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Lyric Paint. I Am Asking. In the dead of night. (Patreon)

Published:
2023-10-22 04:14:08
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

My loves.

Here we go. I love these nights.

I just posted this to socials as well, buried deep in the Saturday night algorithm, but I have the feeling you all will have some goddamn gold, because you always do.

So; Lyrics. Help me paint.

I have this fresh new batch of dresden dolls songs in the cooker, and I need to paint them with human detail. The architecture is there, but I need some paint. Keep it short. The worst, please. Covid, Lockdown, Grief, Betrayal, Divorce, whatever. (I’m Amanda Palmer and I am not afraid).

Stay in the dark. I don’t want hear about your good day.

You can veil with poetry if you gotta.

“He held a knife to my thigh” works, but I’m also talking “I found out about her affair because she left the used condom in the trash where I could see it” kinda level.

By the way; this is not a drill. I really do use this stuff. And I love it.

“He took himself to the hospital the day our baby turned one. I was angry and busy and sad and I didn’t give him a ride and, even though he tried, it wasn’t enough. His body was found when our baby was fourteen months old. I was afraid nothing would ever be right again and I was right.”

That last line is a fucking keeper.

But it’s the DETAIL that makes it. General isn’t great for lyrics. “He died and I was sad” takes us nowhere.

These. Fuck me. Just screenshotted from FB.





Hit me. (Here in comments, or it it’s very private, message me here on Patreon and I’ll scroll through what I can - though don’t expect a response since I’ll be a little flooded.).

Boom!!!

Hit records about extreme sadness and trauma await us.

X

A

Files

Previews only

Comments

Deeslee

Loved Amanda back, got told I’m parasocial

Deborah Geffner

he made me leave the dog in the road. the last I saw her she was running after the car as fast as she could. my heart will never repair from this.

Sage Nash

I accepted so many forms of abuse. It all stopped for a while, while I was pregnant. A week after we brought our son home, he was back to it. He threw me across the room in front of my son. And I knew then and there that I was done. My child is 10 now and has never known that man, and is the better for it. Someone who loves us both more than anything stepped up, and what we have now is perfect ❤️

BridgetJ

I told him I was unhappy and that I needed him more, not less and less. He said, crying, “I guess I have to let you go.”

Stacy Litwin

I got denied my humanity for 6 months by one of the 2 people I saw for 6 fucking months of lockdown. She wouldn't talk to me, I got a straight on look in the eyes when I spoke, then a distinct, purposeful look away. Any time I spoke. For 6 months. All while denying it was happening. I was forced to stay at home because I felt it was my duty to protect others while she was going out, seeing friends, seeing family, seeing coworkers while they were still closed and not working, flying too other states. I felt myself disappearing

Angel Rosen

If I had known that it would be the last phone call we ever had, I would've waited a moment longer to hang up.

Fleassy Malay

"I was no longer angry at him Just disappointed in myself For still believing"

Marie

His gaslighting abuse always ended with him saying ‘you’re just too good for me’ and he always followed up with ‘I just know you’ll leave me one day’ and he’s right I was and I did. And somehow despite wishing him dead and living a completely life right now it still pisses me off that he was right.

Amanda Dockter

Threw some in the $3 chat. And various petals and cake crumbs elsewhere... 💓💞💜✨🔮🐿️🪿❤️‍🩹

Mary Alice Fraughton

Spent two years in couples therapy earnestly and in good faith working on our issues. Turns out the reason we were fighting so much was that he’d relapsed with amphetamines and was secretly deeply in debt. I still haven’t left him because with all this dying all the time what does dishonesty even matter?

Hev

My aunt is in a coma, 14 days without water. There's only waiting left. Her mother lost my father only last year. That's 3 of her 4 children gone before her.

Julian Normand

I talked to him that morning before going into surgery. He was scared and him and mom were arguing about traffic in New Orleans while I was on the phone with him . I told him everything would be fine and I loved him very much. I went to work like a normal day with worry In my stomach. At 5pm mom said he was still in surgery. I fell asleep until 11pm , woke up in a panic realizing I never got a call from her. I called her, no answer. I called my sister for her to answer me crying saying it doesn’t look good. She told me there were complications and the 4 hour surgery was now on going 10 hours. I broke down on the bathroom floor for the next hour crying in fear until I received the call saying he was gone. They did everything they could but nothing could save him even though he tried to hold on after flatlining three times. I didn’t expect my last time I would ever speak to my dad, my best friend , would be that morning with so much fear in his voice with me promising him it’s okay to be scared but it will all be fine, I will speak to you when you are in recovery .

Nathan Williams

The pager woke me in the middle of a twilight dream at 3:30 am I was trained to hear this couple of times a week beep Or I sometimes/often slept with it on vibrate against the waistband of my sweatpants the best way for the cattle prod of johns to joist me in the pelvic area .both a promise and a warning of money and pain . The pain would be so intense afterwards from this wildebeest that I would be reeling and shaking from the knockout punch of the cancerous vampires that sucked the blood out of my cheeks and siphoned innocence by the pound out of my bloodstream and into the floor pooled in ghosts of torn prostitutes stomachs and guts glistening from the shark attack of johns blood iron claws closing in on my body paging numbers of death and even smaller numbers of dollar bills as my drug use intake grew and grew to weather the beatings and the consensual rape that happened every time I agreed to it It was Suzi Of course it was her , a transgendered person that introduced me to the baffling world of cross dressing and the shadow silver side of gay that gay dresses and eye shadow grew out of . I fucking hated Suzi and I yearned for her pages like a dog begs for it’s bowl I always , always needed money Never had enough never saved enough Never could have any amount that would give me even a fraction of serenity And as my drug use intensified the money fell off cliffs ,crashed into road blocks of meth and slid of trucks of crack and irs the plastic bag hell that was solitary painful and mean addiction .. Suzi I sunk into my shoulders and slunk into my brain and fingered a roach laying on the sink Never mind the real roaches that slithers about And grease spotted amber shit brown bigs that would not fucking die fucking and fucking each other until little baby roaches like pin pricks of ant heads grew like mirages into real nightmares A saw a few of them scatter under the sink And groaned as I reached over for the weed roach my sweetest friend My only true love I lit and pulled in deep the harsh sweet smoke I had to quickly forget who I was and what I was doing from the moment I woke up u til the moment I passed out Only small seemingly endless passages of sober time would attack me in my liminal space into waking hell The warning cross of depressions violent back hand across my face I pulled in deeper this blackout This darkness I must have I feel Into the shadows of the solitude of the weed I got dressed now fully numb for trauma surgery I was about to endure Cassette player in hand I put in my favorite 4am music when I was off to walk the plank into the hateful dark of prostitution

Bernadette Roberts

I was hacking up enpugh phlegm to get through a box of tissues a day. Then the medics came and he chatted through the o2 mask.on the gurney. That's her. Yeah, I think she knows they said. We closed the pool where the children had their therapy. Health and safety. It still sits with putrid green in its basin. Closed. Zoom still reminds me of being numb and alone. Laptop on the ironing board. Singing and dancing through their sessions. Then silence, numbness, and searing headaches. The dizziness took forever to go away. He never came back

Jeremy Sliwoski
>>120366230

I once told someone "I'm not upset that you don't love me, I'm disappointed that I thought you were someone worth loving"

Amanda Dockter

When the fever trapped me where I couldn't breathe We reached for each other When my husband forgot how to care. You broadcast your concern. And when wind storms tried to steal my shine you carried me through the wreckage and home to coop

Shelly Sousa

A macaroni necklace lightly dusted with cigarette ash and disdain... how avant-garde. (Midnight dark-roast, but here we are)

Suzanne

I sent a message. My ex-husband did a repeat of what caused our divorce.

Mark Blair

Thirty years later it still only takes a word to lift the scab. But now it only bleeds for a minute while I cry inside.

Valerie Jaruzel

A person a mentor a man I love dearly was hit by car, and tho lived thru it barely the future, the timeline, the thing we were building is fissured dead center. His body will mend, not sure about his mind, he’s down one eye, not sure if he’ll go blind. Please watch everyone when barreling around corners with cars.

Jonah Poirot

Anton was… well, i suppose one might call it a love affair, and complicated, as most affairs are. My ex-wife knew about him, we had a type of unhealthy open relationship. They met each other once and got into an argument… Anton’s wife, well, he said she knew but i suspect she didnt, and i never met her. Still, i didnt ask much after her, because, well, i kind of knew it was an off-limits topic… so… one day when he stopped messaging back, i just assumed she found out, you know? There were times when he had disappeared for weeks or months, we lived an hour and a half away from each other, so i didnt see him very often. But we usually talked every day. Whole days strung together waiting for his responses. He kept me very separate from his life. Thats why i think i was a secret. And thats why i didnt know he was dead for over a year… i still wonder, or feel like i dont have much of a right to grieve him, no one in his life even knows i ever existed. But still, i grieve him all the same and i suppose thats all there is to it. It was, as i said, complicated, with him and i. A relationship with sharp edges and driven by mutual understanding of pain. My friends that knew he existed in my life hated him. He wasnt always kind, but i would say i wasnt always kind to him either. And he understood me in a way no one had before and no one will, i dont think anyone ever will. And i learned things, things i needed to. Like what happens to a person when they let the pain of the past devour them alive. How sometimes you’re just a shell of a person and how, it might not feel like you have a choice in that at times, but you do. Ill always wonder, if it was my fault. And ill always wonder if he knew i would keep coming back to him if he didnt leave. And i wonder why he didnt say goodbye before he killed himself. I wonder if he thought i would never know, never go looking. But i had a feeling and, when i found out i was devastated and heartbroken but… i wasnt surprised. We had talked about death, and dying. About not wanting to live anymore. He told me he had a mantra, for when the time came, the follow through. “My body is clay, and my soul does not feel this pain” or, something like that. It was a year before he actually did it, that he told me that. But i think it was probably the last words he spoke, all the same. I get really angry at him, wondering how he could do such a thing, let his wife be the one to find him… but i know why. He told me in as many words over the years. His soul was decaying inside of a painfully living body and everyone around him could feel it. And i know because that was happening to me, too. And he understood the agony. The difference is… im still here, and my soul is starting to grow sprigs of hope and… i never hit anyone, when i was hurting so badly. But i did… seek out someone who would hit. He hurt me, but i gave myself over to him. And anton found me and i found him and we always called it “harm reduction” because we knew if it wasnt him, it would be someone worse. And i used him, in that way. And i wonder if that hastened his demise, knowing he did that to me but knowing i was willing… i dont… it was complicated, and sharp, and drawn out but such a short time. And i loved him as much as you can love anyone who is able to peer right into your soul and say “i understand, ive been there, too” And he had all the answers, the ways to bring the pain up to the surface… i thought, at the time, that he had all of the answers. But we are different, he and i. I started to,eventually, grow away from the pain, slowly and imperceptibly. But im not sure how much i would have grown in the ways i was supposed to, you know? If it wasnt for him, living and dying in the way that he did. I think thats why i blame myself. And i knowni camt see his whole story but if he hadnt died i would have kept going back, i would have gotten as hopelessly stuck in the pain as he did. I would have died, too. But I still wish he would have told me how close he was to ending his life. I still wish I could ha e stopped him. I wish that even if we couldn’t talk anymore he was still out there somewhere, playing the guitar to animals at the animal shelter where he volunteered. Doing all of the kind things I knew he had inside of him.

Nicole F

I told him what I needed, but he brushed my words aside and made his own demands. It was him or me, and I had to chose me..and now he no longer is. Guilt doesn't even begin to describe the blame I'm taking for something I've been trying to avoid.. I've turned myself inside out for *years* to gain approval, validation, and recognition.. but I'm still the first to be fed to the wolves when shit goes down.. I finally acknowledge I cannot win this battle, I am losing myself trying, I am not enough - but no one will ever be. I salvage what little of myself I have left, and make a quiet escape, just to be told "everyone's replaceable". Replaceable. I've lost so much of myself, just to be replaceable.

