You Might as Well Live
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
I’ve been thinking about You Might As Well Live, the Dorothy Parker poem, a lot lately.
These recent months, I’ve been an emotionally hyperbolic ragdoll. I’m tapering down my current medication in hopes that another medication will help. Help me find normalcy, a solemnity, a place void of the viciousness of chemical imbalance. It’s exhausting, a cyclical nightmare of failed, fitful attempts at tempering pain.
I scream bloody murder, but internally so that the ripple effect on my outwardness is just a dose of perceived melancholy.
And then I have my highs.
Doom and gloom are juxtaposed with bouts of ebullience. Doom and gloom and bloom. Doom and bloom. Doom ‘n bloom.
Doom ‘n blooming onions available now for a limited time!
There’s so much awfulness in this world; I’m overwhelmed most of the time by it. It is the gloom.
I’m enamored and heartened by the joy, the empathy, and capacity us creatures have for love. I am infused by it, inspired to make a difference by it. It is the bloom.
In the between, in the other place, in the bright, anarchic, fatalistic part of my self, I am a lush; I drink heavily. I drink to slow down the solace and the anxiety and the feelings that I just don’t deserve anything at all: not love, not comfort, not a fucking heart beating another day back in me.
The loneliness of a long-distance lush.
“I don’t think you have a problem.”
My therapist told me that a few days ago. A day earlier, after a Wednesday night bottle of wine by myself (BOWBM), I sent her this:
Here’s a tip for people who go to therapy (which really should be all of you, but I don’t judge me, how dare you judge me):
The day before your appointment, send your therapist emails full of stuff you haven’t talked about yet but you totally need to talk about because you’ve been avoiding it. This way, you’re forced to talk about it! Fun! Vulnerability! Feelings!
She doesn’t think I have a problem with alcohol. She thinks I have a problem with my emotional state leading to alcohol. The math goes something like this: Loneliness + self-hatred + a childhood shutting down as a protective measure = “Alcohol is friend!”
I’m not dying. I’m living.
I’ve opened my heart to the adventure.
Originally published at nonwels.com.
