In the time between

Things are.. stable. Depressing, heartbreaking, fatiguing, but stable. Not only is my sister expecting, but so is my psychiatrist. I know I shouldn’t care  about that. I swear I know that. But my OCD won’t believe me.  My “kid thing” shouldn’t make me pause, eyeing the one qualified psychiatrist I’ve ever had  and wonder if I should find someone else to get drugs from. Maybe, my mind says, we should see someone else, this will hurt too much.

I am always waiting for a long list of appointments, possible solutions. We finally got referrals to go to UCLA. World-reknown. They insist that Loma Linda is wrong, that there is nothing to say that I would certainly die from shock therapy. But what if Loma Linda isn’t wrong. I want to die on my own terms. I don’t want to go under anesthiea, while my parents wait anxiously for me to wake up.   I want to know when I’m going, prepare everything I need to before I slip away, hurting people as little as possible. Maybe I don’t want to die.

I don’t want to feel unqualified to have a significant other. I don’t want to feel inferior to my siblings and cousins. I want to drive and be a foster mom and buy my children a million books and find some way of living without being in so much pain.

But maybe that’s scarier. Wanting to want something so bad when it may not be an option. Maybe my brain just wasn’t meant for happiness. And that possibility terrifies me. What then?

So in the interm, I work for my cousin’s electronic recycling waste company  and hope for Barnes and Nobles to call me. I long for textbooks and my old Sociology professor from the class I dropped. I need to be able to want things.

So it’s easier to want death. The absence of wanting things.

Isn’t that one of the main beliefs of Buddhism, that the cause of suffering is wanting things?

I want to want to be alive. And I’m terrified of that.

So in the interm, between being okay, or being dead, I suffer on.