Jonah Poirot
>>120366524

There were really good days with him. Really good conversations. This one time it was raining so hard, a day he drove out to visit me. On most days i would wait on my back porch for him, and he would come find me. The day it was raining, i was inside, but he went looking for me on the back porch anyway. He was wearing a green cloak. He loved that thing. He really loved lord of the rings and had a hobbit outfit. But any day he could get away with it, hed wear the cloak from it. I remember the way his eyes were sparkling, that day, after he ran into my house, dripping from the rain. He was so alive. Vibrant and wild and happy. I think it was the first day he got to show me his cloak, now that i think of it. He liked to play the guitar. And he would bring it on the days he would visit. And on the days i was so sad i wouldn’t get out of bed or off of the couch, he would just sing and play. His favorite songs to play were by The Mountain Goats. He introduced me to that band with his guitar covers. He had a lot of good in him. I just dont think he could always see that. I dont think he always remembered that. I think he’d really like the job i have now. We make fantasy coins and we do a lot of Lord of the Rings coins. If he was alive i would have made sure he visited the shop. I would have bought him a necklace, maybe the mithril leaf one we sell. He liked green. He would have loved it. I dont have anything of his to remember him by. I wish i did. He was, at that point in my life, the only person i could tell everything to. All of the horrible bad things that had happened to me and all of the good and all of the conflicted feelings and all of the spaces where i forgot i was a living creature, all of the spaces where i didnt want to be. All of the thoughts i had that i thought were unforgivable and un human, he had had them too. He understood. He showed me that i was capable of being understood, i just had to find the right people. My ex-wife… that situation wasnt good either. He was like an escape in the middle of that. I think i was an escape in the middle of his life, too. I will always miss him, i will always remember him fondly even through the haze of abuse and hurt. I will always remember the way his eyes sparkled and i will remember the way my heart tore apart inside of my chest when i found out he was gone over a year after the fact. The pain bright and fresh and new… i wailed. I said “no, no, no, you didnt” over and over and over. The whole world quaked with it. I still feel the reverberations of my cries, years later. I only found out because i went looking to be hurt again. And that has made me feel like a terrible person. Like i was so self absorbed i didnt even notice he was gone for so long. But i remember knowing, before i found out. I remember telling my therapist i thought he was dead. That he wouldn’t have disappeared without saying goodbye unless he didnt have a choice. It was in the middle of covid, of my divorce, when he fell off of this planet. So many hectic things happening. I thought maybe he had died from covid, that he didnt have a chance to say goodbye, he had been having other lung problems before covid happened and i thought maybe he caught it and couldnt recover and didnt have a chance to say goodbye… learning that he killed himself… that he didnt send me a last message, didnt say goodbye… hurt like nothing else in the world. Like he was slapping me in the face all over again. Really, i think he didnt want to be stopped. I think he had been planning it for a very very long time, longer than i can really understand. I do understand. But i dont at the same time. Its all tangled up inside of me. Because i think if he had told me, i could have talked him out of it and i think he knew that and i think he couldnt face me because he was so ready to leave. Because if he stayed he would have kept hurting me, and i would have let him. And so my heart just aches and aches and aches. But this year… its like… of course all of that is still there, of course at times the pain is just as sharp as when it was all happening anew. But its not un-doing me in the same way… its sore, its tender, i think in some ways it always will be… but… i think im growing around it, roots protecting the tenderness that will never shrink. Painful as nature dying in the fall and coming alive again in the spring, the frigid cold and searing heat in between. Its just how it is, just how it was, just how its supposed to be. And i wake up every morning, and go to sleep every night. Just as im supposed to. I go on living, becauae that’s all there is to do. Sometimes i think his ghost is here with me, and sometimes i know hes fully gone, doing whatever comes after death. And i hope he isnt in such agony anymore. I hope hes found peace

Cheyenne Dietz

Post-breakup, our friend told me she was cheating. I messaged her and she wasn’t surprised I knew. Fast forward to wet pants at a Montauk Point sunrise: I open the trunk and am hit with that signature patchouli scent. It’s coming from the tote with all she had left of me. I look in it for pants and I see a small notebook. She wrote it all (sorta) out to me. White knuckles the whole drive home. Stiff, save chattering teeth.

Julian Normand

The second time my heart broke a year later was a call at 8am from my best friend, buttons, dad . It was unlike him to call me so I answered with immediate fear knowing something wasn’t right. I will never forget his voice trembling telling me “ Liz and Hattie were murdered” I thought it may have been a random act of violence since they did live in New Orleans and that isn’t uncommon. He proceeded to tell me her boyfriend was the one who killed her and her 15 year old sister who she became a mother to. It would be 2 weeks later at her memorial that her father would tell me he was angry but forgave him already after discovering the trauma he had gone through escaping from El Salvador with his 8 year old sister and 6 year old brother. A victim of sexual assault and never cared for by his family, abandoned. Something inside him snapped and in a moment the man who she said loved more than anyone ever before in her life took hers.

Anna Bruce

I took him back, after all the abuse, after all the bs, I took him back……. AGAIN. While he was in my living room, he changed his status to in a relationship, after almost 20 years of being together, and it wasn’t a relationship with me. It was a relationship with someone on the other side of the planet he never had met. He got catfished

Sparo Arika Vigil

We were friends for almost 20 years, but their love language became debate and mine became silence. When they started supporting bombing, it was a divide I couldn't cross. Even tho we studied Christ & Buddha, I quietly walked away while they yelled thru email.

Bob Dillette

The honeymoon turned sour when six weeks after the wedding she came home to find my lifeless body on the floor, the suicide nearly successful.

Kathryn

After spending our days, nights, lives, and dreams together they met someone else and drifted. I let them back in and got ghosted. I ache to know if they still feel part of me in them as I feel their presence in who I have become.

Ashleigh M. Ferreira-Bartlett

It's been less than a week since I tried to end it again and I'm no Plath. I'm made of much more failure. I still live in Purgatory Chasm.

Amanda

I've got a ticket for the hang in BK, but I'm terrified to come. If I can make it, I wrote 150 pages about much of the trauma and abuse I went through that I essentially only intended to give out right before my birthday, when I planned to end my own life. I've lived 6 months past that, and I'm completely uncertain why anymore. If I can actually make it to the event, perhaps I'll bring you the rough 150 pages. ❤️

Donut

He left once when I was ten and then permanently when I was sixteen. I learned it from a sobbing former step mother over the phone. There was no space to mourn. Everyone wanted me to get over it and no one wanted to throw the lifeline. Even now that he’s long gone and scattered, people will dig up his corpse and bring it through the town square and put it on my table. And they look at me, eyes wide and shrugging and ask me, what do we do with it? What do we do? And it’s been 12 years and I still don’t fucking know!

Piper Warnick

I sat in a dark room on a break at work so angry and anxious that my long distance partner could not listen to how painful it was for me to be a long distance through a pandemic. He could not hear me, understand me. As I read his texts I wanted to bash my head into the cabinet door behind me because it was the only release I could find for the pain I was experiencing in my heart.

Jordan

My sister in law is an abusive, qanon, conspiracy obsessed parent who abandoned her child to be raised by my partners unwell elderly parents. We just found out she’s pregnant again and excited to welcome a baby girl. Healing feels impossible. How can you ever bridge this gap with an awful person, even though my partner wants more than anything to have his sister again?

Mark Blair

I can still feel the despair, thinking if I paddle out to sea far enough, naked on a piece of old timber with a bag of rocks tied around my ankle, at least it would be certain and clean.

Angela Molloy Murphy

I don’t know how my lungs will ever fill completely again. George Floyd said I can’t breathe, in the radiation tunnel the next day a mechanical voice told me to hold my breath. A mix of Covid and teargas made it hard to decide what kind of mask to wear in my nightly protests. Both of them made it hard to breathe. wildfire smoke shut down our 100th consecutive march in Portland…Drove home that night in the dark with all the electricity out for miles. The cancer has spread to my lungs, of course. And I don’t know how they will ever fill completely again.

T Nonya

His mother put my name in the freezer after we broke up, cursing each fiber of my being. She was right, I deserved to be smote.

Kathryn

After years of autoimmune disease and cancer I hate my body with a loathing that burns more than the pain. Many days I don't know if I'm more exhausted from dying or living.

Julian Normand
>>120366388

5 months prior to this I found myself in the darkest place I had ever been. I attempted to take my life and was narrowly saved by my ex who managed to come home and cut me down . I was airlifted to Albany med and in the icu on a ventilator for 4 days. I have no recollection of any of this but My mom tells me the story of her and my dad getting the call and booking a flight at midnight from Nola to Albany . The doctors told them not to have hope because it didn’t look good for me and if I did survive I would most likely have severe brain damage . Everyone came to be by my side those 4 days and by a miracle I managed to survive. I can’t help but think I was kept here so my dad could see me recover before passing. Thinking of the life my mom would have had to endure losing me then her husband of 36 years just months later hurts me to this day . I’m Thankful for every moment I take a breath now, I breathe for me, for my family and my friends .

Jordan
>>120366741

We want to be excited by the “miracle of life”, but how can we under these circumstances?

Fleassy Malay

"I asked him to clean up his beard from my bathroom He told me to find someone else to pay rent" "I just got tired of you using My ass as a cum rag When all I wanted to do was sleep"

Erin Q.

My tormented psyche created a horrible and terrifying giant house centipede infestation in our home. Seven in the kitchen sink. One on my bath towel. In my books, on the walls, above the bed. No one else in our building ever saw them. WHY? If you smashed them, their legs would come off and flutter to the ground. The bite was horrible. Carnivorous motherfuckers. I lay awake, looking for their slithering movement, silently crawling out of the wounds in my brain.

Tym Rourke

I tucked in my daughter into bed tonight and she said she loved me. Two hours before she kicked me screaming because she is being crushed by the weight of dark thoughts she can’t control. She is not who she is and I can’t find HER no matter how hard I try. I did what any parent would do: I told her I loved her too, and meant it.

Piper Warnick

I read the posts full of pain from my Palestinian friend who never got to live in Palestine because his family had to flee. I see the posts from my Israeli friend who is full of fear for the safety of herself and her family but it just comes out as defending the actions of a government oppressing marginalized people. All I want is to see people not being hurt, not being killed, not being dehumanized. I want these people that I love to know I care about them and I don't want any of them to think that my sharing my love for a friend from the other side of a border is an attack on them with your humidity

Mark Blair

Now, don't worry. That real memory is for the dark lyrics. That was then, long ago. As well as despair I found strength, hope, curiosity and so many options for life. Kia kaha!

Wenzdai

I won’t call it love, but it could have been. I’ve spent the same amount of time missing you as I did getting to know you… and it hurts. Knowing what your going through and feeling selfish missing you

S.

The price I pay for safety is enduring their abuse.

Mark Blair

Damn cans of worms, Amanda!

Jonah Poirot
>>120366524

I must remember that the ache I'm my chest, the feeling of imminent death- merely autumn's arrival. Merely the way of the world to wind down into deep and dark slumber. It makes sense, then, that I feel as if I am tumbling away, upwards into a deep and unforgiving sea

Bill Ernoehazy

The thing they never told me about cancer is how it would burn and scar Every Single Relationship I had Every One.

Melissa

They had trapped me in a playground tunnel; arms and legs pinned down, hand over my mouth so our classmates wouldn't hear... days later I started a four week stay in a psych unit after trying to kill myself. I had to see them everyday at school for the next 5 years until we graduated. I was only 13. 25 years later and I'm finally sharing those words. October 30, 1998. Halloween still fucks with my energy.

Damian Blacklock

She was at home when I took off, in hospital when I landed.

Kris Smerick

Three weeks after my mom died of Covid, he sat in the bedroom and told me we should separate because it didn’t seem like I liked him anymore. 16 years of marriage. I said: I’m grieving. I said: my mom died. I said: this isn’t the time to say these things or make these choices. I moved to the basement. He moved onto Tindr. I can say more but why.

Jonah Poirot

I miss Anton fiercly and I don't talk about it because who would i tell? So thank you. If anyone reads, for listening. For letting me put him here for a while, instead of stagnant in my heart. I miss him so much and I am so angry and I want to know why he had to go and I want to know why he didnt say goodbye and I want to know why sometimes I start to feel better and then all of a sudden I look up and I'm in the middle of it all again. That grief swallowing me whole and unforgiving and I want it to. I want it to rip me apart because anton ripped me apart and he knew he would but he knew he would be gone by then. I miss him and I hate that I miss him and I hate that I'm stuck I'm memories

Deborah Hartmann Preuss

I tried twice to go to the jeweler on the corner, to cut the wedding band off. The first time I couldn't cross the street. The second time it worked. What a relief.

SoSe

I have a strong reaction to some vaccines. With the last one I went to a very dark place for about three days. I wanted to die. But I’m afraid of pain. I’d stand in the kitchen crying, wishing I’d get cancer so it would all be over.

Tocki

i just want to keep my baby clean

Mikala - Backstagerider

My father’s friends came and said goodbye on his birthday. He was gone two days later. I was awake in the room down the hall.

Eric Riddler

Screaming by his coffin, two decades after he walked away

Jen

I found my mom slumped over in her bed. I had to do chest compressions for over 20 minutes because we live in the country, I kept going even after I saw the foamy blood streaming from her mouth. I found her at 4pm, the first responders and the ambulance left sometime after 8pm. She was gone. I survived my childhood and stage 4 uterine cancer but I have never been in so much pain of every kind as I was on that day, in those 4 hours. Also, flashbacks are a bitch.

Sara Nelson

After losing my baby I had to take medication to clean anything left behind out of my uterus or risk addictional health complications. My baby was gone and I was lost. My red state has made women's healthcare a nightmare. My doctor had to close the door and tell me how to take my medication but then had to write my prescription differently. I'm thankful she was willing to do what was right for my body. She put her license on the line for my health. How f7cked up is that? I'm livid that someone else's religion and beliefs got into my legislation, between my doctor and myself. I left my state and my home of 20 years for a new state that will never get in between my doctor and my uterus. I feel like a medical refugee, immigrating away from their religious tyranny. FUCK THOSE ASSHOLES! That bullshit was the last thing I needed when I was grieving a very wanted baby. It was an absolute kick in my face when I was already down. My religion allows my life to be put before any potential of life. Why is MY religious beliefs second class to Jesus in a nation that is supposed to have religious freedom? It's one religion, under their God, for their liberties and justice for them. Fuck those entitled assholes who put their beliefs, their freedoms and their God over my body, my life and my medical safety. I should not have had to choose between my health and my home but I did. I'm lucky that I could. Many other women don't have the luxury of leaving.

