>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: Re: I never know what to put here...
>>Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000

Hello again. Right now I’m sitting here listening to Moby's "Why does my heart feel so bad." Just the title is perfect, and even though it only consists of two lines "why does my heart feel so bad/why does my soul feel so bad" looped over a fairly depressing techno beat, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Another great song, even though I can't relate on a racial level, is Louis Armstrong’s "what did I do (to be so black and blue)."

So, a little information about myself...I’m an English major and a philosophy minor. Lately I’m becoming more interested in the philosophy side of it (especially existentialism and questions of being). My favorite school of literature is the Theatre of the Absurd because I like reading people making a joke out of existence and taking all the meaning out of it. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, my favorite scene is when the two guys are sitting around, bored, and they wonder if they should hang themselves to kill time. It always brings a half-wry smile.

I’m currently taking 187 mg of Effexor, 200 of Wellbutrin, and 50 of Trazodone. I’ve been maxed on Serzone, Celexa and Prozac with absolutely no effect. These medications aren't doing a whole lot either, just making me sleep. I have horrible insomnia. Without the Trazodone, it takes me hours to fall asleep, and then I’m up again in an hour.

I used to have the problem where I couldn't cry. I could sit there with my eyes burning and my throat swollen full of tears and nothing would come out. It was like swallowing all the bitterness back down and not being able to get rid of it, but crying isn't any better at all. I just want to scream or go into some sort of fit to force things out more than a single drop at a time. And I always end up feeling worse. Who knows who's really better off? Probably the person who doesn't have either problem.

I live alone right now. I have a small apartment to myself. I know one person in this town, and he owes me almost 200 dollars (because he needed it for rent, and I couldn't say no, and I can't force myself to bitch at him to pay me back...). I’m so passive it’s maddening. I let people walk all over me because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or make them upset. I’ve never been able to tell anyone how dark I feel because I never wanted to drag them down with me, and I’ve never met anyone suffering from the dark already to take comfort in. I hope that's changing....

I was reading some of your older entries last night after I e-mailed and was continually fascinated with what I read. It's the same sort of stuff that I feel trapped with because I don't think that anyone can understand. I have no comprehension at all of "normal" people. I can't understand anything they are concerned with. It's all just stuff, and they totally ignore their minds. I can't leave my mind; it's like a cannonball on a chain that's hooked through my skull. I live completely in my head, and for that reason, I’m alone physically most of the time and mentally all of the time. Nothing that people do makes the least bit of sense. I drank constantly for a while to try and stop my mind for just a little bit, to get some sort of a break from its relentless grinding and escape into a free-floating nothingness, even for an hour or two. Even sleep isn't escape because I always have bad dreams if not nightmares. But alcohol just made me fall deeper and deeper into this abyss, to the point where I was half an inch from dropping off a chair and letting a cable break my neck. I’m always worried a moment like that will come again. I know it will. I’ll end up emptying all my medication bottles and a bottle of whiskey, and I’ll probably sing myself to sleep. And there's the tearless crying right now. It feels like there's a golfball lodged in my throat. It's times like these I just need to fall into someone who knows what I feel like.

Belacqua

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>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: I never know what to put here...
>Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000

Belacqua,

I don't listen to much music because I'm a musician and I've had such awful experiences with other musicians that I can't bear to listen to most of it. It drives me absolutely up a wall to listen to anything for more than very short periods of time. I used to love listening to the song "Insanity" by Boingo, though. When I was in high school, I'd listen to that and "It Can't Rain All the Time" from The Crow soundtrack over and over and over. I'd have those little earphones in my ears all day long listening to the same two songs, and it was just so good to be able to become engulfed by the music. It really pisses me off that I can't do that anymore because of the stupidity of other musicians.

What kind of drug is the Trazodone? I'm having awful troubles sleeping lately. I can't fall asleep unless I take lots of Benadryl an hour or so before I try to fall asleep, and then I wake up all dehydrated from it. I'm not used to having troubles sleeping because I used to sleep constantly. My sleep was SO nice before my meds, but it was hard as shit to wake my ass up. I'm on 60mg of Paxil and 1200mg of Neurontin right now.

I just got back to work after leaving to go to the therapist. Do you meet with a therapist? I wasn't seeing one for a long time, but then I got so frustrated with my shrink that I told him I need someone else to talk to. All the shrink does is give me drugs and send me on my way. The therapist asks me questions about normal people problems. I'm not concerned with how my relations with other people are, I'm concerned with myself. I'm concerned with the way my meds change who I am, and I'm concerned about the fact that no one can help me. The shrink and the therapist are equally useless, but I generally leave the therapist in a better mood than when I leave the shrink. The shrink just pisses me off.

You know how you said before that you know what I mean by being lonely? You know what would totally rock? I really want someone else who's depressed to follow me around in life and just feel miserable right next to me. I don't want to talk to them or anything, I just want them to be there feeling miserable, so at least I would know I wasn't the only one. Then I'd feel better.

My therapist tells me that depression and anxiety are more common than I think, but I think that's a load of shit. Do you know anyone else who's on meds for depression and anxiety? The only people I've met have been people online who are far away from me. How can anyone tell me it's common for people to feel like me? That's so not true! Christ, I'm so pissed at the normal people, and I'm even more pissed that they're trying to make me one of them.

And you know what's scariest? What's scariest is that the drugs I'm on occasionally show me what normal people see, and that doesn't make me feel any better at all. In fact, then I feel like I'm betraying myself by trying to squelch what's really going on in my head. And then what's really going on in my head comes back to haunt me time and time again.

And how the hell did I get so fucking interested in Columbine? I don't even know where that came from, but every time I think of Columbine, everything comes back. It's like I took all my pain, scrunched it up into a tiny little ball, and set it in the back of my brain so I can pick it up or put it away at will. I guess it's good that I can do that, but do you really think the meds are doing what they're supposed to be doing if they're making me pick up thoughts and move them elsewhere like I'm dragging and dropping them across the computer desktop of my brain?

I look through my eyes, and I see a world that's highlighted by drugs. I see a world that's only in focus because of the medication the normal people gave me. I see a world that I don't like and I don't want to be a part of, but christ, it shows me how much I'd be hurting my family if I killed myself. I really want to go off my meds and go on a shooting spree or something, but instead I sit here at my computer at work all day, wondering what the hell is wrong with me and how much longer I'm gonna have to put up with this infernal life. I wonder why I'm NOT going off the meds, when it's my choice to take them. I wonder why I'm too weak to kill myself, and I wonder if I'm really weak or if I'm strong to continue struggling.

I just don't know. I don't know anything. I don't know why you and I have to feel this way. I don't know why I can't do anything about it. I don't know why I constantly contradict myself, when all I really want is to be dead. Why can't I just make the decision and be done with it? I almost want to slit my wrists and call an ambulance, not to attempt suicide, but just for the feeling of doing it and knowing what it would feel like knowing I might die. I want to OD on drugs and just let myself fall away from the world in a bliss of complete confusion. But I'm not doing it. All I can do is sit here and write e-mail.

Perdita