You don’t know, can’t know how it feels to be me. When you look at the world you see happy things and sad things. You see people and places and joy and hope and despair. Sometimes I look out onto a sunny day, full of promise and it’s black, not a dot of light in the sky. Just black, no grey. I can feel like I’m falling with a weight crushing my heart. This is what it feels like to be ill day after day, I understand that now. Something or someone that picks me up can crush me just as easily.

As the pain leaves and returns so am I alive then suddenly dead, cut off in my prime; unable, and somewhat unwilling, to function. You seem so alive to me. You function like a human, you’re happy when good things happen and sad when they don’t. Your smile is a ray of joy that shines in my face and warms me. But it is also a bright lamp shining in my eyes that interrogates me. Sometimes seeing other people living their whole lives seems the most tragic thing for me, can’t they see what the world is like or do they just ignore it?

“People who are terminally unhappy are freaks!” you say and you should be right, so why then are there so many of us? People so often refuse to understand. “Cheer up” is a favourite along with, ‘just get on with it”. I’m not sad. It’s not like grief, it’s mostly like a weight constantly pressing. A pressure that says, “I can’t let you feel like everyone else. I can’t let you get on with your life”.

I’m so often told that if I try hard enough I can be happy.

Occasionally I look out and see the people that truly love me and I can see the damage I’m doing to them. How can they possibly love me? I’m twisted, broken and ugly, both inside and out. Sometimes when I’m tearing out my hair in self-hatred I see tears in your eyes. You say you can’t understand my self-hatred. You say that you cannot understand how I could hate myself so much when you say I am so beautiful. You say you cannot understand why your opinion does not count. I cannot understand it either but sometimes I think I’d rather die than have people looking at me.
One day I hope I’ll be able to tell the whole world, how I feel. But not today. Some efforts are just a little too strenuous, some hungers just a little too gnawing. I can trust so few people with this hurt.