Zena Darling

It's so cloudy I can hardly see the darkness anymore. How can I make it hurt if I've forgotten how to hold a knife?

T Nonya

I found out he hung himself in his childhood bedroom 2 and a half years after the fact. No one told me until after I asked what had happened. They said they knew I'd ask eventually. His family wanted to keep his death quiet. From all of us.

Ryan LaBelle

After literally half my life with the first person I dated, and a few years into the subsequent divorce after he cheated multiple times, I finally have my first queer relationship with someone local. Turns out I'm gay, who knew. Her name was Grace, and she had three kids. She was really great except for when she was narcissistic and didn't seem to realize other people's feelings existed and mattered too, including her kids'. When we were on the vacation I'd dreamed about for years to Dollywood during Christmas time, she didn't like that I was frustrated with her erratic driving multiple times. I reeled it in, but she was already upset. An argument turned into her telling me she felt sorry for my child that they had me as their parent just inside the entrance of Dollywood. When I reacted with visible sadness and quiet, she told me I had five seconds to change my attitude or she would drive me to the airport and buy me a ticket home, then proceeded to count down. I guess I managed to talk her out of it, but I knew after that trip that she didn't just have trauma and poor skills that would resolve if I loved her enough, and I should leave. Instead, I stayed eight more months because I felt bad for her kids, and was the primary parent when she had them. They came to me instead of her, I planned and ran birthday parties, the whole thing. Did I break up with her? No, she broke up with me, and found a new person two weeks later while I was still living with her, two weeks after I let go of my apartment since I was always at her house anyway (I cried when I packed because I knew it was such a bad idea; she comforted me because she thought it was just the stress of moving), and two weeks after she said she would kill herself if I ever left her. I found a new place and moved out a week and a half later; she introduced the new gf to her kids two days later. I was still getting my stuff out for the following week and saw her carefully arranged sex blanket and outfit, I'm sure on purpose. My mom and ex-spouse were also narcissistic. I honestly don't know how I will ever trust someone again. People think you're really amazing when you always see the good in people; they don't seem to realize how much it can harm you too.

Robert McGrath

So good to see family after so long. Happy waves goodbye at the airport, full of promise to see each other again soon. "Hope you got home okay". They arrived in Palestine just in time for the bombs to start dropping.

Jonah Poirot
>>120367060

If I could talk to him, see his again. What would I even say? Would I have a right to? Will I ever stop blaming myself for not saving a boy who did not want to be saved? I would say: You left me. You didn't say goodbye. I was so wrapped up in my own crumbling life to look closely at those last few weeks I got to talk to you. To make you look me I'm the eyes and tell me what was really going on. I'm angry at my self and I'm angry at you and so when September hit and your ghost slowly phased into reality, to stay until December, at least. My heart croaks over and over "where did you go?" Why did you leave me? Why didn't tell me. And... you're gone you're gone you're gone and you will not ever come back, even as my memories dredge you up from whatever grave you might lie in. A grave I will never get to visit or.see

Deborah Hartmann Preuss

She was obviously lost. In the dark, in these woods. At midnight, in the rain, we all went out with flashlights, holding hands so as not to add another lost soul. We shouted her name, we listened. But I noticed I wasn't really looking where my flashlight shone - afraid I'd find her body. I dared myself to look. We came back, wet and empty-handed. She turned up at breakfast, tired and hungry.

Tara

We were estranged for years and then I wrote him a letter. The medical examiner called the next day to tell me he was dead. We both made choices that he made sure we couldn't take back.

Lucas Harrington

Realizing that some of the things I sent could have been public... I'm autistic and n high school I liked another autistic boy. I kept backing out of plans saying I wasn't feeling well, but I was really just nervous--I'm sure they told him I was trying to let him down gently and I never saw him again. I have tried many times to find a way to reach out and apologize but my last avenue for possibly contacting him closed a few years ago.

Lucas Harrington
>>120367385

I'm actually not sure I want top surgery from a gender perspective, but my breasts are giving me crippling chest/back pain and my cancer risk is about 20%.

Zena Darling

He almost died of Covid. Maybe if he had, she could have finally learned to live for herself.

Jeremy Sliwoski

I enjoy funerals over family reunions, get to see all the same people but no one pretends to be happy

Jade Jossen

A deer moved into our back yard in the middle of Oakland (city) for 8 months, we fed it apples, it became friendly. The one morning it was gone. My partner lied to me about finding it dead. I cried for three days.

Andrew

He kept saying he wanted to die, as I helped him get ready. In the ER, 36 hours, no sleep. I only left his side for the psych hold. Coming home to an empty apartment knowing I couldn't help him. Hugging him after years of loving him, months of caring and worrying about him so hard my heart was in tatters. All so he wouldn't see my face when he said he'd settle for me, because nothing better had come along.Yet.

Daniel Allen

I'd buried a dozen people by the time I was 15. Pain and death are dinner guests and fear's my bestest friend.

Lexy Green

My young daughter was sick with three different illnesses, screaming in pain, my weak lungs infected, both of us gasping for air when I found out my mother’s mind was lost enough to start the long goodbye (and I’m still saying it)

Stephanie Kazamek

I was 16 when my dad told me I was wasting the best years of my life being fat. When I graduated high school I asked him if he was proud of me. He said to ask him when I’d graduated college. I graduated college and asked him again, reminding him of what he’d said 4 years prior. He didn’t remember saying that but he didn’t answer either.

Trish Reader

Ode to my messy apartment, post concussion When cracked wide open, everything spills out An endless flowingness of pictures, mementos, vignettes, feelings The past is in crumpled pages on the floor, and yet New life emerges, and the violet needs watering Attempts to compartmentalize the endless flow takes effort Time to bolster enough logic and energy to deal Bits and pieces go into shoeboxes and sandwich bags Labeled in hieroglyph and stacked to the ceiling, there Creating sacred space takes courage, surrendering The stuff, the mementos no longer seem relevant Desiring and allowing ebbingness to follow flowingness Holding space for new life, more violets and friends That flowingness becomes smoother, gentler, welcomed Pictures, vignettes and memories merge Rupture tentatively picks its way to an elegant rapture Like the ukulele waiting in the corner, excited to celebrate

Aqualynne Carnahan

Part of an actual text I sent last week Tuesday- I am an obstacle to your happiness, and there is a real chance you will only grow to resent me, and I will resent you. That's just tragic.

Stephanie Kazamek

My mother had secretly been taking everything I was putting from my full time job in to our joint account. I was young and stupid and didn’t know mothers could do this to someone they were supposed to love. When I thought about moving out on my own and finally looked to see what I’d have to start my life with after 6 years of working I had $700 left. I gave up on any hope of a future and tried my best to drink enough to not wake up every night for at least 10 years.

JessicaLynn

The longest hour of my life was spent waiting to tell my daughter that her dad had unexpectedly died. We hadn't been romantically involved for her entire life, but we had a real, true friendship. There were so many things to feel but I couldn't feel them because I had to prepare. I should have let myself feel all of it, because there's no way to prepare for a task like that.

Vicki Callanan

All the times before, I was an object they used, that they were crafting to their will, but an object that could participate, that had a function, that they called to being. I had seen them end life a hundred times by the time they hurt Natalie, but everything is different now. They ended her life and they ended what I was. Nobody wants me like they did before. They only want to see the monster I have become. They come to marvel at this machine that sucks and swallows and is filled and emptied and turned upside down and passed one after another but has no colour left, no vitality, no presence. Awake but emptied, alive but mechanised, ended but kept alive for the unending game.

Sean Wheeler

I spent 7 years in therapy trying to figure out how to change my life, and decided on becoming an English teacher overseas. I spent 5k to get a top end certification, which I did in January of 2020. I applied to go teach in China in March of 2020 and was left in limbo for a year due to the pandemic. I finally got a placement in late spring 2021, only to have all my documentation rejected because China no longer wanted English taught, and the consulate I was forced to apply through was rejecting all visa application. I was forced to work the grey market to keep my head afloat, and have yet to find living wage work. While all this was going on, two of my best friends each had their relationships fall apart, one from physical and emotional abuse, one from cruel indifference, resulting in them resettling in new cities and in the destruction of my core in-person support network, while my online support networks fractured and fell apart as the pandemic eased. The end result: I went from drinking occasionally, to downing 1/3 of a bottle of whisky a night, and now that doesn't even get me close to intoxicated, I regained the 60 pounds I lost in 2019, greatly hindering my physical and mental health, and my passive suicidal ideation has become so pronounced that I feel like I'm already a ghost who just hasn't had the pleasure of dying yet.

Cloeie Hood

One dead mother and now I'm an orphan, but I was alone before the funeral so the tears felt false.

Zowie Jones

I was her nurse for a year... and I have neither cried nor screamed since they took her body away

Stephanie Kazamek

It took me a lot of years to realize not all kids try to hide the kitchen knives from their parents so they won’t kill each other.

Jordan

For four days I watched him die, but I wasn’t there at the end.

Barbara Vreede

The headache turned out to be a tumor. I got the call by the side of the road on the way to Legoland with my 5yo son.

Samantha Blackley

The worst two rationales I have had for being dumped are by the same guy, 35 years apart. First time I was 21 and head over heels in love but I had a punk cut & when I declared my love he told me he couldn't go out with someone with shorter hair than his. 30 years later we reconnected - 10 years long distance - and then he dumped me again. Apparently I'm the kind of person who holidays on Waiheke and that's a bad thing. I'm 60 and I think this is the last relationship I will ever have. I would like him back because I am very sad about being alone for the rest of my life. But surely I can't give him the opportunity to take all three podium finishes in the worst reasons I've been dropped in my life??

DebbieG

He was my rock, and in one second, he was gone. Something he loved turned into twisted steel and took him away. I never got to say goodbye.

Jenna Bruner

"A long time ago I was crashed into by a wave of horriblness. My clothes and body were drenched in cold dark despair for what felt like the lives of a thousand me's. But I would eventually begin to dry. Slowly at the beginning, but ever faster with each progressing day. I saw my dark soul rejoice. I saw everything different or as it always should have been seen."

Candice Westberg Ambrose

When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9, my cousin offered me candy to give him a blow job. I didn't know what that meant. I remember hating how he tasted but I did it because I thought I had to (enter a life of people-pleasing and having sexual encounters whether or not I wanted to). His twin brother sat next to us and just watched. I remember that we were under a small tree in an orchard on a very sunny day. That was my first time seeing a boy naked. Twenty years later I'd heard that he'd been killed by a gang in California and his body had been dumped in the Fortuna Mines. (the information apparently was offered in a plea bargain deal by a criminal who had been there). I didn't feel sad about it.

Trish Reader

my son’s dad committed suicide a few years ago, it was a shock. I’d married my best friend’s brother, but we separated years later because we didn’t get along: I was intrepid, he was jealous of my creative ideas.. My son hadn’t seen his dad, who lived 5 hours away, for a couple of years which was a bit out of ordinary, but life happens, and his family didn’t tell us he was having MH issues so when I got a call from his sister, my friend, she told me he’d died, then that he’d committed suicide, and then that he’d hung himself, and I can still hear my shrieks, on the phone.. and I think she can still hear them too Whenever we see each other, my dear girlfriend and I, we always both of us burst into tears and need to cry until we settle ourselves down, it’s very hard but good too.. I’m crying now typing this. There’s so much love there.. he really was a special man, and I live with is son, who is so much like him.. I wrote this.. https://www.patchesrefit.com/?p=508 Any of it you can use, Amanda, and paraphrase if you wish.. This is the 2nd to last para.. I like the last line the best: Each day I live with his memory in the form of our son, now a man older now than when I met his father, with a wisdom so clear and bright.. Our son, who has a deep love for all that matters, and some key mannerisms that emulate his father. A fondness for ice cream. Holding his food with two hands when one would do, his handwriting, his laugh, his musicianship, maybe his stubbornness I’m not sure, but when I look at him, I see his paternal grandfather, Hans, I see his ancestors, I see his father and I am proud and sad at once for all that is and was and wasn’t and isn’t and can never be.

🎭Orpheus Wren🐦🏳️‍⚧️♂️Zaunking of Words

I remember laying there in the freezing heat knowing this was my death but I wasn’t dying yet. My breathing stopped but I forced it through and I wondered if I should be trying. Delay and ignore, try to forget, then catch it again, I know it’s not time… yet

Melissa Johnson

Heroin is better then sex but f-ed others anyway.

Benjamin Cundiff

I didn’t know that, the last time i asked my now ex for sex, days later i would find out she had been sleeping with another man.

