I’ve always imagined my death- in a nostalgic, self-fulfilling way that oddly built up my self-confidence but also my contempt for those around me who wouldn’t care if I died. The old woman at the local coffee shop who always said hi to me but never stopped to talk (admittedly, I hadn’t stopped to talk to her either), those old friends who don’t remember your name or the times you’d had together as kindergarten students, the boy in my History class with whom I’d shared irritated looks with when the teacher would trail off on a rant that would waste our precious time- Oh, time! What a marvelous, endearing concept. What can we do with our time on this Earth so that everyone we have ever met will stop to cry or mourn us when we are gone? That’s a question I’ve asked myself many times. The truth is, there’s nothing we can do. There’s no way to make everyone love us. It just doesn’t happen. And honestly, that truth is heartbreaking. To know that not everybody cares. Maybe that’s my fatal flaw, my hamartia, my detriment, my… Reason for not being able to be happy. I try so very hard to make sure that everyone I know cares about me that I end up losing myself. I begin to think that I am not worth being cared about. I’m not worth those three am calls to check and make sure you’re alright. I’m not worth an invitation to a simple game of bowling or a weekend hang out. And finally, I get to the point where I don’t believe I’m worth life. That’s when my slow downward decline full of self-pity and melancholy thoughts spirals into a complete spiral into the depths of seemingly unending depression.
Music has always been a large component of my life-like it is for almost everybody’s. I’ve always said I like everything, metal, pop, country, rock, blues, etc. etc. But to be real, I only said I liked everything because I wanted people to have a reason to talk to me about music. So that they’d be interested in what I was saying. “Do you like Nine Inch Nails?” One second, let me google what they’ve performed and memorize the lyrics to their top five most popular songs… “Yes, I love them! Hurt is one of my favorites, but I think I like Johnny Cash’s cover better.” That was me. The girl who knew every song. I can tell you almost all of the lyrics to every song on Jimmy Buffet’s Boats, Beaches, Ballads, and Bars collection, but I don’t like Jimmy Buffett hardly at all! I just listened to him because my dad liked him, and I wanted to have some connection to my dad that would make him think I’m well-versed in old person tune-age. The whole reason I joined choir and sang solos in eighth grade was so that I could be doing something that someone would be proud of. I didn’t enjoy singing in front of people. Hell, I hated it, and the songs we sang. In my freshman year of high school I continued on the vocal path and found that I hated high school choir even more than I hated middle school choir, but I still did it anyways. I still put in 110% because I wanted to be worth listening to.
To continue on that theme, school has always been very important to me. I used to be an amazing student. By that, I don’t mean the kind of student who gets straight A’s and keeps their nose in a book-which I did, by the way- but the student who did everything they could to impress their teachers. I would spend hours upon hours working on papers and presentations that would make them like me. YES, to make a teacher like me (by my standards) I would spend a day creating a presentation on some outlandish topic that only adults who had lived through the Cold War would understand or even like. But to me, that little look of pride or acceptance that a teacher would give you when you said something funny or knowledgeable about a topic they knew about made my day worth it. I could even say it made life worth it, and that isn’t stretching. That was my purpose. At least, I thought it was.
Then, the summer of my sophomore year of high school, I became close with a girl (let's call her Jane). She was faith-filled, beautiful, fashionable, smart, witty, crafty… She was everything I wanted to be, all rolled up into one person. And the thing that I found the most incredible about this girl was that she seemed to do everything because SHE wanted to. Not because it would impress anyone, not because it would make her mom and dad or her teachers happy, but because it genuinely interested her. That concept blew my mind. After spending some time with her, I decided that the only way to feel the way she felt was to do what she did. I tried photography and dressing cute all of the time (even when I wanted to be in sweats) and being quaint and talkative, but I came to realize that all I was doing was copying her. I wanted to be metaphorically free so badly that here I was, doing everything she did so that I could feel like she did. Oh, how badly I wanted her to tell me how well I was doing. How great I was at being a God-loving, fashionable, creative socialite who did everything for herself. But she didn’t. And I grew to resent that. I resented that she felt so good and did things so well and then when I tried to do it too, she didn’t give me praise. That same praise I expected from my peers when I talked about a song they liked, that same praise I got from my teachers when I gave an awesome presentation. Now, I look back on it, and I was doing those things so she would accept me (which I’m pretty sure she already had accepted me, so there was no point in trying to make her accept me more).
