imagining that I am shedding the history that dragged behind me for years, becoming as weightless as a new pair of jeans with no patches on them. When I’d scratched off all of my numbers, I sighed as deeply as I could. In my fixation with this strange hope I had claimed as my own, I had barely registered what appeared on my lottery ticket. $20,000! I had to reread it several times in order to let this stroke of luck settle into actualization. Was this what it felt like to have things that everyone wants?

This was like a beautiful golden beacon that screamed joyous, unchained words into the air until it was full of them. It promised me that I was worth all the love and none of the fists. I opened my journal to a blank page and began to write my feelings down; for once, the words came to me as fluidly as water.

That Tuesday night, I wrote a true story about surviving when you want yourself dead- a manifesto of feelings about a day in my life where I had gotten a penny for my thoughts and used it to scratch off a lottery ticket and scratch out the stitch work of past trauma to make room for the love I deserve.

The next day, I would place the ticket in my pocket for good luck and buy some new jeans at Target. I would throw the old jeans in the trash and hug myself tightly under a golden sky, thanking god that I am alive to see it.

For tonight, though, I make do by filling the air with all the resounding joy of my personal catharsis. I say out loud, “One stitch at a time. One stitch at a time is good enough, Alex.” I lay my head down on the little black book that I write my feelings in and, for the first time in years, I cry.