Jonah Poirot
>>120367060

If I let go of this grief, if I find gentleness and forgiveness for myself, for not knowing, might the searing anger and despair dissipate? Do I want it to? It's lived within my bones for eons, who am I to tell it to rest? Sleeping gets harder and harder, these few months. And I just keep slipping slipping slipping back in to self-hatred and I'm suddenly convinced I'm the worst person on this earth and I isolate myself away. I turn everything in. Sink into myself like so many plants falling back into the ground as winter approaches. Spring will come again, as surely as the sun rises. Things older than us remember patterns that we will never understand

Pamela Kirsch

Going to PM because I got shy ❤️❤️ Here’s a line - Later was told it was a misunderstanding

Amanda WouldGo

Catholicism stole my ancestors from their homes. We’re still finding the bodies of my ancestors friends in the fields outside of the schools.

Adam Tritt

Ashes I still go to call you. When the door opens Rise, run to greet you. So I took your number from the phone and now look for it. I lock the door, So it won’t open unbidden Expecting to see you. We tossed your ashes to the river. I stood downwind, Poured them into my hand, Threw them high. They flecked across the moon, They mixed with the new grey in my hair, Covered my face. I took a breath Deep. Your ashes Taste of salt.

Lisa Sophie Beck

The loneliness was protective, for it was so familiar.

Adam Tritt

Something Holy I’ll find something holy in this. In the blood and the vomit, The urine and sad almond eyes. Bodies come from the Earth, And these are of the body. So I will find something holy in this. I will find something holy in the Seizures, tetany, drugs, The cost in dollars and sense. In time, I’ll find something holy in this. I will find something holy in the Far-off stare, in the long breaths, In the scent of wheat because She always smelled like wheat And was the color of golden bread And, certainly, there is something holy in that. I’ll find something holy in the last breath, The closing of the eyes that won’t reopen, The beat that slows, stops, Leaves memory. And certainly, There is something holy in that.

Jerry Peckery

As she recounted the details of her "girls night out" to her jelous boyfriend, he noticed something in her hair. While fixating on the area she noticed him starring and reached up to feel a vairly thick stream of semen in her hair - busted !

Adam Tritt

The Vigil This is the vigil- To protect you from the wolves After the nights Sitting up, Singing to you Heart Sutra. “Don’t leave me.” I won’t. Holding your hand, Touching your heart, Fingers in your hair. “You don’t get tired.” It isn’t time for me To rest. For you though – Watching you breath Watching you stop. Open the doors. Sunrise. Keep the wolves away. Wait. Feel the sudden change. “Where is she?” Gone. Gone. Beyond gone. Beyond beyond. To the other shore. Let the people roll in, Roll out. Gather the sheet, Tie it around your body, Carry it away. Carry it away.

Amanda WouldGo

The pope in holy descent finds his god in the hot earth ascends to tell his friends The children in holy descent Confront their god in man’s unholy heat But mustn’t tell a soul

Julie Steele

I’m feeling some things so here goes: You promised a party, I’m trapped in a basement, one bare mattress to share. I can hear the music on forte, while you hold me down by my hair. I promise to be smarter to be wiser, but this isn’t catch and release. You clean up with my shirt, because you believe dinner buys her. Forced to fawn, because he was the son of the police. Home wrecker. He was married when we met. Home wrecker. How can I wreck something already abused? Home wrecker. I never walked through his door. Home wrecker. I took the gun from his hand. But I’m just a home wrecker. Five years he begged for a child Finally, I arrived First born, no cock, too wild He felt deprived He named me after what he hated Fear was his fun Memory of my name faded Once he finally had a son If my brother knew I’d die for him… I’d let him gladly take any limb If my brother knew at 10 I lived for him… I put the knife down at the thought of him walking in If my brother knew I once starved for him… He would realize why I looked so thin If my brother could break his icy silence now… My screams might finally be allowed I have more. I just can’t go spelunking much further into my emotions tonight.

Amanda WouldGo

I wondered why she hated me She carried me by choice I wished I hadn’t come from her I didn’t choose, I had no voice

Amanda WouldGo

Your imaginary god erased my people He’s a genuine monster and you are too.

Jayme Sdrakas

From age 13 to 20, I was in a heavy depressive episode after experiencing a sexual assault and following court case. I dropped out of school and spent days and weeks in bed. I moved out at 16 and had to get a job to pay rent to my now ex's parents. I worked an overnight job and his mom intentionally vacuumed the room above mine every single day while I was sleeping because she thought I was so lazy for "sleeping in". I was only allowed to shower until 10am because the shower was upstairs and out of the basement, in their part of the house. My ex was abusive, physically and mentally. I have never felt crazier than when I endured his company, and I grew up with and escaped a narcissistic mother. When I finally got the courage to leave 2 years later, my mom's friend offered to pick me and my stuff up. Instead of giving it back to me, she kept it in her car for almost a week because the guys she was seeing were more worthy of her time than I was. She was a social worker as her full time job, which only adds insult to injury.

ayla halberstadt

I held my best friends hand in the ICU as we watched another friends husband take his last breath at 25. We got home and sat together in a shower and drank a bottle of wine in complete silence.

Stephanie Kazamek

He came to my house to fuck me once last time before telling me immediately after that there were so many women out there that he didn’t want to settle and left.

Lynn Parlett

From a dear one It's been 6 months since cancer took you away baby girl and today is your 16th birthday. There was nothing sweet about it.

EmVT

Mum said to lie about how dad died, I was 16 and scared and have barely said a true word since. The worse the trauma the better the liar, if you know what I mean and saying nothing is the easiest lie of all. It’s the perfect crime, victimless unless you count the way I died inside.

Jessica Nicholson

For two years you told me to trust you, nothing was wrong and you're an expert. Now only the xray can define the problem. The tool that should empower has escaped from my uterus.... or the time my IUS burst through the wall of my uterus.

Arielle

My man is my sanctuary, my glass of cool water, his mother died last may, we got stronger and better through the shared experience and showing up for him meant the world to me. Two months later I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor which necessitated brain surgery last September, he was awesome we got closer and stronger. A few months later in March he was made redundant by his banking job, THIS socialist was thrilled, he'd finally have time to find his bliss and rather, we came closer and I got more of him. My 86 year old mother decided to quit her cancer treatments which were working to control the cancer but were ruining the remainder of her life, it caused Gastal Entropy, once off food entirely, she was more herself and we were all with her to the end on her terms until she passed in June. It was not just emotionally beautiful/ difficult, it was labor intensive, we were her carrers. He was with me all the way having a calming effect on all of us especially my mother. It was two months of Texas Heat and triggering emotions for him but I couldn't love him more for being there with me. We returned to NY, my father joined us here with a plan to stay for a month. They bonded and I so appreciated the grace with which he approached my Sicialist Professor father (he's an Oxford Matt's PHD himself), my love felt warm and appreciative. We went out to dinner with my dad and friends, woke up at 3 to have spontaneous sleepy sex, he went to the bathroom, then collapsed dead infront of me (it was the widowmaker) I started CPR after calling 911, they came and for 20 minutes my world stood still, giving me no encouragement, the got enough of a heart beat, he got to Bellevue Hospital they put in a stint and told me it looked bad, I had decisions to make...for 3 days I was reading to him, playing Bach, Emily Barker, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, for 3 days I tried not to imagine my world if he didn't make it or worse, on the 3rd day he woke up and the doctors were astounded, %12 of people survive this event and even fewer walk away with no brain damage of any kind...it'll be a l8ng road for his brain to fire on all cylinders but I still have nightmares of weather I did the cpr right or I'm gonna wake up at his bedside having dreamt he woke up ok, PTSD is real and while I want him to celebrate my gratitude hemis perspective is much different. He's (obviously) depressed and passed this freak heart attack happened and with not warning, and now his shortterm memory, comprehension (at the level hes used to) are currently "off", I can empathize, but it's a downer he isn't quite able to step into my shoes! It's a different kind of heart break after him falling suddenly and with no warning infront of me, at that miment dead. "This isn't happening I will not be a widow today" was my mantra and "this is some terrible writing, I wouldn't see this kitchen sink of a plot in a movie! I NEED AN EDITOR AND BETTER WRITERS"

Julie Steele

Watching my mother’s face On the phone with my aunt She hides into a bookcase Trying to suppress something she can’t I get whisked away My little eyes go wide She held her tears at bay As I asked who died

Jessica Hewitt

When I had nothing left to give in that booze soaked cottage, I took a bath and started to sing. As he slumbered on I got louder, my voice clearing the stench of defeat from my nostrils. Halfway through me screaming paradise by the dashboard lights at the top of my exhausted lungs, he woke startled and demanded to know what I was doing to HIM.

Deniz Bevan

He sleeps and he sleeps, but its never in our bed

JenSam

I followed a man across the country, 2700 miles away from my family because I was convinced he was the one. I ignored the voices telling me this wasn’t a good idea, that moving didn’t feel right because I wanted to be loved so badly. I made excuses for the controlling behavior, the pieces of myself I had to carve out to fit in the life we’d built, the way my needs were ignored. I was angry and bitter, clawing for control because I had so little. When our daughter was two, he decided I was the architect of all his problems and decided to divorce me, and kidnapped my daughter, keeping her from me for 2 weeks. It was the tower card, everything tumbling down and rebuilding my life from the rubble. I found me again. But it’s lonely, and I see the same imbalances of power in how he treats our daughter, and it breaks my heart.

Sarah Leinart

Why me? I am lonely can't you see Or is it just me? Why can't I find the love I deserve? All my friends have, But then again, Im not them. Theyre all pretty, with nice little bodies. While I am ugly, short and fat, You know, guys just don't buy that. Oh well, one day Ill show them, (my friends and the boys) that I am much more than rolley mounds of fat, because I have feelings too. just watch, they'll all be sorry one day, when Im the prettiest girl around. maybe my dreams are just too big for me, but not for my mind or body (if you know what I mean) or no means no stop means stop you're a man i forgot

Avren Keating

When I was 15, my dad found one of the poems I wrote. He made me sit there and he read it out loud to me in the most scathing and mocking voice. It was a poem about the pain of living under him. He had beat my sisters and me throughout the years and this is still what has hurt me the most. He lost--I'm still a poet so fuck that guy.

Jane France

My dad died of Covid at the start of lockdown and I wasn’t even allowed in the house to hold my mum. I didn’t hold my eldest son for 9 months during restrictions; it caused me real, physical pain and I can’t forget it.

simeon dale

We lived through the lockdowns together, 10,000miles away from our families, supported each other until she could no longer support me or herself. She died from suicide almost when we made it out. It's over two years ago now and it feels like my life stopped then, I wonder if I will ever feel again. She was my life my everything

Taylor

I told her I couldn't see her anymore because it would remind me of how I participated in my own suffering.

autumn f

Spent six years with a man who repeatedly told me that I would not make a good wife or a mother. Many years later I was seeing someone else. This man cheated and lied the whole time. I packed his things for him, weeks pass and he decides he will move his stuff out on the morning of my birthday.

Mike C.

I found her car in the last spots in the last parking lot. It was freezing by the ocean. She was lying across the front seat. She took a shallow breath. Emergency in my ear I pulled her out onto the frozen asphalt. I put my coat under her. She was not breathing. When they finally came they worked on her with paddles with drugs with yelling with pain. 30 min on my coat on the frozen asphalt. Another 30 in the ambulance before they left for the hospital. I stood there for a hour freezing shaking in pain from the cold. The cold they said saved her. She jumped from a building a week later. Too high for the cold to save her.

Nichole RIek

Walking alone with no family through life. Left my ultrareligious family behind to stand with my trans nephew.

Elaine Wilson

My best friends are on a trip without me, and they never even considered inviting me because it’s a “couples trip” and I’m single at 50. I’ve cried every night this week wondering what couples do on a trip that I can’t do, and I’m so sad that I’ll never know.

Nicki Hunt

my mum left my dad when i was 15 months old, she moved to America with the lodger - my dad's best friend, I was supposed to go too, but dad refused permission, it was very early 1960, my mum had to agree to leave me behind. Whenever I tried to ask my dad why I didn't have a mum, like all the other kids, he would tear up and be sad, so I stopped asking. I grew up believing I was such an awful baby even my own mum didn't want me.

AnnaLatchman

I thought my traits were super powers then I realised they were all just built from trauma responses

Nicki Hunt
>>120371898

When I was 30 I knew for my own mental health I had to find out why she left me, so I braved it out and asked dad again, that's when i found out she had a ticket for me, i should have gone with her, she had wanted me. Even though I know that now I still really struggle with self worth - 30 years thinking even my mum didn't want me, it hurts.

rebecca

On today's date last year: His heart stopped beating, they could not save him. It took everyone by surprise, especially him! He was the first of over a half dozen people, who would just as unexpectedly die as he did over the course of the next half year. The grief never stopped.

Art Popp

I drove through a hurricane To bring her children Christmas Presents, I quit my job, Moved to another country, Changed careers, Bent the universe to her needs. She didn't say, I do, but she did say, I think so. A week before the adventure began She slipped, hit her head, and drown. No enemy to hate, no evil upon which to take vengeance, No righteous cause to pour myself into, Just life.

Ermete Bottazzi

I am too exhausted to be my father's father anymore. I'll let him die.

Robin Goodfellow

She told me I never said sorry. So I made a point of apologizing. I apologized for things I never did, that were nothing to do with me. And still she told me that I never said sorry.

