Medicated and Motivated

It's not enough. I am - what? For some reason I think of Virginia Woolf, who had a room of her own, and also stones in her pockets. Do we die for art, or does art die with us?

I'm not actually that retrospective. I'm just a girl. An administrative assistant who writes poems under her desk on post-it notes, hoping to god today isn't the day someone empties the trash and finds out about my existential crisis.

I have forgiven my enemies. My mother is sincere now, and I am fond of her absolute disdain for everyone. When I was a child, she would throw things and chase me and call me unspeakable names, and I learned to internalize it as one does. Therefore, I am convinced everyone hates me. But her vocabulary is utterly fantastic and I laugh heartily at her mockery of others, her ability to laugh at what is utterly ridiculous.

I am a psycho. I count out the number of times I read sentences because I am anxious I will get the meaning of them wrong. I am convinced cameras are watching my every move at work. When I write those aforementioned poems under my desk, I make sure the person reading them will be entertained, so there's always some comedy to my madness. I daydream about writing topics. I see an email come in and do not forward it because won't the sender know? They won't. That's the point.

In a panic, I text people back whom I haven't responded to in days because I was writing and submitting to contests. I refresh my personal email twice a minute. I apply to new jobs, eager and desperate to not have an old crow of an office administrator tell me to file the paperwork for a third time in one day. I'm done. And I am over it.

In 2018, I spent New Years Day at McLean, a mental hospital where Sylvia Plath and other illustrious poets slept and ate while overly medicated. I saw the ball drop at midnight in the sterile hospital rec room and heard a song sung, one I hated at the time but now relish. It reminds me of sickness and being utterly out of control. Nostalgia, if you will. And something for the post-it notes.

I don't reminisce often, I am far too tired and still hopelessly medicated into sedation. But one thing I know for sure is: I'm still figuring out who this body is. I breathe. But do I think? For myself, about anyone else at all?

It is hard being mentally ill, harder to fight it, easiest to write about it.