I’m lonely.
There’s the truth.
What I’ve been avoiding.
It’s clicked now.
I feel more alone than I ever have in my life.
Paradoxically, I also feel more connected to people than I ever have.
I’m medication-free.
No lithium in my body. No psychiatric chemicals for the first time in ten years.
There’s something fucking terrifying about that.
It was gradual.
Yet it’s unknown. Uncertain.
It goes against every medical belief I’ve been taught.
But I feel fucking good.
I feel fucking free.
And there’s the loneliness.
Another contradiction.
That’s what they called me:
an enigma.
A contradiction.
Someone who could never be understood.
But all I’ve ever wanted is to be understood.
I think to be understood is to be loved.
And I have never truly felt understood.
Identity.
Knowledge is power.
No.
Knowledge is control.
If I know, I can prepare.
If I know, I can eliminate the possibility of a negative outcome.
If I know, then I’m safe.
So why does it do the opposite?
Why does it trap me in a never-ending loop?
Certainty.
That’s what I crave.
No.
Safety.
I’ve come so far that I can’t turn back now.
That doesn’t make it easier.
I can only meet people as deeply as they’ve met themselves.
But I’ve met myself so deeply.
My soul longs for connection.
My soul.
My body.
My mind.
Maybe it’s just my mind.
It hurts.
Profoundly.
Like speaking a language no one else can hear.
Like being conscious all the fucking time.
I’m alone.
Yet I’m not.
I fear I’ll either be alone forever
or forced to compromise what I need.
Black or white.
All or nothing.
The default.
Grey is harder to find.
Grey feels like software I had to install manually,
something that needs rebooting every time the screen locks.
Funny that I want to drive an automatic car, isn’t it?
Considering my brain is manual.
Every page handwritten.
Every thought organised into files I have to manually extract every day.
I crave automatic.
I’m slowly learning to let go of manual.
Well-
parts of it.
Thank you for articulating exactly how I too feel!!!! I freed myself from all the drugs and toxic beliefs around diagnosis and illness 10 years ago and counting. And it’s made me happier and healthier and safer than I ever was before, and yes, more connected, but also…lonely in a way I did not expect. I wonder if it’s because the personal traumas and indignities of treatment, the severe altering of my personality and then the labeling with a disorder to match, that degradation is a particular kind of abuse and trauma that is mostly unknown and unacknowledged. People who haven’t gone through it cannot understand it. And most of the time, they don’t believe what we’re saying either. But for me, every once in a while, I share with a person who DOES get it and DOES listen and that really helps. And back to what you wrote: thank you!! I appreciate your poem so so much. I feel less alone reading it.
I love this writing. Thank you. I too identify with the loneliness. The depths of feeling to wind up so drugged in the first instance a mere drop compared to the digging needed to free yourself.
Well done. Though that sounds too little. I’m wondering are there more of us than we realise? I hope so. I think we’re growing.
5 years free in 2 days time.
I’m still trying to understand all that unfolded.