You did WHAT?

I hope I do this right. Unfortunately, part of my story has to do with the loss of someone, and that beautiful, brilliant someone belongs to a number of beautiful, brilliant, strong family members and friends who sting for her every day. It’s impossible to think of a way to honor her properly in the framework of a narrative centered around me, and describing such grossly indulgent and juvenile behavior.

So my friend’s mom died. I want to address this first before I do anything, because it was something that was happening during this time, and that I will mention. I’m going to just take a moment to try to acknowledge what deserves volumes, and just say something, I guess. This isn’t really for any one but _____ and her family, as one day they may (whether I send it or not) come across this and the respect of acknowledgment is more than deserved before I do anything else. I am preserving anonymity out of respect.

To you,

You have a light, that while you were here, exploded into a fine glittering of nova stardust particles that have permeated what’s left of our dying atmosphere, and stretched beyond, through the entire galaxy. We all breathe in a bit of you, your light, each day-- and when we do --we are touched with a whisper of abounding love, a glimmer of deep belly laughter, microscopic particles of a warmth unlike any that existed before you.

And that’s what her spirit is, to me. Family, my heart is with you. I am a call away, always. That is the least I could do. I am eternally grateful for you all being open arms over the years. You and she couldn’t comprehend what your welcoming and love has done for me and meant to me over the years. Love, always. Thank you.

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When I say that right now I don’t know how to proceed, it’s because I don’t, and the only thing I can think to do is be honest as I move through this. I just don’t know how to connect what I just wrote to the rest of this essay the right way. But I know it has to be here.

What I’m going to explain is two events. Two bodily changes I made with a year between them. I’m coming from a perspective of two years following the first. Though I will spend a lot of time on the first… change I made, having an understanding of that is what makes the second (the positive change I made that symbolizes growth) so rewarding and evident of how far I’ve come.

In explaining the first change I made, the event in which it happened, there are all these hard things. It’s all a hot mess. A flaming, molten, hellfire mess.

There are so many layers, events, and moments and thoughts leading up to what I did. I don’t know how to explain it. I still haven’t actually tried to untangle the complicated network of events and thoughts and feelings, actions, that form what my brain was when I enacted this… stylistic transformation? I’m taking the opportunity to try to right now, as I write this. So, please bear with me.

The event itself in many ways was just the top of a roller coaster ride, right before plummeting down to the bottom— to stumble off and throw up carnival fries or corn dogs or whatever. There was a certain tension and distress going up, and a whole other type of disturbed anguish on the way down. I think back on parts of the last three years of my life, who I was, the decisions I made, why I did what I did (usually I can’t really figure out why) and just cringe, and wince, over and over and over again. I try to tell myself that it is okay—I was 18,19 — and that even now, at a day before 21, I am going to mess up and do things that aren’t always the best for me or the people around me. But, looking back, yikes.

Okay. Before the funeral, before the start of the school year, before most of the summer, a friend that I had a (huge) crush on nearly killed me. I don’t want to say it any other way. I don’t want to say that he tried to. So nightmarish, how everything went down. It was night and he was on psychedelics and I was sober, driving. I don’t know why I didn’t think it could be a potentially bad idea to trip-sit for a college football player who is 6’2 and 260lbs. Certain things in life happen and you don’t think those kinds of things will happen to you until they do. A large part of me feels like it was my fault, or at least that I could’ve prevented if I’d just thought a little bit ahead and asked: what can go wrong with this?

Luckily, my car didn’t crash, just veered off from the road and stopped. Another friend was in the car when it happened and literally saved me, somehow peeled him off of me so I could escape. She’s traumatized, and I hate that she had to go through that. I hate that he had to go through that. From all that he said and did that night, I can’t imagine what hell he was internally going through. When we got back to school, he tried to call and tell me. I listened, then I blocked him on everything. We went to the same school still— I couldn’t bring myself to press charges against him. Every other time in my life that I’d experienced him was beautiful. I struggled (and still do) to think that what happened could be a real reflection of him. But at the same time, I just couldn’t shake the memory of him staring into my eyes while hurting me and saying that he wanted to hurt me, that he planned on hurting me worse. The whole situation screwed me up. It made me afraid of monsters under my bed again. The dark.