Mark Ringrose

My Mum died on Friday and my Daughter last year. Now I'm trying to write something for the funeral to cover what I know Laurie would have wanted to say about her Granny.

Franz(i)

locked in my apartment, three years and counting. when will the world let me out again? forgotten, worthless, or maybe they really want me rather dead

Jeff Zimmer

When I kissed him, I could taste ass on his face. Still he denied it.

Head VI

It was a nice sunny afternoon, Easter was around the corner. I sat down in a quiet corner of the emergency room, verging death around us. The doctor told me it's hopeless, she will only suffer needlessly from now on. She was in a coma for two days already. So I said goodbye to her, gave a nod to the doc, and went home. Couldn't stand watching. Two hours later, the phone rang. "She's dead." the doc told me in a soft voice. Was it the cancer, the bacteria, the hopelessness, the ER doc that killed her? No, I decided, I had killed my mum.

Viktoria Nikolova

For nineteen years I thought one man is my father. One day I understood that I have the eyes of another. He only told mom to call him when I graduate. I called when I was 22 and he spoke from the bathroom from fear and shame that his other daughters would know. I asked for the name of my grandmother and he said in an email that God will forgive everyone.

irina

One death at work, one in private life. Then restructuring. Then terrorist attacks 100m away. Then leaving a work that was family. Then another death home, one at the old work, one at home, all complicated and lovebound. Then covid. Being told you need to build resilience. The pounding of grief on barely sutured grief, when they dress for Halloween as Frankenstein's monster I feel represented.

Marie O'Reilly

My teenager was 16, it was 6 months into covid. At their first video appointment with mental health services, they asked me to leave the room. When I was asked back in, I learned that three years earlier they'd taken 15 paracetamol and they only didn't take more because there was no more. I lived for months in terror and guilt - that I had missed the suicide attempt, the self harm, the eating disorders, the intrusive thoughts. That they'd hidden all this from me. We were close and open and honest with each other, or so I thought. Things are better now but there is always a tiny seed of fear in me. The fear that one day the pain and derealisation might come back and take my child away. That they'll say good night smiling - and in the morning I'll find them cold. I'm scared to go upstairs one morning and find them cold.

Jeff Zimmer

The diagnosis is that I'll go blind, starting with night vision. So every night, when I turn off the light, I spend a minute to drink in the deliciousness of the shadows, the tree branches against the sky, the moonlight and light pollution filtering through the trees and into the bedroom. By these faint traces of light I can still find my way in the dark.

Danny

My momma is gone now yet my father's still here, which means I am truly alone.

Katie Player

15 she smeared her blood on the wall beneath the words, “Nothing here is ever promised”

Steve Turnbull

Reserve the right to use in my own song later, (particularly if you don’t like it )a”The ghosts of Christmas past were my dead parents, made Christmas Day the bleakest of my existence “. If nothing else, hope I have helped you in some small way x

Honey_Bear

At the start of the pandemic an old queer man I cared for as a nurse for years who had lived with HIV for almost 30 years told me ‘I can’t do this again’ while he watched the news and soon after died. Those were his last words to me right before I switched plagues and became a hospice nurse in the pandemic. One of the places I worked was on a floor for demented people who had COVID where they were supposed to stay for their 2 weeks and then go back home or elsewhere. All of them were supposed to leave. Not one of my patients got off that floor alive. One died with transport in the parking lot. I lost dozens of patients there. I almost killed myself listening to your cover of Encanto’s Pressure in 2022 after working 60-80 hour weeks for 2 years. But I’m here. I learned the hard way that our broken medical system doesn’t care back for caregivers. We weren’t heroes. We were pawns in a war some people couldn’t accept was even happening. I set boundaries for myself with work, got a lot of a therapy, and I’m doing a lot better these days. In a few years I hopefully won’t be a nurse anymore. I’m tired of watching the healthcare system continue to crumble and burn after everyone else thinks it’s over.

Dean N

Nothing is as terribly silent as your own house when your little boy is safe asleep in some other place that he calls home.

Johannes Widi

I was madly in love with this girl but she told me I was too complicated for her - she was right about that. When she and some friends decided to visit that french commune of 'revolutionaries' they invited me to join them. I went along, harboring high hopes. An old barn was the sleeping place for us and about a dozen of other visitors. There I spent the first night listening to her making love to the guy next to her.

Jake Marcus

I loved the COVID shutdown. Not the people dying of course, not the two months of layoff, but “social distancing.” I realized there was an expression for my preferred way of living - social distancing. COVID was an introvert holiday.

Jake Marcus

My cousin’s suicide took me entirely by surprise. We had once been close. Sitting in my mini-van in the long cemetery car line waiting for directions to the plot, a man came to my car window and introduced himself, realizing he was my cousin’s longtime best friend who had sold me weed when I was in junior high. We welcomed each other like old friends do. He was the only one who would tell me how Michael had killed himself, filling his van with gas grills and closing the windows. Inventive, I thought. He told me this had been Michael’s third try and that in the previous attempts Michael had joked “I’m even a fuck up at suicide.”

Corgimom

44yrs old spending some of my mother's last days on this planet with her. She finally admitted to treating me like shit growing up and that should of and could have treated me better. Took a deathbed confession for her to finally admit to the one thing I had been waiting to hear my entire life. Now days away from 45 my heart still hurts from her passing but feels whole from her confession.

Jana Cohen
>>120375102

Being told you need to build resilience can be the hardest thing. I feel for you.

Alessandor Earnest

I don't want to put someone else's body inside my body I don't want to put someone else's needs before mine someone else's life dictating mine I don't want to be eclipsed I don't want to be fundamentally altered I don't want to cede control of my life to lose sight of myself to disappear completely behind someone else's dream just because I’m in love

Annie Jane

He held a box cutter to my face and said “your positivity sickens me.” I pushed past and said I needed air. I rounded the corner back home to see my tires slashed. “I’ll never let you leave.” I felt the scream writhing inside but I was too afraid to let it out with my sleeping toddler in the next room. I fell asleep on the couch and woke to clammy hands on my ankles, dragging me down the hall. Please don’t let my baby see this, I prayed to whatever gods would listen, let me carry this weight alone, let me make it through the night.

Rexington Funk

The end of my marriage came because my husband completely changed. He started drinking and became abusive. Every day I was psychologically beat down, most days included violent outbursts/threats. Many thrown/broken things. I cried and struggled to sleep at night. Every night felt like a battle in my mind I had to survive. Every day living a walking nightmare. To the point of a mental breakdown. I was physically sick to match my mental state. Then, things got even worse. The drinking escalated to a 1/5th a day, and the abuse was nonstop. I was shaking and crying uncontrolably, and projectile vomiting even water. I couldn’t sleep. A human can only take so much stress. At that point I had to escape. I had to choose me over the greatest love of my life, and it was the hardest decision I’ve ever made, but I’m alive today because of it. There was nothing left of myself to sacrifice on the altar of love, I had to turn that love inward for the first time in my life and I am a completely new person because of it. A lifetime of trauma I can finally rise above, I can finally take charge of my story and start healing.

Raven Thunder

Justice is an empty word A promise, too often left unfulfilled An appeal to the false hope of retribution In the lack of justice, we are left with desperation Desperation is sitting in the shower Wishing for a superpower, to transform water into fire Hot enough to burn away their fingerprints Willingness to sacrifice every layer of our flesh it takes to get to the infection Because desperation turns our skin into a prison Trapping victims on the wrong side of the system While the ones who haunt us hold the keys, unlocking gruesome memories and laughing at our pleas Gloating in their freedom to collect bodies like trophies THIS ISN'T FAIR That's the sound of despair Despair is when the justice system fails Despair is when our desperation has exhausted every option When the nightmare continues upon waking When every waking moment someone's happiness is taken When we are sentenced to a life consisting only of survival THIS ISN'T FAIR It isn't fair that they are celebrated, vindicated, facing zero consequences Desperation is what happens when we are denied protection When those who preach "protect and serve" get to pick and choose who deserves it When we are left with only two options To sit in silence in our flesh prison or to condemn ourselves to life in prison To take a life to protect ourselves or to allow our lives to be taken THIS ISN'T FAIR This isn't fair, she said As I held her, in my desperation to mend her broken pieces back together No, it's not fair, I said You're not alone, I said In my despair, knowing that my words could not give her what she needed When what she needed was justice, When justice failed to keep its promise I stopped believing in justice I believe in evil, which too often goes unpunished Yet I still believe in goodness I believe in solidarity I believe in the power of companionship Providing validation, ensuring our safety Standing by each others side on the journey through healing I believe in healing, I believe that nobody can rob us of our power, that we are stronger together than every soulless predator can ever hope to be I want to believe that this can be enough I wish I could believe that evil could be stopped But I believe with all my heart I believe with all my heart In all of our despair and desperation In all of the pain that comes from such unjustified violation I believe in a power deep within us That they can never take away from us.

Simon Carruth

Nothing I could suggest would compare with this quote from aid worker Mahmoud Shalabi in Gaza: "I've seen kids write their names on their palms, because when they die, they want people to know who they are."

Raven Thunder

I am not a ventilator I am not a punching bag I am not a superhero I am not an anchor I am not a mind reader I am not a coping skill I am not a void filler I am not a way to get a fix I am not a drug I am not a medication I am not an inexhaustible source of energy I am not a victim I am not a villain I am not a last resort I am not an enabler I am not a perfect person I am not an escape I am not a possession I am not a solution I am not a problem I am not a failure I am not a scapegoat I am not an obligation I am not a parent I am not a mistake I am not a liar I am not a deity I am not a distraction I am not a source of entertainment I am not a sense of direction I am not a babysitter I am not a sadist I am not a fire extinguisher I am not a toy to be played with I am not an indestructible object I am not everything I am not the one.

Tony Pegg

I was seeing someone that I shouldn't have been as she was married. I ended up going to war. She stopped writing after a month in. I finally got a letter six weeks later. It stated we should see other people. She was back in the States, I was on a ship full of Marines. I was devastated and did not eat for a week. When I got home from the war, I found out she also left her husband for someone else when he called me. It was a mess.

Jemma

Had a medical abortion (the one where you take the pills) and I went out with friends to help me not think too hard about it. It finally "passed" in the bathroom of an emo club night I've been going to for ten years. It hasn't changed at all, but I have.

Caren Rusco

My best friend tried to stick up for me, so he held a gun against her head. It didn't matter that it wasn't loaded. That was my breaking point. I moved out that night when I got off of work.

Kat

I’ll send a message as it’s private

Sarah Jespersen

I asked him if he loved me. I don't remember why. I was holding our toddling boy while he was leaving for work and I needed to know. He said he didn't know, but he'd think about it. Every day he didn't have an answer. He'd think about it. He'd forgotten. After a week he said I think I do and smiled benevolently. And I told myself it was fine. I had enough for both of us and I was so fucking noble. But with nothing from him to fill it up it was draining and I didn't notice. Frogs in a pot, it drained so slow i never screamed. When love was empty and I was so cold that I couldn't feel anything any more, I got out. I matter too. I deserve to be loved the way I need it, and I deserve to want the one I love.

Anna Branscome

The NYT has Tiny Love Stories; you’ve got Tiny Grief songs. Which, now that I think about it, is the title of a Sinéad O’Connor song.

Hetty

He was old and red faced. His breath was horrible. I was only just 15. It’s 25 years later and I still can’t make the shower hot enough and I can’t scrub my skin enough to make it mine again

Anna Branscome

My mother and I followed the cop to the hospital where he’d said my daddy was in the emergency room. We had to wait in a separate room. After an hour sitting in that room, my normally composed mother suddenly put back her head and howled, “I SHOULD HAVE BEEN KINDER TO HIM.” She was right, and he was lying dead in another room.

Małgorzata Anna

Every day I feel like a captive, who just wants to break free, Every day my body is fighting, but now I finally see, I’m trapped and there is no way out No way out Sometimes I don’t want to wake up It would be easy to just give up I’m in so much pain I struggle to breathe Chemo is poison, but it is saving me Saving me (*currently have mets in my liver, spine and a lot of bones. my spine has broken, as the cancer has eaten quite a lot of the bone structure. No clue if I’ll be here tomorrow. Trying my best to keep afloat but the pain is unbearable)

Meesh

"I love you but I'm not "in" love with you." It didn't occur to me until years later how hurt I was, deep down, by that simple statement. I'd dropped out of school, I'd been flagrant with my family, I'd moved across the country, all for him. He reminded me of my then-recently deceased father. He reminded me of my father because he was a drunk and he liked sports and he built things with his hands. He was kind to dogs and cats but not himself. I was in love with him. He loved me I suppose, but not enough. He brought me to a city I love, and I'm grateful for that everyday. We lost touch but I heard he got married, I tried to be glad he found somebody he could be "in" love with. I presumed. I heard he was going into liver failure. I heard he had died. I cried inside, I'd always known he'd drink himself to death. That in so many ways he was like my father but not in the way that would lead him to seek help and sobriety. Almost 11 years since my father's death and one since his, I weep for them both, for the depths of love they'd numbed themselves to, for the sadness of being responsible for their own demise, for the distances that had grown between us and for not being able to say goodbye in any way that mattered.

