the fine line between life and death (nostalgia is a purgatory and the only solution is apathy)

Nostalgia has got to be the single most soul-crushing feeling alive, second only to apathy. Reminiscing on an old feeling or memory, smelling the single moment in time, gone in a second. A reminder of all that you long for and the knowledge that you can never go back there. There is a reason I love liminal spaces and the backrooms so much. They are the literal representation of a space between states of being. A hallway, a stairwell, a parking lot, they’re all a purgatory; a transition period where you can go in any direction, but you’re stuck. You are forced to pick a path to walk in, unknowing where it will take you and what will be at the end. Like Sisyphus, pushing a boulder for eternity, ignorant to the end, unaware if there even is one. Nostalgia creates a pit in my stomach, a longing for something I can never return to.

My childhood was filled with a lot of noise. The jarring slam of a door and voices echoing even louder. It contained hidden cheat codes that I found that broke into the noise to create a silence of my own: music. It contained a kinship between myself and my parents, a bond I created with each of them in order to learn their own cheat codes, allowing me to disarm the potential explosion before it began. By the time I was 10, I had perfected it. The good times were so fucking good that it made every bad moment feel fleeting. It wasn’t until 2020 when I realized that the bad things were the only few things I remembered about my childhood. I was unable to enjoy those good moments. I’m about to turn 20, and I remember more now. I remember my mother’s voice as she would sing me to sleep. The faint sound of Over the Rhine’s “Ohio” playing in the background as I swayed with her in our kitchen. My dad doing silly voices as he made up stories before I fell asleep; him pretending like he was too cool for it and folding immediately when I asked him to tell another one. The radio blaring in his old maroon ford expedition that I hated more than anything but always played our favorite songs. The warm breeze as a promise of summer to come in early June, before the weather got even worse with climate pollution. Playing on my neighbor’s front lawn with my friend from down the street. The good memories became warm again, and I grew fond of reminiscing.

When I think about the past now, it’s like I’m looking at someone completely different. I don’t know who she is, but I miss her all the same. I am not the same, because I am no one. I am floating above it all, trying to find a solid ground to stand on before the longing swallows me whole and I’m stuck in a hallway with no doors or end in sight for the rest of my life. I heard somewhere that feelings ebb and flow, you can’t have one without the other. You have to have bad moments to enjoy the good. I’ve been afraid of the good moments since I can remember. The word “Cherophobe” comes to mind, and it means the fear of feeling happiness because you know that there has to be the inevitable comedown of sadness. That every feeling is transient and will never last. In a way, emotions are a lot like liminal spaces.

With the high highs comes the inescapable apathy, surrounding my conscious with a promise of absolutely nothing good. There is a crack in my psyche each new opportunity and exciting moment I have. The crack quickly becomes a hole if I don’t fill it fast enough. I become so euphoric from a good moment that it makes the loss of the feeling seem like a death. I am stuck in an endless cycle of wanting to be surrounded by people and wanting to isolate myself forever, so no one has to have the displeasure of interacting with me. I think there is something to be said about how crushing the feeling of loneliness can be, but also how comforting it can feel. It is like a blanket, heavy and stealing of my breath so much that it starts to hurt, but that weight soon becomes a familiar safety. The knowledge that we all will eventually die alone, no matter how many people you surround yourself with, so why bother with anything? That, my dear readers, is where apathy can be the worst feeling in the world. When I am at my happiest, it’s simply the other end of the spectrum. I’m almost apathetic to the apathy, like I don’t care enough about feeling nothing so much so that I force myself to forgo it completely in order to preserve the little emotions that try to push through to the end of the hallway. Every bit of it is transient, and I’ve come to realize that my relaxed state is that of an absolute clusterfuck of nothingness. Who am I when I am not performing for others? Who am I when I am completely alone with myself?

The answer is complicated, but simple. I have always said that I am in a constant state of overwhelm. I feel stressed about so many things at a time that it shuts me down completely, paralyzing me from doing absolutely anything. I used to get these moments, I would feel so many things barreling at me at once, it felt like everything in the world was screaming at me and I needed to do anything to get it to stop. Anything to have some small semblance of control in a world where it was lacking more and more each day (enter: OCD). Anything to ground me to reality, to remind me that I am real, and the world doesn’t have to be this loud, my brain doesn’t have to make it worse. But it always does, and I found different methods to try and quiet it when it gets bad. I have found healthier ones now, it was a rough time when I was 11, and the reveal of my biggest method of control unraveled something in me that simultaneously made the noise a thousand times worse and also quieter than it had ever been. The fear that I would worry people as much as I did then is what stopped me from ever going down that path again. I write now, and I dance, needing some kind of physical release from the tension in my body. When it gets worse, which it has been recently (something something ebbs and flows), I write more than I ever have before. I still crave a physical release, and sometimes that looks like me hugging myself as tight as I can or squeezing a pillow until it feels like my arms will fall off, but it works as best as it can. When I lived with my roommate, I would ask her to squeeze my hands as hard as she could, like a tether to the present time. I’ve tried several things: the rubber band trick (a classic), holding ice (pretty okay but it gets annoying when my hands get wet), and so on, but my favorite has been this. Writing. It gets easier to talk about when I can hide behind a screen. I don’t have to face the fear and hundreds of questions from worried friends and family, don’t have to hear their fear of me doing something worse. Because I’m good, and I have been. For a very long time.

I think a PSA needs to happen around what you should and should not say about these types of things. I’ve said before that people are too nervous about the smallest things, and I stand by this. They are so afraid of saying the wrong thing, of ‘triggering’ you. The reality is, the idea of being treated like a glass object, or constantly second guessed like at any moment I’m going to do something horrible, is the reason that most people don’t say anything or talk about it. It doesn’t make me feel comforted; it makes me never want to speak again. As someone who has crossed that bridge already and had the single most blocked out memory of my entire life, so much so that I refuse to bring it up to anyone: stop treating people like they will break. I like the concern, the gentle check-ins and acknowledgement when I am clearly not doing good. I like knowing that people can see that I am not 100% and they want to support me, but there is a clear line that needs to be understood about how you do that. For others, it can look different depending on the situation. But this isn’t about them. It’s my turn to talk about me. I can have bad days and feel like I’m at my lowest, but for me, the only thing I need is silent support. The knowledge that someone else is there for me, whether that be to listen, or to distract, or to give me a hug. The last thing on this god forsaken earth that I want is for someone to act like I am going to swallow a whole bottle of pills because I mentioned that I am not doing good mentally. I can be allowed to feel crushingly depressed without it immediately becoming a category 10.

These moments happen for me because I get so apathetic to everyone worrying about me so much so that their worry just adds to the other noise. It’s one of the greatest causes for me to feel overwhelmed, because I become a burden to everyone else, and the only thing I am looking for is acknowledgement of what I am feeling and then support from afar. I am self-aware to a fault, and I know how my brain operates enough to be confident in my own sadness, so the trust has to come from everyone else. I feel so much at once that it starts to feel like nothing. I need noise to quiet my head, and I need noise to louden the silence. The fine line between nostalgia and apathy is the entire reason that I wrote this in the first place. Check in on your friends and family if they won’t come to you, but allow your own nostalgia to not get in the way of seeing who they are and where they are at now. Comfort can feel crushing if it is too tight.