rambling, rumbling desperation.

i wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up in one house.

it's a reality i have difficulty imagining. living age zero to eighteen in one room, maybe longer. the same four walls keeping me in, keeping me safe. bed after bed occupying and reoccupying the space, swelling as my limbs stretched past the edges, then shrinking again to accommodate the kingdom of literature i was destined the cultivate. friends sharing sleepovers, years of pillow gossip and abandoning laughter and crying angry, ugly tears. comfort in the banally familiar, in memorizing patterns of shadows cast by street lamps on gritty asphalt. comfort in the ways to school, in the consistent curriculum, in the things i didn't realize existed until it was too late to ask for them. 

sometimes, i crave that knowing so fiercely that i can't breathe. i wish for a life so very different from my own, if only to see if i might have become someone just as different. i can't change the chemistry of my brain -- i believe i was born wounded -- but i can't help but question the role that my rootlessness played in the evolution of my illness. 

contrary (perhaps) to the description of this blog, i love the life i've lived. i love the diversity of being i have experienced, the variety of culture i have come to appreciate (even when i didn't/don't understand it). i have met so many amazing people, learned languages, seen history paved in cobblestone that i never could have known without my very specific set of circumstances. 

i love plenty of things i hate. i love things that have scarred me, that have made it harder for me to exist. and i could hardly expect to find happiness in the present without coming to love my past. but i also couldn't love it without making sense of it, without exploring what that past has made me into, what i have allowed to shape my daily experience.

i'm not sure where this post is headed.

the places i've lived, the houses i have inhabited and vacated too quickly to leave even my fingerprints behind, were is some ways the best i could have had. i was always curious about the world beyond my chain-link fence. but those houses won't remember me, and not for their lack of sentience. too greatly do i wish my story mattered to someone besides me, as if their caring would lend credence to my suffering and joy. as if it is not enough for me to know, remember, take stock in them. 

i don't know what i'm wishing for, really. 

a conflict of needs.

disclaimer: this post deals with issues of depression, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. please read (or don't) with care for yourself above all other priorities.

i was thirteen when i first admitted that i wanted to die.

it was so much deeper than want, and when it hit me, i couldn't remember what it felt like to want to live. it was insidious in its invasion of my body, this sudden drive to dive from the roof of my middle school. i remember telling my best friends that i wanted to cling to metal in a lightning storm, hoping it'd strike and i'd fade like the stars at dawn. 

that year, i learned that "depression" was common in teens, and i finally had a word for the cloud that had followed me from college station to sembach to small town central georgia. depression. it seemed so small a name for the demons raging in my mind, too few syllables for the sadness that sent me to the corner of my room to scribble for hours in the dim light of my bedside lamp. i listened to melancholy mix tapes on my boom box, desperately alone and afraid to speak a word. in the two years since my eleventh birthday, i had gone from mary kate and ashley skirts to a rotation of black t-shirts and baggy jeans. i didn't know who i was in the mirror, but i knew i wanted that forever dark that came when your heart stopped beating. 

my depression made me feel even more transient than the constant moving did. that angry, degrading voice made me small, quiet, desperate not to draw attention. it made me scared and invisible, a ghost in the halls of my school. my classmates stared at me like i was a stranger, a monster who was once a friend. i felt like i was slipping through the planes of reality into some limbo where i could hear what they really thought of me, how annoying and worthless i was in their eyes. who would want a friend like me? who would want to know the way my mind drove me farther in, farther away? who would care if i disappeared?

but i finally told them. i couldn't hold the fear inside any longer. that fear was becoming purpose, it was transforming into a plan, and i was afraid i'd really do it, i'd really fly from the building and meet my asphalt grave. and how impermanent would i be then? some thirteen-year-old suicidal freak who penned some drivel in the margins of her math homework, too unoriginal to count to anyone who didn't know her. didn't know me.

even then, i needed to feel known. i needed to die, but i needed to matter.

a friend tried to talk me down over the phone. his stepdad picked up the line, listened in like the creep i later came to know he was. but, abusive prick or not, he probably saved my life when he hit redial, when he told my mam. 

if only it had ended there, in the air my mother and i shared above my bed. 

too bad the madness was just beginning.

--

author's note: this post is the first in a series of indeterminate length about my history with depression and mental illness, and how it has contributed to my feelings of transience. this history and my woes of impermanence are inextricably connected, and i think exploring the relationship between the two might offer some insight to my current...unhappiness? discontent? [feeling that has no english word]?

a book with many roots.

when i was nine, i consciously discovered religion.

it isn't as if christianity hadn't always been a presence in my life -- it was merely unseen, a ghost carrying me from city to city and home again. my mother read from a big yellow devotional sometimes, and i remember her, haloed by oozing chartreuse light, desperately imparting the wisdom of the lord to my sister and me. at least, she seemed desperate, as if she only had so much time to make a deep enough impression that would remain with us, like a tattoo or a scar. i remember realizing that my mother wasn't simply sharing stories with us -- that many people believed the stories to be true, that they found some greater truth in whispering fervent prayers at the alter or at the dining room table.

by this point in my young life, my transience had became a palpable part of my existence. i began to meet people who weren't growing up the way i was, other kids who lived in the same home for all of their nine or ten years, had the same friends since the play-dates their parents held in need of a toddler reprieve, play-dates they couldn't even remember themselves.

and i had begun to want that feeling of permanence.