Amber Rhapsody Jet

"I know that I am sick and I need help," she said, sobbing into the phone. "I'm scared." It was the middle of the night, and she was parked on the side of a highway, not sure where she was or how she had gotten there. She had been in a psychotic dreamstate, driving for days, not answering her phone. It was her encounter with the fiery hellscape of Northern California that finally forced her to confront her reality. She was hundreds of miles from her intended destination. I had barely slept since her cryptic call from a hotel room somewhere in Northeastern Oregon. Her cell was dead, she had forgotten to bring her charger. She was planning to go stay with a friend. "Can you call tomorrow to make sure I make it there?" It was a simple request that led to 2 days of frantic phone calls, none of us able to unscramble the facts from the strange messages she left for her friends before she went radio silent. I set my own emotions aside and did my best to comfort her, guiding her back home. I felt relief. She had finally promised to seek treatment after suffering multiple psychotic events that Summer. But, sleep in the safety of her own bed erased the experience from her mind. She was chipper, everything was fucking hunky dory from her perspective. She shut down any talk of getting help. She was fine. The pattern repeated. Her behavior became abusive. She played games, spontaneously ending friendships, then calling weeks later as if nothing was wrong. I believe that my friend was addicted to her own mental instability. Like, literally addicted to the chemicals released in her brain while she was in such extreme emotional states. Her denial mechanisms formed a labyrinthine fortress around her turbulent mind, the only passageways for communication were laid with trip wires that unleashed cruel insults or triggered inescapable traps of "logic". I eventually cut her off completely. I loved my friend, but I had to put myself first.

Dahlia

Covid: 1. A person is coming, don’t get too close. I tugged her small hand and pulled her to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. 2. I gasped for air the night I couldn’t breathe. I could hear the rattling in my lungs. I started to hyperventilate and stared at the fear in my own eyes through the bathroom mirror.

Tanya Hart Newkirk

The morning my aunt was murdered my mother looked straight into my 13 year old eyes “she’d be alive if you’d stayed at her house”.

Ria

When I was 18, my boyfriend tried to kill himself three times. He failed three times but he got closer to succeeding with each attempt. The third time he was in a coma for a week, a week I spend frozen and suspended in time. Each time he tried a part of me died. I tried to support him, to help him find his will to live without success. So I decided he didnt want to live with me around, he might want to live with me gone. I left him. I left the most beautiful and most flawed boy I’ve ever met. I don’t know if he is still alive. I told everyone he was dead because it felt like I finally killed him. I still think of him each year on the last day I spoke to him. He might still be alive but I still, after 21 years, don’t know if that thought is comforting.

Abby Lee

I was plotting my revenge but then he drank himself to death

Gina Rivera

I have attempted to share (3) traumas, but can not seem to hit send. My voice feels stolen by all of the people who have told me to be quiet.

Kirk

He used to care for developmentally disabled men in a group home. I always loved and admired him for that. So when a piece of mail arrived at our house in the desert with another man’s name on it, just above his, I thought nothing of it. We had lived together for almost three years, been together twice as long. What appeared to be a bank statement for a joint account. My only passing thought as I set it on the counter was a recollection of an old photo of him at work with one of those men, joyful and smiling. He came home a few hours later. I was smoking a cigarette in the courtyard. He waked up behind me and gently placed a hand on my shoulder. He whispered, “I’m so sorry.” I could see the piece of mail in his other hand from the corner of my eye.

Gwyneth Sarah

Glass shards of past hurts stick through our skin. The closer we are, the more we try to hold each other, the fiercer the wounds.

Jennifer Wortman

He was one of seven children but bore most of his father's beatings. He was different. Didn't fit his father"s idea of who a son should be with his artist's heart. With his queerness. He wouldn't let his father see him break, but the cracks were there. By the time we met he had built a hard protective shell. But I was patient and earned his friendship and his trust. He introduced me to the Smiths, Depeche Mode, the Cure. The music that nourished him. Made him feel less alone. Made us feel less alone. We were inseparable those campus years. And though we moved to different cities, he was there standing beside me when i married my love 28 years ago. A few short years later I was standing beside his casket. He would never see 30 years old. The cracks, it seems, were not to find repair. I hope he knows that he was loved and I miss him every day.

Joni

My mother waited until the day AFTER my cousin died to ask if he'd ever "messed" with me... When I told her he had and how, she told me he couldn't have because those circumstances couldn't have happened... I'm almost certain she's wrong. I'm almost certain my memories are real... But sometimes, I'd rather be wrong, and go back to protecting her, rather than wondering why she's not willing to protect me.

Kirk

When I was away on business, he came into my condo and tore down the photos and art from my walls, including a tapestry his mother gave us for the house we once shared. A solitary torn piece of cloth remained held to the wall by a nail that was too high for him to reach. And he left behind a note that ended with, “I hope you never feel at home again.” It was the worst punishment he could imagine. What he didn't understand is that nowhere had ever felt like home to me.

Wally Nancy

In the end, effort wasted, effort gained. In the end, misery traded for another life, made bright with the pain of passing pleasures.

Claire

he locked me out and called me crazy for climbing in through the window. that was the moment i knew i didn’t love him anymore.

The Southern Fried Witch

He makes my coffee, every morning, as if he didn't leave me to die once upon a time. I swallow my scream in cream and sugar, and drink his sacrifice while longing for blood.

Lisa Reza

Hi Amanda, Perhaps the last 3 stanzas in particular...Lisa Marry-go-round You snatched the brass ring, Then tossed it away, For excitement, enticement, Now, a bore...for a lay. So c’est la vie, But say no more! No more talk of delights That used to be yours. No more looks, no more glances, No more drinking me in, No more wining and dining On the flesh of my skin. My meals...I take elsewhere. Deserve the feast I have found. I was starving in the theatre Of deceit in the round. Go eat the heart That could part with me, Add it to mine. The one you gorged yourself on, And called it divine.

Shawn Inwards

Again, I am a casualty of a misguided intrusion and the closest ones get the banishment, seems a tried and true conclusion.

Rhys

"do you not like to kiss?" I asked him. "It's ok", he replied, "but just so you know, I will never kiss a girl after she goes down on me, because that would make me a homosexual."

Carrie Garrett

You’re 25 in pain every day and There is no relief Invisible disabilities elicit no compassion “You got through it” they say But it’s more than just today It’s your whole life. Sick since you were 8. I don’t know how to make it better I break watching you How can a mother heal the broken body I gave you.

Michael Murphy

I dug this up from about 10 years ago, on Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath right before Yom Kippur): Who’s Judging Who By: Michael Murphy Once again we have come to that time of year When You demand of us all the faith, awe, and fear That has been beaten out of us for the 300 days That are not Shabbat or any Festival Days. And out of the blue, You demand, with Your Booming Voice: “Perform rites you understand not! Sit! Stand! Now repent! Now rejoice!” And all while we say to each other and to you our confessions, I cannot help but think how you never admit Your Transgressions: For every idea believed that had no helpful utility, For every mortal conceived who was born with a disability, For every war started with nothing gained and everything lost, For every Crusade, intifada, pogrom, and the Holocaust, For every dream smashed to pieces due to other people’s rejection, For every job lost in the recession causing mass poverty and dejection, For every high school student so tormented that he finally attacks, For every preacher who says You agree with his politics, but refuses to look at facts, For every person whose willpower was destroyed by alcohol or having a smoke, For every true Messiah who was written off as a joke, For every time a Bat Mitzvah stumbles on a zakef katon or sof pasuk, For every Jew who hasn’t read the Torah, and has never heard of Habakkuk, Who said it isn’t right that peace should be obtained via the victory of an idolatrous nation, To whom You revealed your solution to theodicy was indefinite procrastination, And for Job, who, during unjust suffering, You told to shut up and admire Creation, And never bothered to explain how Your playing dice with the universe got him into his situation, For how You said in Deuteronomy Wisdom was near, in Baruch it was far, and in Proverbs, it came from our father, And in Judith it wasn’t ours to know, in Daniel it was hidden, and in Qohelet, we shouldn’t even bother. And who is to say what’s holy or profane, to choose one over the other Or that wisdom isn’t man-made or attained once you become a father or mother? And what’s a Jew like me to do to deal with all this tsuris Except to say, “To Hell with it all!” and to become an apikores? But lo! The Day Of Judgment is here! Even the angels are alarmed! The Great Shofar is sounded, every man and woman is disarmed. And so begins the catharsis, with one last day to repent. And still, I feel the power of prayers that any other day I’d resent. And as I say every Al Chet Shechatanu and Avinu Malkeinu, Every Vidui, every shofar call, every Kaddish, every Aleinu, I can’t help but wonder if You are even paying attention When we have millions of Jews praying, many without comprehension. So tell me, does any of this even matter to You? And if You won’t answer that, just tell me, who’s judging who?

Dawn Marie

When I told him I was done with the lies and torment and was ending our nine years of dysfunction, he grabbed a gun I didnt know he had and held it to his head. My gut was to struggle with him and protect him. Only later did I find out the damn thing wasn't even loaded. The f*** was playing another manipulative mind game.

Nicole DeNicolo

My sister is 5 years younger than me. I always struggled in school and she was basically a genius. There is a moment that I clearly remember where I was struggling with some stupid math game that was supposed to be fun but I just wasn't getting it. She was in the room listening to the instructions and things and at 5 she was able to quickly and easily say the answers. I was 10 and completely demoralized. It's one thing to be behind people your own age it's something completely different to being fifth grade and have your kid sister who is in kindergarten know your material better than you do. There was a juxtaposition once we were older. I had always struggled college was relatively easy for me because I was used to working hard. However, when she got into college she nearly failed out because it was the first time she was ever really challenged. She got into her first choice uni with a really good academic scholarship (which she lost almost immediately) through early admissions. I got into my uni after being rejected six times by literally talking my way in. I started on academic probation but was quickly given scholarship money because of how hard I work.

Stephen Hanrahan

Recently me an my sister had to drive around my cousins favourite places to try find her before she killed herself . She was found and rescued from the water by two strangers

Sam Allen

Twice a week I wake up, dress, and interview for the same position. The guard at the concrete entrance to that building has come to recognize (and know) me. Each time I receive no answer. That the job duties are different every time doesn't matter anymore.

Sam Allen
>>120384376

"And for Job, who, during unjust suffering, You told to shut up and admire Creation, And never bothered to explain how Your playing dice with the universe got him into his situation" --- WOW.

elia bassin

My goodness, what a project for you. I could write all day... WOMAN SAVED ME/BARBIE TRAUMA: Here is a recent one in current culture. Barbie trauma due to flashbacks. A friend, and my partner and said something like "people were so responsive to the Barbie movie, but I was like umm yah, that's how life has always been, nothing new in Barbie" - they didn't cry at Barbie. I cried through about all of Barbie, it gave me flashbacks to my Peace Corps adjustment. in Peace Corps warned us before we flew out we maybe traumatized for how women are treated differently. I told myself "yah, that will be hard for the woman identifying in the group". But a few weeks in, the mom in my host family was basically a prisoner in her own home. They used to try to socialize but another woman told their man something and it passed right back to my host's spouse and he beat the shit out of her and there was nothing else for her to do or go to in this country where raping your spouse is officially legal per the top judge as written in the country news paper. ***here is the key point, I was always a woman's advocate in any way I could figure out, but I finally had the moment to realize 99% of everything good that had ever happened to me was thanks to a woman. It was not a happy moment, it was on the list of saddest moments of my life, I probably wrote a list in my journal of 23 key woman who had inspired me and had gone above and beyond, given me the tools to be able to be free and do anything I wanted in life, like go from poverty to being able to quit my job and join the peace corps. I knew all the stories, but that moment, to be sitting in the middle of a families tin roof home where the mother was a prisoner. That is why I cried a Barbie, I was again laying in my bed in the prison mom's house. I was also going through another wave of **Afghanistan Refugees**. The most traumatizing news thing for me these past three years has been the people fleeing Afghanistan. I just relived that before Barbie, hearing a story about Hillary Clinton working to get woman leaders who are on a death list out of Afghanistan. In Barbie, there was a line that said something like "there is a girl going through a hard time", I jumped to the hit list of woman leaders in Afghanistan. You could immerse yourself in some videos and second hand trauma and dedicate a song to the females in Afghanistan, at the airport trying to leave. That feeling of desperateness to hang onto an airplane hits my soul. DAY I ALMOST KILLED MY DAD: One of the highlights burned in my mind. I'm 25 trying to help my abusive dysfunctional parents, in their living room (I've hardly been in their house for years at this point). My dad, falls into one of his rages and has me kind of cornered. I went through some of my therapy steps to try to defuse and remove myself and he keeps getting closer in a crazy rage. I snap and I have these next five seconds burned in my brain for my life. All my lifetime of rage, I'm now 25 and my dad is now a senior, I wind up into the punch of my lifetime, I am ready to kill him, this frozen moment of being face to face and truly ready to kill someone. Mid punch, I don't know how I did it, one of those slow motion split seconds, somehow my brain said don't kill him but I still had my dysfunction rage and I move my punch to the 2007 giant vacuum tube computer monitor and I when my hand hit the screen, it looks like my hand was made of Play Dough. All the bones in my wrist popped out of my wrist and all the bones between my knuckle and my wrist broke. It was 16 hours that day looking at my Play Dough hand wallowing in my dysfunction until I could get a spot in the surgery room for them to wire my hand back together. *Note, this is before Marathon bombing, before you are publicly talking about radical empathy (or similar phrase) and I can now, today, see that man as a sad pathetic result of being a child in Europe in WWII and lead in our air and everything else. COMPLEX PTSD: Another key moment you might like. I'm walking with my partner down a rural road and we are taking this self administered "are you suffering from Complex PTSD". I'm 30-ish and finally learned what Complex trauma is. I had read the survey and thought no, not really me. But I value my partner and know it's hard to see yourself from the outside, so I'm asking them to score my survey. As we talk through the questions **There is this key life moment, like a realized intervention, I thought oh fuck, I have almost the maximum score of complex trauma, the key was almost an out of body experience looking at myself and embodying all these dysfunctional, weird, unique traits and I step outside this self I'd learned to succeed in and saying everything I thought about me was just Complex PTSD. Who am I, this "me" is just a bunch coping mechanisms and trauma responses. I sure you know what I'm saying, but if anyone else reads this far, one easy example, I used to wake up if a neighbor slammed their car door loud, or a sink dripped, and I'd wake up like the house was on fire/wide awake, and then I'd be pissed because it takes and hour to go back to sleep. I thought "i'm just a light sleeper", but once I see outside myself I realized no, you are traumatized, your brain needs serious healing! After that moment walking feeling deep in my soul that I am nobody, my entire personality is just a product of Complex PTSD, I'm since learned, had wonderful therapist and i am still a person : ) I could go on all day. Thanks for being who you are!