After what happened, I took a couple days off of my internship to try to calm the swelling of my jacked up face and ate Ritalin to feel like I was in control or something. Keep me going. Almost like it was ordained by fate, that next day my phone died-- went kaput --and I just didn’t get a new one. For most of the rest of that summer, my life was Ritalin, coffee, internship, home. Sometimes, I’d have to go to the gas station.

By that September I’d been subsisting in the confines of a choking fear and sadness, a constant suffocation. Every unconscious, unmonitored breath felt like it was cusping upon a violent sob. Teetering on the brink for a period of months was managed-- poorly. When I reached campus it all started to fall apart, and quickly. Paranoia. I skipped classes. I avoided the bars and the quad and library and the cafeterias because I didn’t want to see him. I’d convinced myself that what happened to me was a result of some type of planned effort and viewed the people around me with suspicion. I self medicated with whatever I could get my hands on. Not that I hadn’t been taking drugs before, but the purpose was much different than what it had been. I didn’t feel like my friends anymore, who popped Adderall for finals and drank to feel uninhibited and dance around. I wasn’t taking things to get good grades or have fun, it felt like a need.

Living in the reality of my misery, the things that had happened to me, then and before, the great, great number of struggles and obstacles and demands of working towards a healthy life, towards happy--I can’t even finish that sentence in a way that describes how awful a sober state felt. I just didn’t feel strong enough to face life like that. I took comfort in sinking deeper.

I won’t say that I completely wanted to sink into oblivion. Some part of me deeply believed that if hitting “rock bottom” didn’t kill me, I would have some kind of intervention of fate-- God maybe, the Universe-- that would set me right. I remember actually reading an online article about my astrological sign that voiced my exact inclinations that late summer:

“Like the crash-and-burn Phoenix, Scorpios need harm, risk, danger and near-death events if they wish to evolve and cycle higher.”

I held on to that belief with a vice grip, because it seemed to explain what I was going through in a way that didn’t mean I was cursed, which honestly is what I feared.

Just about a year ago my dad said something that I, even being on the other side of all this mess, hadn’t grasped. He said something along the lines of, “You need to stop, waiting for something, to happen to force you to change. You have to change”.

Yes, I was sick. Delusional, navigating residual fear and insecurity from what I’d recently experienced, which brought up years of yuck I hadn’t sorted through-- pre-existing issues and traumas and vices I’d struggled with but never fully resolved. Who I was then, what I was, was the result of a slow violence that had been enacted on me since I was able to think for myself. Certain things I’d been conditioned to think and how I responded to that conditioning. Everyone has demons, entropic flaws, constant battles that must be fought for the duration of their lives. I didn’t recognize mine as such. I felt as if I was coming into myself. Though my life before looked good on paper, there wasn’t much that was healthy or sustainable in my reality. After what happened, I leaned into my comforts-- crutches --that had always been there. Before I even knew I was headed that way, my life wasn’t looking so hot on paper anymore. I felt that I was so much closer to hitting the bottom than surfacing. Looking back, I was unfathomably out of touch with reality.

Alright, and then my friend’s mom died. I left college in the middle of the week for home. We all did. It hurt, a lot. Being at home-- seeing my friends, and being there for them, with them-- it was like being in a different world where sadness was tangible and rooted in love and no one had to carry it alone. I have to acknowledge that there were so many who had known her longer than me, deeper than me, who hurt through the love of so many more years, decades. It hurt me worse knowing that. My friends were hurting. I went and I was with people who I loved who loved ________ and there was a warmth that dulled the sharp throb of grief in my stomach, just to be there. To do what I could-- because it’s not like I could do much.

I’d left behind a shit show.

