I Am a…
I spend so much of my life in my head that I don't even know what qualifies as real, as truth. If I say, I’ve done x—have I really done it, or have I spiked reality with my overloaded mind?
I don’t control cherries on top. There are too many of them, and not enough cake. For self-preservation’s sake, I make cakes out of leftovers of whatever gets lost in my daydreams, or whichever memory I’m too afraid to digest.
I’ve never felt like a real person. I’m more of a projection, a puppet, or even a lonely string, hanging by itself, from itself, into itself. Maybe that’s one reason I used to try so hard to establish myself as a clear-cut Someone.
‘I am a singer.’
‘I am anorexic.’
‘I am a suicide attempter.’
‘I am an imaginary girlfriend.'
‘I am a…drug user, now?’
A passion needs grounding. My passion was music, and yet the ground it lay upon was fragile. I had to water its soil to pretend it wasn’t rotten.
At sixteen, after seemingly having recovered from anorexia, I needed something tangible enough to protect the artist within me and define my sense of self. But I had nothing.
It was summer, and I travelled. I visited Dublin on my own; then Portugal, then Greece. I think I might have died somewhere around that time, but the heat misled me into maintaining an upright position.
My headphones served as a grave.
While in Dublin, I daydreamed full time. My imagination had always run wild, but upon discovering that I could create an entire world and force myself into it, it was too thrilling not to taste.
I kept my headphones on and walked around the city. Then I came back home, to the host family I’d been living with, and gave them a smile; emptied of conviction, but enough to convince them I was really there.
After I returned to high school, things turned too real and too dark for me to keep my eyes closed. I couldn’t translate the murky sun into anything other than a headache. I didn’t have enough time to commit to my daydreams, so they turned sloppy and I turned sloppy along with them. Sloppy and blurry, unreal and derealised. I needed grounding, an outline to confine myself in.
So I attempted to get high.
I had always condemned drug use. Or, rather, I had been afraid of it—afraid of losing an illusory sense of control. After hitting a suicide ideated rock bottom, however, I needed something new. My vocal cords were dry and the music was stale, so I needed to find another projection.
‘I am…a drug addict.’
How does that sound? Unreal. And unrealised. And phony.
I didn’t have friends or connections, or the motivation to take it seriously, so I resorted to pharmacies. I bought multiple pill variations with a range of side effects, yet I was still afraid to take them. So I started small.
Pseudo-ephedrine. If I squinted my mind long enough, it was almost like amphetamine. Not that I had anything to compare it to.
It was not a placebo, nor was it an illusion. It made me feel restless. And focused. And, if not confident, then careless. And not-hungry. It made me feel unnatural, in the best sense of the world. I felt an outline of mine growing thicker, even if it was made of an old snake’s skin. Or chameleon’s. If only that had been enough.
I was coming down faster than up, and the pills turned into depressants more than anything else. My following suicide attempt had resulted from taking them on an empty stomach during a weekend school trip.
When I came back home and had my first meal in two days, my organism was too resentful to digest it, and so I thought it was the perfect time to die. I walked around the room with disparate pills inside of me, barely aware of what was going on. I was holding a giant water bottle in my hand all evening, as if hydration could have kept my little death safe.
That was a nothing. I got up the next day and re-took a physics exam. And I continued with the pills until they were not enough.
After those few dreadful months, I finally tried the pills that scared me. It was the beginning of Christmas break, so I had more time to waste. One night, while listening to Audioslave in the darkness, I took ten of them. Dissociatives of some sort.
That, of all things, got me into a hospital. My little fantasy of a romantically miasmic oxymoron of drug experimentation turned into a full-blown family fiasco. For the first time in my life, I got grounded, though even that didn’t change much, since I preferred to stay home most of the time. How to punish an anxious bookworm-turned-fake-pillhead?
Even the label above is an overstatement. I took a “drug” whose name begins with pseudo—, and I landed in a hospital because my highly sensitive organism got a little bit too high too deep the first time around.
That was the end of my drug-ish phase. But it was the beginning of something else, something whose dawn I had missed, too preoccupied with becoming a stereotype. I missed its inception and it was too late to hold it back.
After passing my days in a haze, my nights were filled with smuggling pseudo-contraband chocolate into my mouth. And then out.
As I forced one identity onto myself, another one began to branch out. Having neglected anorexia recovery - never really dedicating to it in the first place - bulimia had risen in its place.
It was a mistake to believe that, having an addictive spirit, I could have chosen an addiction, and that every substance would have kept me afloat to a similar extent. I didn’t even like those pills much; they took my hunger away, and although I didn’t want to be hungry, those pills subdued an appetite that served as the only motivation to keep going. Maybe, in a subconscious space, I craved the comedowns more than the highs, because it doubled the hunger—and then doubled the binge, and the purge. And then duplicated the self-hatred.
Maybe I wanted the hatred, too. Maybe it gave the mind what the junk food gave the body: a filler. It was certainly better than glass-eyed inertia.
Writing this now, after relinquishing drug-taking altogether, and going through numerous loops of eating disorder phases, I can say with certainty that there is nothing that gives me such a high as food does. I’ve been clean from binging and purging for over half a year now, and yet the cravings are as dedicated as my will not to act upon them.
If there was anything that helped, other than discipline, it was malleability. Who cares if I’m an anorexic, a singer, a writer, or a fake drug user? There are no alternatives between life and death, and the labels do nothing but let me stall, pre- and pseudo-fixed in a one-track mind.
If I’m x or y, I am a static extreme. If I’m none of those things - or a bit of all of them - I can be somewhere in-between; and the only real life there is exists in between.
A London-based student, Alex Blank has been experimenting with various forms of writing for the past few years. Through prose poetry, journalism, fiction and so on, she’s continuously finding and refinding her voice. She’s a culture editor and writer for Roar News, and her work has also appeared in publications such as HuffPost UK, Strand Magazine and Heliopause Magazine.
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