Dear God.

Let me disappear.
Please, dear God, please.
Let me evaporate
And become nothing.
Let me be empty,
Painless,
Invisible,
Weightless,
Dead.
I didn’t choose this life,
This body,
This nightmare.
So let it be over.
And let me sleep.
Don’t make me do this, God.
I’ll do it.
I swear to God, I’ll do it.
Please don’t make me do this.
Find another victim, God.
Find another puppet on a string
To toss around,
And taunt.
I’ve had enough.
I want out.
And I’ll get it any way I can.

I wrote this poem about  2 and a half years ago. I wrote 4 of them. One day, sitting on my bed, they came pouring out of me, fully formed, waiting to be heard. This poem and the others still scare me. I can’t read them without feeling like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. There is such a darkness there, a vague hollowness that makes my skin shiver.

This was after I nearly killed myself. I’d moved past it, and didn’t want that anymore, but I was still trying to make sense of it. This poem was my attempt to make sense of the feelings surrounding that day. I still don’t think it’s something I’ve ever processed.

I never wrote about it in my journal. If someone went back years from now, and read the entries from around that time, they would have seen that I was depressed, but I hid my deepest desperation even from myself. I never wrote about my choice, and only mentioned it in passing several months later.

It’s a darkness within myself that I could not face and even today, I turn away from it. It’s still not something I entirely understand. It’s also something that I’ve never completely healed.

That’s not to say that I’ll ever be in that place again – I won’t. But there are wounds that a situation like that leave behind, and there are scars there that are thick and deep.

If I’m totally honest with myself, I’m still reliving the past. I’m stuck there, replaying it on a daily basis, and I’m going to keep replaying it until I heal it. I’m walking around with chains round my ankles, heavy ones that drag me back and down, but I keep trying to pretend they aren’t there.

“Oh, that. I dealt with that already. No worries. I’m fine!”

No, it’s not fine. And I need to learn to be okay with things “not being fine”. There are things that still hurt, there are situations that still sting. There are aches and pains sitting below the surface that I have yet to deal with. There are parts of myself, as in this poem and the others, that I am just not able to face yet.

But just because I can’t face them doesn’t mean they just went away. They’re hanging out on the couch, eating my chips and peanuts, forgetting to put the toilet seat down, and leaving their darkness hanging over everything, like an ugly brown haze.

I can’t get away from them. I won’t be able to until I face them. Which as of yet, I’m not prepared to do. Yet it’s a process and it’s a place I’m heading towards. As I follow the path of my own pain downwards, I’m slowly moving towards the place where the pain was so bad I wanted to physically blot out my life to make it stop. I’ve never given that feeling the time of day since. It’s like it happened to someone else. No big deal, just a tiny little incident, I’m over it now. I’m fine! Just fine.

Despite the fact that I made the choice to live that day, I never healed the pain underneath it. I just stopped acknowledging it. It’s been eating away at the edges of my mind ever since, nibbling and tearing, and me pretending that it’s not happening, blaming everything around it, but never facing the real truth underneath.

Your own darkness is scary, and I spent months dancing with it, a twisted tango with my pain that ripped me apart inside. I never healed it, just covered it with some bandaids and a big blanket.

“Oh, that? That heaving, gaping hole with a covering? That’s nothing. No big deal. Just a little rip, a little tear. Nothing to worry about. Really. I think the maid must have left it behind.”

As I heal shallower wounds, and tackle manageable pains, I can feel myself moving inexorably closer to that point. Quite frankly, it frightens me.

And at the same time, I know that it will liberate me.

Welcome to one artist's odyssey

On May 21st, I'm going on a quest. A quest for art, for meaning, for beauty, for truth. I'm picking up my life, packing up a suitcase and heading to rural France to live, paint and study art for the next 18 months.

Click here to find out how you can stowaway in my suitcase and join in the adventure!