Niki McQueen

It was the second night after he had sold my car and I'd moved into his home. I was forbidden from speaking to friends any longer. He got very drunk and told me about the 3 people he had killed. I haven't slept a night through since.

Chris Valentine

When I was barely still a child, I couldn’t breathe. I almost died. I had surgery to fix both of my collapsed lungs. It’s not uncommon. It’s not unique. 19 years later, Covid hit and I was triggered every day from watching the news tell me about 3,000,000 others who couldn’t breathe, and watching the other news tell me it wasn’t real, and watching other news tell me it’s not that bad. I missed the fact that I was triggered because I became hyper focused on one individual who couldn’t breathe—George Floyd. I put all of my energy into fighting for others, and I ignored myself. That’s when the panic attacks started. They haven’t fully stopped.

Kimberly Santini

My mother couldn’t love me. I thought I wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, good enough. Always striving to be more, thinking my actions somehow controlled the tide of her heart. Here’s where you write something eloquent connecting the moon/tides to her unplanned pregnancy. It was never me, it was always her. She spent my entire life grieving for hers, the one that was taken away.

Stephanie Quinlan

It’s late at night and I’m 9 years old and for some reason I’m still awake. My parents are talking in bed, in their room just across the hall. They are talking about me, and none of it is good. They’re listing all the ways I frustrate and confound them, the ways in which they wish I was different, better, less of an embarrassment. My father says “If she was mentally retarded, I could understand why she behaves this way”and suddenly my spine is made of ice, my heart drops into my stomach. I think there is a part of me that is forever 9 years old, lying in the dark and hearing those words, wondering how I could ever be deserving of such contempt.

Cassandra Bunk

He told me Mother’s Day was only for your own mother, not the mother of your child, and since his mother was dead and he was still sad about it, Mother’s Day was really about him, not me, the mother of his child.

Jennifer Harnage

I was raped two years ago. Woke up to being sodamized, something to which I wouldn't consent consciously. Starting running away screaming with pee dripping down my legs. The kicker? It was my husband who did it to me. I almost died from an ectopic pregnancy a while back. It was the most physically and emotionally painful experience of my life. My first lover killed themselves when I was 16. I lost my virginity to her. 1997. It was the worst time of my life. Police watched my house to try to catch me in a crime. They thought, because we were goth, my friends and/or I talked her into suicide. Even after they found evidence that I was the one trying to convince her to live, I was still treated like a criminal because I was a queer goth witch. 1997 was a weird time. Two of my kids are queer/trans and we live in Florida. Do I need to say more? I've gone no contact with my family because they're all a bunch of racist cunts. My body is a prison. I have numerous chronic pain causing conditions. I've been suffering from migraines since kindergarten. Endometriosis, Adenomyosis, and PCOS since teenagehood. MSK which causes regular kidney stones. Fibromyalgia. Currently in the process of getting a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. I'm autistic and ADHD, not to mention an INFJ, so I feel like an alien more often than not. Like I was forced into a world that was simply not designed for me. I am always asking *them* to come pick me up and bring me *home*! Earth has never felt like home to me.

Mary Guarnieri

I had lost so much weight because I thought that he would love me, at my thinest he told me that he didn't want to fuck me.

Lisa Pannek

Twice a day I changed the dressing and cleaned the wound in my mother’s chest wall. The wound large enough to lay my fist in. One day my fingers touched something hard and sharp and I realized it was her rib.

Val Meade

Burned into my memory: 23 years ago my 3-year-old daughter crawled into bed with me after a nap & told me how her 14-year-old half-brother would play "penis to the butt" with her.

Robin McFadden

My dog's final seizure happened the day I was released from the hospital. Before even going home, I hobbled to the animal ER, still festooned in a cath bag and ileostomy and various IVs, and they brought out my sedated but still twitching little dorgie, and I stroked her ears and whispered "wake up, baby. It's time to go home. Mommy doesn't have cancer anymore..." But she never woke up.

Douglas Pinheiro

I had just gotten out of a very traumatizing and abusive situation. My mother and sister had come and picked me up and were bringing me home. We stopped overnight at my sister's place on the way. I had been trying to be okay, to be objective and level-headed about my experience. My trauma hadn't sunk in yet. I didn't realize how badly I was hurting. Then my mom and I got into some fight, I don't even remember what about, but she felt like I was vilifying her and unfairly so. She spat something at me like, "If this is what you think of me, maybe *they* weren't so bad!" And something in me snapped. I completely lost it. It's a blur now, but I ran into my sister's kitchen, pulled the largest knife out of the block, and started slashing at my arms. Someone wrested the knife away from me. My sister broke down sobbing, panicking, looking at my gushing arm, and I just started repeating through tears, "She said it didn't happen. She said it didn't happen. She said it didn't happen." When I noticed how badly my sister was affected, it brought me back down, and I shifted to trying to comfort her. She was worrying about rushing me to a hospital and I tried to reassure her that it wasn't that bad. I grabbed some antiseptic and butterfly closures and bandage wrap from her medicine cabinet and fixed myself up as best I could. "See? All fine." I wiped the blood off her dishwasher and her floor. I felt *so* guilty that I had hurt her, spreading my trauma around, compounding it, inflicting it on bystanders. That was over a decade ago. We're all fine now. My mom and my sister and I all have good relationships with each other. We've all done a lot of therapy. We're good. We're not even the same people who stood in that kitchen all those years ago. But the scars are still on my arm.

Lindsey Lubow

"somehow it's my fault that I managed to get myself away from your influence / I bought myself a sobriety token to mark the first year / I hate that I still dreamed about you last night"

Andrea Thomann

My ex would wake me yelling and screaming to do him a favor and find whatever it was he couldn't find, usually at 4:30am. Eventually my brain responded with this chorus. Holy shit balls. You know there's gonna be shit balls! Holy shit balls oh. The way you're talking to me- it's like you see right through me. Holy shit balls oh. Let me hear you say: you washed your balls today!

TMR Bennett

Last night conversation with a friend who called in a moment of emotional emergency - “some people fall in love with impossible people in pimpossible situations because it suits the displacement they feel in the world. It is possible to live every day occupying the “wrongness” of simply being in the world, to turn the valves and vent the pressure that lives behind your where. At least I damn well hope it is, or you and I are wel and damned.”

Teresa Toro

I thought I would burst sometimes from having to do the thinking and feeling for both of us.

Kirk

Re-locating from FB: When my ex courted me, he would text me lyrics from an amazing Ani DiFranco song, “School Night.” It made me feel so special, so personal (I still love her and her music today). We had a complicated relationship and I was convinced that it was OK for him to have other lovers. Many years later, he brought home someone else, to our shared home, and when we all awkwardly met at a breakfast I prepared, this new person marveled aloud at the lyrics my ex recited the night before to seduce him. The very same that I fell in love with.

Nechyfer5

Why is it you are cold to me, you are cruel to me, you hurt my heart when I need you...and I take it all. Yet when you're kind, or caring and try to show and give me love, I want to run, I get disgusted and shut you out! TRUTH!

Jessica Badousek

She lived with my abuser for nearly a year after I moved out. Poverty left her little choice. I didn't understand that until I was much older; a 13 year old can't understand it. When I was raped at 17, on her couch, it seemed only fitting. Her inability to judge character was something I paid for.

Damaris the Goddess

Friday night: When I was 15, I was a Pedestrian vs drunk driver. I had 2 severe Traumatic Brain Injuries within seconds, a compound fracture of the front of my head, a compound fracture of my right leg, & the last 3 discs in my spine & tailbone spider-webbed from the impact of the street. They took me to the hospital to wait for me to die so they could harvest my organs. My mom was snowed in in Chicago for 3 days where she had just landed for a business conference that weekend. Thank Goddess, my brother was home & gave drs permission to save me. 3 transfusions & some emergency surgery later, I was in ICU where my mom was finally able to came home Monday & told me my dad just died from cancer. A year later, I lost my only child.

Laura Keeney

This is making me want to cough up long-buried darkness. But, I have a busted arm and can’t write in my journal right now, so the thoughts are creating a tempest in my brain. All I can do is sit here and breathe. With each inhale I am holding space for your pain, and with each exhale I am sending love, comfort and peace to each of you. May we all heal. ❤️‍🩹

Allyson Strickland

I read once that when you remember something, you're really just remembering the last time you remembered it. So every time you said you loved me, it was a photo copy of a photo copy, and that's how forever ended after 8 years.

Lauren Schmitt

He broke my wrist when he saw that I "liked" a male friend's post.

SewTara

On the first night of our honeymoon he got really drunk and had to miss the next day exploring on our rented scooters. I brought him buffet breakfast in bed. I lent the scooter to a couple we had met and went out with them. Years later, he said he’d gotten drunk that day because he realized what he’d done. I said “Why did you even pick me then?” He said “I thought I saw the potential in what you could be” as if I was some moldable and pliable thing for him to refine. What lead to us exploding was me waking up and realizing what I had lost of myself. I started to break out of the box he’d so slowly put me in. He didn’t like that.

Marissa

September 2017, i was waiting to hear from my best friend about his amazing view of the eclipse from Oregon. I never heard from him. Instead i received a call from his sister letting me know he was gone. He was murdered. Killed by someone he knew and trusted. I still miss him every day. I will never be okay.

Karen Krebser

What I've wanted out of live has never counted for less than when he drank himself insane after the world shut down, and he didn't even have the good grace to die and set me free.

Michael Murphy
>>120366086

Better still than being paraprosdokian. That way, if I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong. ;-)

Bellana

I told him I miscarried our child, we didn't know I was carrying, alone in the ER room. He said that sucked and he was going to play video games now and hung up the phone. He never came to see me in the hospital once.

Bellana

My grandmother asked if the priest had touched me inappropriately. When I said yes, she beat me because "we don't lie about the clergy like that."

Aerandir

A teacher asked me to stay late at school. I hadn't misbehaved. When the class ended I made my way home. Standing in front of the door with do not enter plasterer all over it, I remembered the letters I found in the drawers but didn't dare to read. Numb. I was picked up by a couple of teachers who had followed me. I stayed with my brother who had his own battles to fight but could not extend much kindness to me. And her, I couldn't bear her touching me for years, the smell of the hospital making me shiver. These days we hug sometimes but it's not the same and a friend who warmed my hands when I was a child, out in the cold, wad the kindest gesture I can recall.

Doyle Casey Ray

My mother had borderline personality disorder. My therapist said I had “range”. Is it any wonder?!?

Della Morte

The first time I found out he cheated was because I was pregnant with our child and they always do a panel of STI tests. The second time I found out because my uncle was screaming about how his girlfriend left him when she found out he was related to my husband whom she had slept with previously.

Natasha Reith-Banks

He was so drunk he nearly didn’t make it to the birth of his son; i paced through my contractions and watched him sleep it off in a hospital chair.

Natasha Reith-Banks

the last thing my father said to me before he died was “I wish you would divorce him. But your son is a smashing lad.”

JessTCreate

December of 2019 my husband had a heart attack. 43 years old. I'll never forget the grey of his face that day. He recovered for a new chapter only to be met with covid lockdowns.

Michelle Turner

Easter morning. The most vibrant friend I've ever had died of a brain bleed caused by the drugs that were supposed to dissolve the clot in her head; even if she'd lived the stage 3 cancer they'd just discovered might have claimed her.

John Youker

My Grandmother, one of the strongest humans I've ever known, slowly faded away. Her mind becoming a fog, her memories breaking and blowing away. Now my father, her son, is having short term memory issues. His body is the healthiest it's been in years, yet his mind starts miss firing.

