boycott love.
DETOX
This is how it feels.
You want to die. You want to claw off your own skin. You hate yourself. You hate everyone around you for doing this to you because you feel like shit. Even the people you love. Especially the people you love, actually, because you alternate between hating them for caring enough to make you do this and hating them because you don’t feel like you’re worth it. You aren’t. You aren’t worth it at all. You are a worthless piece of shit. You don’t know how to take care of yourself and you don’t know how to control yourself so there’s no point in sticking around to see how it ends. You sleep with oven mitts duct taped around your wrists so you can’t pick at the scars on your arms and thighs from weeks and months of self-harm. Someone sits with you in the bathroom every time you shower to make sure you don’t try to relapse while you’re shaving. Eventually you give up on being allowed to shave because it’s too hard to resist the urge. You hate yourself.
Do you hear that? You hate yourself. As much as you hate everyone else for caring and pushing you to do the things you don’t want to, you hate yourself more. Because you know that they care and you want to make them happy but you can’t stop yourself. You look for any opportunity you can to try something so you can go back to feeling normal. Feeling sober is not normal for you because you’re alone with your thoughts and they suck. You hate yourself. You hate that you can’t control these thoughts and feelings and you don’t know how to cope without something in your system to level it out. You can’t sleep half the time.
You can’t eat, either. Your body rejects everything you try to put in it. You feel sicker than you have ever felt in your entire life. Everything sucks. You shake and you shake until you can’t handle it anymore and you just want to be dead so you can be put out of your misery. You want to die. You really do. And you can’t even do that right so you’re trapped in this miserable existence, like the fucking junkie that you are. You hate yourself. You can’t do anything right. And it’s fucking torture because you can’t stop shaking and you can’t stop throwing up and crying and you’ve never felt so bad in your entire life.
It gets worse before it gets better. Your body will rebel against you for the next month; you will sweat and break out and you will barely sleep because it is that fucking hard. And you will continue hating yourself and everyone around you until you get your body under control. That’s the hardest part. You have to reclaim a body that now feels unfamiliar because you don’t know how to relate to your new awareness of it. You still want to die.
RETOX
(The worst part is not having anything to do to distract yourself from how awful it feels. You’re stuck in this unfamiliar house in the middle of nowhere where everyone’s routines are different and you’re apart from the people who you considered to be your family for the longest time. You miss them like hell and it makes you want to cry and you do until you throw up again. And eventually you will relapse. You try your hardest to behave and not put yourself back in that position. But it does happen. Maybe no one’s around. Maybe you’re just feeling that desperate, but you know it’s there and it’s calling you so you... You swallow your pride along with a lot of other things because you fucking need it. And the shaking stops. You are in control. You are in control and you don’t need anybody else so you decide to cut all ties before you can get hurt again. Before you can hurt anyone else. It’s a good idea in theory. You aren’t thinking about anyone but yourself. In this state no one exists besides you. You don’t need anyone else.)
DETOX
When you wake up the morning after, you will realize that you did the one thing you promised yourself you wouldn’t. So your head hurts and you feel just like you did that very first day, but now there’s a new taste in your mouth that you don’t like. Label that one remorse. Because you’ve just hurt the one person you care about more than anything. You hate yourself. You don’t want to see the disappointment in their eyes so you avoid having to deal with it. Which makes you hate yourself more because you should know better. You hate yourself because there is nothing you can do or say to make it better because the hurt has already occurred. Maybe you didn’t mean to do it. Maybe you did. Either way, you cannot escape the consequences of your actions and it makes you feel even worse than you already did.
The shaking starts again. Your body is going to reject everything you’ve ever eaten because over the last days, weeks, months, you’ve lost your tolerance for it and so the entire contents of your stomach end up in a slippery, chunky mess on your bathroom floor. You hate yourself. You stand there in front of the mirror asking yourself who the person staring back at you is and you don’t know the answer. Because that’s part of it: you don’t know who you are when you’re sober. You don’t know how to be, you can’t be, you don’t know why anyone would want you around when you are because you have spent so fucking much time trashed.
You find things to pass the time because if your body is busy your mind loses its hold on your actions. You learn to put those feelings in a box and you tape it tightly shut and send it away. You don’t want to feel that way ever again. And it’s a humbling experience; you spend more time than anyone should have to dwelling on it and you make amends to the people you’ve hurt. You don’t expect any of them to forgive you. You will cry more than you’ve ever cried once you realize that you are a better person now than you were before. You hate yourself because even though you haven’t done it in months you realize that you still want to.
And that box you thought you sent away for good? It’s still there, hiding in the back of the closets of your mind. It’s waiting for you to have a moment of weakness so that it can get you back in its grasp. You are going to have to fight for this harder than you have ever fought in your life. There are going to be bad days. There are going to be days when all you want to do is crawl back to that place so you don’t have to feel the way you do anymore. You hate yourself. You hate that as soon as something bad happens this is still your reaction after how many months. And you will find yourself slipping. You will tell everyone around you how you’re feeling expecting them to not care. But they do. You will be accountable to them for your actions and the longer you think about it the more you realize that you don’t want that on your shoulders.
You don’t want to be the one that makes everyone sad. You don’t want to be the one that everyone worries after because you’re still not worth it. And yeah, maybe you aren’t worth it, which is why you spare everyone the trouble of having to look after you even though it’s hard and you swallow your pride again. You don’t do it. Every time you don’t it feels like a fucking gold medal victory. You won the marathon. You won the fucking biathlon. Because that’s how hard it is and how hard it’s going to be every time. There is no middle ground. There is no grey area. It’s everything or nothing at all and this is your life. This is your fucking life, so you don’t want to mess around.
This is how it feels.
RECOVERY