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It was a couple days after coming back to school. I walked into my dorm room, empty. My roommate was probably off doing something fun. There was a heavy silence that felt like grief that hung in the air-- or maybe in my head. It had been days and I hadn’t unpacked. I hadn’t done anything. Barely eaten. I don’t remember where I’d come from, but in the previous days I’d barely left the bed.

I hurt for home, and the feeling of warm familiarity that comes from years of knowing someone. This pain won’t quit, so why can’t I feel it there? I thought. The feeling of a void in my stomach twinged desperately for _____. Just to be there, in the world with us. Put her back! I hissed in my head-- at who I didn’t know, just whoever had taken her from us. I wanted her to be placed right back in her house with her loved ones who miss her so much, back with her community that admires and cares for her. I wanted her back in the world, in human form.

I slumped in my desk chair, in some type of trance. Something was happening, from beyond the grief, the anxiety, constant fear. Or maybe from deep within them. The up-and-down and up-and-down that I constantly felt from what I would take to get up in the morning and what I would take wind down at night, seemed to merge and blend within me. Inside, my mind was buzzing with an onslaught of innumerable chattering thoughts, to the point that I couldn’t possibly focus on a single feeling. Emotion. Thought. I couldn’t distinguish one of either. I felt so singular and so foreign from everyone around me. I don’t know how this works, or what the psychological explanation is for it, but I could audibly hear a long shrill scream piercing through it all at a constant pitch from someplace in the back of my head. Regardless of all the chaos in my head, my room felt too quiet. So isolating, like a prison cell.

I’m losing it. That realization ascended subliminally and broke the surface of my waking consciousness. This is what it feels like to lose it. But there was nothing I felt I could do, what was going on in my head was just too loud. I couldn’t understand what was going on in my own head and I was convinced that no one would know how to help-- not even my therapist, my mom, a higher power.

Lonely, angry, wired, terrified, I sat down at my messy desk and started to coat makeup on my face. I don’t know why, but it was the only thing I could think to do in that pitiful moment. I felt so ashamed of who I was, for feeling the way I did. I wanted to get back all that I’d lost-- if nothing else, I wanted back what I’d lost of myself. I wanted to know-- what I would look like without my eyebrows.

Once you pull a trigger like that there is no going back.

Yeah, so I shaved off my eyebrows. There is a certain type of impulsivity that is particularly dangerous. I made a conscious decision, I had a moment of knowing the consequences and repercussions and irreversibility of an action, what I would lose and vaguely what I would feel and experience from it. Then I just went for it. I know that death is permanent in many beliefs, and shaving off my eyebrows isn’t. But still, in that moment there was a kind of death; I initiated the process of a kind of letting go that has an irreversible impact. With the shaving of my eyebrows, I simultaneously shed myself of my relationship with reality. I broke that barrier of what is rational and stable and hurtled myself into a kind of carelessness, lack of regard, abandon-- that is so extreme that it becomes in a way concerted. And it scares me, because that one impulsive moment wasn’t just of the trigger pulling variety. It’s the kind that any given answer to “why” can never quite explain. To me, it really didn’t matter, along with most things. It wasn’t a good liberation. It was giving up, succumbing to disorder and self-sabotage.

That reckless moment, it set the stage for the next... year? Just trigger pulling, everyday, not caring about my well-being. Making myself dumb to how, or to what extent I was hurting others as well as sabotaging myself. In many ways I shaved my eyebrows again and again, shed my connections to what was once a part of me, favored the boldness of the stark voids within me that made people look and know immediately that something isn’t quite right.

I’m not going to go through all the crap that happened after this. Maybe it would make a good story, but I don’t think it would do much but provide you with something interesting to read. I will tell you all what I’ve learned through it all.

Obviously, eventually, my eyebrows grew back. Ultimately, I changed. I grew. The trajectory has been anything but linear. Typically, it isn’t. It doesn’t always feel like I’m healing or growing or anything. I still have moments where I feel utterly stuck-- or even worse, like I’ve been transported back to my exact state of mind as in the moments that lead to shaving my eyebrows off.