But what is acceptance??? What the heck does that word mean? Why do I try SO hard to be accepted by people when they probably don’t think twice about how much they like me or don’t like me? When I define the word acceptance on my Word processor, it means “an agreeing either expressly or by conduct to the act or offer of another so that a contract is concluded and the parties become legally bound”. Expression and conduct, that’s where I go wrong. It’s not necessarily the fact that someone “accepts” me, it’s the ways in which they act like they do or don’t. Their words, their tones, their body languages- all of these factors can change my mood from being blissful to depressed, in just one movement or phrase. My world can come crashing down by one single action. Do you know how hard it is to live like that? To be on edge every second because there might be someone who does something that makes you feel like you ended up not being good enough. Every single move I’ve ever made, it feels like now, I’ve done because someone else might like it or like me for it.
When I was in the hospital, to be more precise a mental institution for children (which was my fourth visit to an establishment of that nature), I had this therapist. Dark brown hair, brooding expression, and an air of superiority (which he had proved by the end of my time with him) He was unlike no other therapist I’ve had before, which is saying something, because I’ve seen a ton of people who want to talk about my feelings (part of me has always resented that notion, the other part loved it because someone actually wanted to know how I felt). The thing was, I couldn’t lie to this person. I couldn’t just tell him some story about why I don’t want to live anymore but at the same time manipulate him enough to make him think I’m okay to leave. He saw right through the “I don’t care anymore”, self-deprecating, world-hating mantra that I had created. That scared me more than anything ever had in my entire life. Not because he saw through it, but because I’d gone so long lying to everyone that even I couldn’t tell when I was or wasn’t. I’m surprised I didn’t break down crying when he spoke to me about why he didn’t believe what I had just said. Because later, when I digested what he had said, I sobbed. In my twin sized bed, in the freezing cold room with what to me was a threadbare blanket and lousy pillow, I cried harder than I had in a long time. My roommate would look at me occasionally, wondering what the heck was wrong with me (What do you think is wrong with me, I’m in a mental hospital) and I’ll tell you what was wrong: I’d come to the realization that most of the “happiness” I’ve been experiencing in my life was basically a lie. Everything I’d built myself on for many years, at least since sixth grade, had come tumbling down. All of that work that I’d done to make people like me was out the window because even I didn’t like me. No one likes a people pleaser, a suck up, a LIAR.
When I’d told him I didn’t care anymore, he’d told me that he didn’t agree. To me, that was so frustrating, because it was my feelings-the one thing that I owned. But even those weren’t my own, I’d come to find out. He gave me the reasons why I was so messed up and I gave him the time to do it. He told me what was wrong, I told him lies as to why those reasons were false, and he called me out on it. No one has ever-and I don’t mean to sound full of myself when I say this- outsmarted me on so many levels. Any type of manipulation I’d mastered that I used on him did not work. I could not try to sound smart, I could not try to sound dumb. I’m so thankful that I met him on my-hopefully-final stay at a mental hospital.

Anyways, my whole moral of this writing is that I shouldn’t base how I live my life on how much worth people put into me. Who knows, maybe the people I think like me the most are the people that hate me more than anyone on this Earth? That’s the problem for people like me, is that we never know. Humans in general are too unpredictable emotionally to base your own feelings and thoughts off of. We, ourselves, don’t even know what we truly like. At least, I don’t. Not anymore. But I can tell you a few things I enjoy:
·        Colorful sunsets
·        Long, superfluous words that make you wonder (like superfluous, for example)
·        Books with sad endings
·        Anything by Lynyrd Skynyrd
I can’t put myself on that list yet, but that list is growing day by day, as I try everything out again to see if I truly do like it or if I only liked it because I thought everyone wanted me to. I can’t go back to that line of thinking, just like I can’t go back to the looney bin-because if I do, I’ll think I’ve lost again, that I’ve lost at life and that I’m just not worth it. I’ll go back to imagining what it will be like after I’ve died, that sick, sick fantasy where I watch everyone cry over my grave and leave notes as to why they loved me or didn’t love me. You could say that I’ve spent a great deal of time wishing I knew what everyone thought about me. And I’d say that’s true. But really, it’s more fun not wanting to know. Because then I can live just for me, and not for anyone else.