i don't remember who suggested my baptism. for all i know it was my mother's mother, a woman who carried us off to church each sunday that we visited her. it was a ritual, one that i enjoyed but didn't understand. whoever it was, it sparked an idea in me -- that maybe, if i loved god enough, he would be something i could carry with me no matter where i went. no matter what happened, he would give me the roots i was craving. i convinced myself that no matter how often i moved, how many friends i left behind with no forwarding address(es), i could have god.

i began to read the bible. i was given one, and then another after i was baptized. i read and read and participated in bible studies and read some more, picking the pieces apart, looking for bones and branches, anything to give me certainty.

a few years passed, and my fervor passed with them. the more i understood about the bible, the less i understood its followers. the more i read, the more questions i asked that were left unanswered, shut down. my mother listened, offered advice. she kindly let me doubt in the ways i think you have to doubt, at least at the beginning. but some of my preachers and teachers couldn't silence me quickly enough. how dare you question god? how dare you wonder about the miracle of christ's birth? it's in the bible, and so it is.

i felt my roots in faith wither, starved for answers. i went through waves of devotion and rebellion, especially after the last move, the one that ended the life i had once known. but even still, after that, i went back to the church, back for more answers and hoping, begging for stronger roots.

maybe i am broken for religion, broken for faith, because after that final back experience, i've never consistently returned.

---

author's note: i do not write this to condemn, or to claim neglect, or to point to someone's failing. i thought that faith in something would give me permanence, but it didn't. i came to that faith selfishly, and now realize how much of faith is giving with no expectation of receipt. religion didn't work for me, or maybe i didn't work for it, but either way, my quest for spiritual foundation was cracked and faltering and left me floating, halfway between faith and cynicism. i'm floating still, though now with far less fear of falling.

georgia to texas: the summer of 2003

the move from warner robins, ga to helotes, tx was the worst of them all.

i finished writing my second novel that summer, my mother's fujitsu plugged into "the purple box" so that i could write as we drove west. i wrapped headphones around my ears, and listened to the angriest music my mother would allow, trying to tap in and tune out as i killed my heroine's love interest on a winding back road, introduced ghosts and pirates and unicorns that fulfilled prophecies. it was god awful, but i still have the floppy disks brimming with multiple, minutely different drafts.

that summer, i turned fourteen. i spent most of the day strung out on a mattress in my grandmother's living room, my makeshift bedroom until we had walls farther south. i stuffed myself with ritz crackers and dr. pepper. a laptop kept me company, my single connection backwards, my virtual highway east. it was a nice computer, considering the time, and my grandfather was kind enough to let me borrow it for weeks on end, even though he was writing another book and probably needed the mobility more than i needed to rebel against my parents' choices.

i had my first brush with danger that august -- a stranger in a chat room masquerading as an acquaintance, a man desperate to know my full name, my address, my phone number, my parents' names, a/s/l. i gave him nothing but a nickname, parading through cyberspace with a tolkien-inspired screen-name, but he got closer and closer to my trust, inching ever nearer in the way that predators (even unintentional ones) always do. i think he thought he could save me from the horrors of my mind, but no one could, not even me.

theatre camp was supposed to be the final crossing into my new life. two weeks in the mountains of montana, learning a new show with 120 other hand-selected students from across the country. we were talented, they said, full of potential. all i felt was full of blood, toxic red that leaked from me and stained my skin. i felt that i carried my pain to the fire-scorched forests, so far removed from the entanglements of leaving and yet so immersed in them that i thought they would never leave me.

that move was a kind of trauma that i previously imagined myself immune to. was it my age? was it that my father's mother had died in georgia, and i felt wrong being away from the remains of her? was it the house in kathleen, blue and perfect and the one i chose for us before my parents had even brushed the curb with our weathered tires? was it all that had happened in that bedroom, or the way my demons finally emerged, fully-fleshed and taunting, in the bathroom mirror i shared with a sister who couldn't see them?

was it all in the timing, or did any of that matter at all?

mono no aware: everything is transient, and so am i.

"mono no aware": lit. "the pathos of things"; Japanese term for the awareness of the transient nature of things

transient, n.: a boarder who stays only for a brief period of time

i grew up in the passenger seat of a mini-van.

my life is measured not in years (or coffee spoons), but in addresses and area codes. age eight was colorado springs, age fourteen was 210.

i learned quickly not to attach myself to a bedroom or a house, a streetlamp or a neighborhood. soon enough, the people i met were held safely distant from me, friends without strings that i would inevitably have to sever.

this blog was prompted by a post i read somewhere in the online universe. one that expressed "xx things only military brats would understand" (or something to that effect). a girl i grew up with in arkansas (ages 3-6) shared it with me, and soon thereafter, i started a new job where my coworkers began asking basic questions like "where are you from?" and i didn't have an answer and it hit me -- how very transient i still feel, even though i've lived in the same region of texas since 2005. how temporary every choice seems.

the impermanence of my childhood has left me without roots, without the burden of nostalgic obligations. this is freeing, to be sure, but also terrifying when thinking of marriage and children (eventually) and careers. i don't know how to do these things that seem so normal, so simple to everyone around me.

and surely i'm not alone.

this blog is not just for me. through it i plan to explore some of the parts of my life that seem most difficult, relive my various lives, and detail ways i am trying to feel a little less like i'm just passing through the lives of my loved ones, but i hope you will share your stories here, too, stories of suffocating permanence and terrifying ephemera.

the only time i feel rooted in anything is when i'm writing, and when i share that writing with others. and right now, no matter how little, i desperately need to feel rooted in something.