Sometimes too, I’ll wake up and realize that I’m not quite what I was before- whether before is a week, 6 months, a year.

Feeling true, live, real pain is so much more worth it than feeling nothing, or feeling a drug-induced sense of joy/euphoria. The good moments are much more fulfilling when they happen with a clear mind and soul to feel them. Taking care of yourself doesn’t always directly result in feeling better. Escapism doesn’t get rid of all the yuck, the mess. It’s just waiting there for you when you’ve been forced back into reality-- whether that is when finding yourself in a silent room with only your thoughts to accompany you or in flashbacks and little moments after a traumatic, or even just stressful event.

There is infinite potential for change, always. You can create new neural pathways-- it’s scientifically proven. You can even recenter the perspective of your memories with mindfulness practice. With habit forming and practice and affirmation, all of what you have learned and grown into is capable of altering shape and direction.

I wasn’t always a nice person, and was far from my best self during this time. I want to take another moment to voice appreciation to an old friend for supporting me later that night, and in many other moments.

______, you gave me love when I was so devoid of feeling and you tried to root me and shelter me when I was the storm that was tearing everything up inside. Me, my decisions. The drugs I took and the people I chose to commit myself to. You couldn’t have dragged me out of that mess. I wasn’t a good friend to you, and I could’ve been, and I wish I could do that now. I really hope you are happy, and that you don’t put up with people like the kind of person I was then. You deserve so much love and support being given to you proportionally to how you give it. I hope you have that now. Thank you.

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One of the most important things I have learned is that I am who I choose to be. That makes me both accountable for what I do and have done and empowered to do differently. Yes, I have a lot to unlearn, always. Change may feel slow. Change is also held in the potential of every single decision I make. If I work towards doing what is best, not easiest for me-- I know that the person I am evolving into is the product of this effort, the work. That change couldn’t happen alone. I needed to stop trying to manage it all . I needed to speak to people, cry, and be a mess for someone else to hold even if I didn’t think it made sense to feel how I felt.

Therapy isn’t just okay. Therapy is good.

My eyebrows have grown in pretty nicely, potentially thicker (!) than before. I would joke to my friends that I never really had eyebrows to speak of anyways. But no, many days I look in the mirror and I enjoy the shape of my eyebrows, how they lightly trace my brow bone and accent my eyes. Then there are days I look at my face and feel a warm little flutter, like a summer breeze in my stomach-- like I have a small crush, an ongoing flirtation with the figure reflected back at me, and with the whole universe of everything that vessel contains. Those are the days it’s all worth it.

It has been kind of daunting to be vulnerable in this way. To write publicly to an audience about times where I wasn't my best, mistakes I've made and issues I've struggled with that wouldn't go over very well on a resume. But I think, that maybe this is a good thing. It's completely okay that I have this past. Even better, it has shown how much I have grown since then. Something feels kind of good, about this. Like writing about it, reflecting, is closing a chapter. I can live on. I am living on.

Oh, and I took to the clippers. That’s the second thing.

Last Thanksgiving, I shaved off all my hair. I’d been thinking about it for a while. That was a whole other experience, no trigger pulling. I was alone, and excited, a little anxious. I remember looking at myself after the last chunk of hair was shaved off and feeling so… okay. There was music playing on my phone, but my thoughts were pretty quiet. I knew exactly what was going on in my head, what I was feeling. I knew what I was doing, and why I felt like doing it. I’d had a plan to execute-- and then it was done and I was... bald. I felt like I needed to let go, in a different way. My hair felt heavy and over-processed and dead. I know that hair is dead skin cells, but spiritually, dead. My hair had gone through all of the hard nights and breakdown moments, right with me. I felt it was drained of all energy, had nothing to offer me anymore. It was just time to make a change.

I like it. I think I’m never growing it out. At least that’s what I tell my mom so that she’ll stop asking.