Bethany Olson

I breathed on the mirror and the mirror breathed me in. I broke myself instead of the mirror and found myself in the fragments. The bleeding stopped when I stopped feeling and the feelings only come when I bleed. But fuck the abyss staring into me because even in pieces I See.

Issa Rodri

I still look up a self styled prince of shitty discount renfaire swords that hurt me long ago- a lifetime ago- to see if he's "served his sentence," and I stay prepared for the dark nights when it feels certain he'll find me and break down my doors again. It feels like doomscrolling, and he could have died in there for all I know. I don't care that he can be forgiven. All I want is to take that stupid sword he threatened me with and enact my own sort of justice. It's justice for him, and for the other girls he hurt, the ones braver than me.

Rebecca Brisbin

Our last anniversary, before the divorce, we went on our first trip together since our honeymoon six years prior. I reached for intimacy, he pulled away and said he couldn't because his dick was leaking green. He thought he might have Gonnoreah. We talked about getting tested when we got back. I asked who he had slept with, he said only his fiddle player, and she assured him she didn't have anything, then he accused me of bringing it back from Europe, but I didn't have any symptoms and I had slept with two people the whole tour in 5 months, both with condoms. I felt hurt that we hadn't slept together but once before Europe, and I'd never had an STD. We went and got tested together after we returned from Yellowstone. I was racking my brain...we did the full scope. He had Gonnoreah and I didn't, clean bill of health as always. He had been so vicious in Yellowstone, the way he looked at me when he asked if he was sure I didn't bring it home from Europe. How defensive he got when I questioned what he was doing while I was away. When the results came back, he casually stares off at the wall inside planned parenthood, shrugs and says "I forgot the condom broke when I was fucking her." Years later, almost 8 years after the divorce, I reached out to her and apologized for treating her so coldly on account of him...she never had Gonnereah, they had used a condom and it it hadn't broke. My gut told me he was lying about who he'd slept with, the way he said she assured him she was clean. I felt in my gut a condom was never used, and I felt in my gut it wasn't his fiddle player, that man had so many secrets.

Teo Hoble

I asked her so many times to choose between me and the bottle and she always chose the bottle. She chose the bottle instead of going out with my dad and I on the weekends. She chose the bottle instead of Christmas. She chose the bottle on Easter. She chose the bottle when I went to the doctor. She chose the bottle when I moved out. She chose the bottle instead of meeting her future son-in-law. She chose the bottle by twisting my arms behind my back to get said bottle back from me; she chose the bottle by slapping me so much and so hard that all my neck muscles and tendons ached. She always chose the bottle. AND ONE DAY, she chose the bottle over her own life, too. It messed with her blood, and that messed with her heart, and on that day her blood had been messed with and her brain got messed up too; and she had a stroke. . And myself and the doctors, we found her still alive, lying in a pool of vodka-puke, and poop and pee. She'd chosen the bottle. She was paralyzed in half her body; but her mind was half paralyzed too. And she spoke of real things, but also of dreams and memories and hallucinations. And she saw dead people, and people who were still alive but had abandoned her long ago. Sometimes she saw me too. And slowly but surely, she spoke less and less of the real world. She'd sought to lose herself all her life, and now she was finally losing herself for real. Sometimes I fantasize that she realized what she'd done, just before she went. But knowing her, she probably just wished there were bottles on the other side. . And now I write this text and I place it in a bottle together with my abusive, alcoholic mother. I seal the cap and I throw both out into the world, so that I may forget and move on. She chose the bottle.

Heather and Tim Allman

Being independent instead of a "Sheeple" tweaks that heart wrench every single moment. Stolen time, wasted energy, and heartache —all because I'm me, who else can claim the title to my heart, my joy, my pain, my fear? Then again, maybe choosing the wrench would be easier: "Everybody wears the mask but how long can can it last..." (The Fugees) The only thing i have to fear is conformity and condemnation. I don't worry about fear itself. How would anything change? I am the only me who can ever be; deal with it people so i can be free... and finally rest.

Hugo Camacho

I'm Spanish. I was scrolling on my phone and my former girlfriend asked me: "Share? Who is Share?"

Tanjuša

I made the mistake of reading too many od these comments. I hope everyone heals their hurts and cuts and hearts . ♥️ *****I have to chime in with my love sad little story that happened in all but six months. At first he dropped the love bomb on me, then slit his wrists two different times. Next month I somehow end up pregnant. He made me drive him to get his beer in the middle of the night, threatening that otherwise he will drive and inevitably kill himself. The fog finally lifted from my eyes when he hacked my computer and read every single conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. When he yelled as I was leaving, to abort the baby I’ve been carrying over 16weeks under my heart. I’ve never run faster than with already forming belly that night. I’ve never before chose myself, but I’ve always known, I will chose her.

Jessi Moss

cut my father out of my life and now the bad memories are surfacing because i'm no longer in survival mode. i didn't realize my mother was my savior until she died.

Andy Brailsford

She was not the same, she was different, but we were told that would happen after they had invaded her head to try and remove the thing that was taking over. It changed again, on the morning we brought her out, knowing that a few hours earlier her husbands’ body had been found on the railway line. She has gone now, and we are all different.

Allison King

You killed yourself on the night of March 31, ans we all found out on April 1. It's hard to believe news like that on April Fools Day, but we knew it was true. And all because your long-distance girlfriend found out you were cheating on her with one of my good friends. At the time I felt guilty for telling a mutual friend that telling your girlfriend was the right thing to do. But all these years later I know it was you that was the coward. Nevertheless, I still pour out one for you on April Fools.

Lynsey Jonas

Watching your best friend continue being friends with your rapist even after you told her what happened. (we're not really best friends anymore)

Just Karly

Trigger warning, obviously... The worst, most life-changing sentence I ever heard was cheerfully said by my 5 year old daughter: "Daddy licked my butt! Daddy licked my hoo-ha!" She has no idea the hell that this offhanded comment has put me through ever since... Having to turn my partner of almost 20 years into the police, having to re-contextualize the last 2 decades of my life. Having to raise my child completely on my own. Feeling so incredibly alone because I can't tell anyone what happened (because I want to protect my kids privacy and also because it triggers literally everyone on this planet). Feeling like the biggest idiot for falling in love with an abusive monster and being the last one to know... Never being able to trust anyone ever again... Never being touched by another man again... four years later and tons of therapy and I'm not anywhere closer to being "ok"... It all fucking sucks, I wouldn't wish any of this on my worst enemy.

Julie Dean

I jumped and screamed when we hit maybe the biggest pothole in the world. He cursed at me and his tone and glare cut me. I silently wished he would hit me. It would be so much easier to leave.

Coila
>>120469344

Fuck that guy. Or rather, don't. Invisible abuse is harder to leave but no less real.

Coila
>>120456531

I'm so sorry you are going through all of this. I hope you have support where you are and if not, you have it here. ♥️

Coila
>>120409013

My mom, too. There's so much that is beautiful about my mother that I can't access anymore because of the broken parts of her... I hate to know she's suffering and there's nothing I can do to help... And also... This last disowning by her was as much relief as it was crushing...

Coila

The night the police took my mother away, after her then-husband who she believed to be the Love of Her Life beat her up. Again. The police had to take someone away and it had always been him. That night, they took her. My best friend's mom (my mom's best friend) saw me crying outside as I watched them drive my mom away in a police car. My neighbor's hug and motherly kindness is something I will never forget. Thankfully, the abusive bastard let us stay with his parents. I was terrified of him that night. And that's when I decided I was so over all of this nonsense. And him. We couldn't leave soon enough for my liking, but we did leave. We survived.

Just Karly
>>120456531

Thank you Coila 💜 I've never posted about this (I'm pretty much off of social media these days) but Amanda asked for details and I feel like i can trust this group since we're all being vulnerable. I have about four people in my support system that I can talk to outside of therapy but none of them know what to say (what is there to say?) I'm good at pretending I'm fine for the sake of my kid so everyone just assumes I am fine and leaves me alone. Enough time has passed that most people assume I'm "over it". They don't understand that there's no getting over this.

Coila
>>120456531

If you know, you know. And if you know, then I'm sorry you're in the club... 😅 (I was the kid, different but similar situation...)

R.J. Ehlert

Do I remember? No, I don't. The last memory, too clear, watching my father die, never fades. The door to my memories broke open afterward, and Depression came for years, stealing whatever it pleased.

Damian Blacklock

No matter how many transfusions they gave her, the blood stains on the bedsheets were still only the colour of rose wine.

Katherine May Williams

A darkness so dark it's almost comical? My first session of ECT (electro-convulsive therapy, aka electro-shock) was delayed because I picked up an upper respiratory tract infection in the filthy underfunded psych ward. After a week I was ok'd, but they forgot to book a cab to take me from the hospital to the off-site place where the ECT was conducted. So we (myself and a nurse I'd never met, who didn't speak much English) took a bus. Two buses, actually. During the morning rush hour. Picture me in my dirty pyjamas and robe on a crowded London bus, crying, surrounded by kids on their way to school, people on their way to work. When we eventually got there (a residence for elderly mentally ill people) the waiting room was small and cold. We waited some more. Finally I was walked through into the bright white ECT room, told to remove my robe and boots and lie back on the gurney. Suddenly it seemed like there were a dozen people in the room. Med students come to watch. Someone wiped my temples as the anesthetist began to try to find a vein in my right arm. A minute of jabbing, he couldn't find one. He switched to the other side. Another minute of digging, searching for a vein. Still couldn't find one. He withdrew again and tried the back of my left hand. Couldn't hit. Things got tense. He tried my right hand. I heard someone say "we might have to try between her toes". And THAT is the line I remember. "We might have to try between her toes." If it hadn't been so awful it might've been funny. It took so long to get there, but at every step, something went wrong. "We might have to try between her toes" felt like the last straw. (It wasn't. But it was the point where I felt myself give up. Like something inside me died.) There's more, but that was the line that to me seemed most poetic (almost comedic) in its utter wretched farcical darkness.

Jessica Badousek
>>120456531

I was the molested kid (though I was older) and believe me when I tell you that there was no sign you could have seen and that you walking away with such certainty will mean everything to her in the future. Everything.

Sarah Parkinson

I spent the first twelve years of my life watching my cousin die. I spent the last 30 years wishing I could relive those first twelve years with him again. The sweetest member of my family, my uncle, choked to death on a cinnamon bun alone, one room away from the rest of the family.

Darwin's Observations

In reading several of these postings, I see small variations on events that are soul crushing. Some of you found ways to put yourselves together. Others are staring at their own broken pieces; weeping because they cannot pick them up. They are too far away, or too heavy or cannot be seen in the darkness or painful brightness.

Tanja Nieminen

My sister told me I have depression and drove four hours to be with me, talked me into seeing a doctor, was happy when I was hospitalized. I loved her for doing that. I bounced back, it was merely a reactive response to burn out... Two and half years later I didn't make it in time to see my sister still awake in hospital, I was there when she drew her last breath but I didn't understand in time that she was going. The cancer had come back, she had a bad reaction to chemo and we lost her too fast. I wasn't there for her. Fuck, she was there for me, and I wasn't there for her.

Malvine

It's been 2 years of back and forth with a terrible step-ex. And a helpless step-son in between. And I'm still figuring myself out - he's older. We're in love but it's a struggle cause we handle problems very differently but there's been nothing but problems. Leaks in the house, visa struggles, custody struggles, money going to lawyers instead of our happiness. Sometimes I feel I'm too young to be bearing it. Sometimes I think about leaving. But I couldnt. We just have to get through this dark patch. Everything will be fine eventually. I hope

Ryan Stuck
>>121161642

I can't say that I've had the same experience, but I've been there. I had it in my head that I wouldn't live to see 30. At 29 I fell into deep depression and was significantly suicidal up to my birthday and beyond. The only thing that prevented me from killing myself was the idea that my fiancee would find my body and I didn't want her to deal with that. The inconvenience of my body was the best reason I had. Not that someone loved me, or I had potential, or any bullshit like that, but that my body would be depressing to see. That same excuse saved me an additional 3 times. I was battling quite a few things at the time (chronic pain, opioid dependence, depression, crappy job, etc.), but I managed to not kill myself. All the physical and emotional pain or suffering has become something that I ponder intently, but for the most part I don't let it get to suicidal ideation. I've taken to Buddhism where suffering and the cessation thereof are primary focuses. Might be enlightening, might be a crock, we will see.

Taylor

It took me 3 years to realize I was raped. That, by definition, when someone keeps fucking you after you told them to stop, when they don’t let you up when you try to move away, you have experienced rape. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t scream. Or if you didn’t struggle much. He was your boyfriend, his friends could have heard you (don’t want them involved), he was on coke and c’mon, he was soooo close That was rape. But not a “real” rape, don’t worry. That gross, crawl out of your skin don’t touch me feeling that’s still there 10 yrs later is just being over dramatic

Syntaria

He was coughing up blood and shaking, my sister was begging him not to leave, my brother sobbing at his back, and I will never know if the last time I held his hand, if that was him responding to my grip or just his body seizing one last time.