The Times I Didn’t Die

1.

I didn’t die. Maybe I should have.

The doctors said I had stopped growing when my mother was pregnant. They said I would be mentally retarded. My parents were proud, so proud, that I turned out to be gifted instead.

Their first child.

My mum was under great stress when she was expecting me. She and my dad lived with my great-great grandma, and she was bossy. When the mother has anxiety during pregnancy, there is a strong probability that the child will inherit that anxiety as well.

What I remember from regression therapy:
I don’t want to be here. Can I go back?
I want to shrink, to disappear.
I don’t want to have this body.
Oh God, do I have to do this? Let me out, let me out, please.
I don’t want to be here.

2.

I didn’t die. Maybe I could have.

The nurse was looking at me, but she was talking to my parents: “If you don’t leave her here, she could be dead by morning.”
She has just finished taking my vitals, and the numbers didn’t sound like they belonged to a living person.
I was so cold.

That day, I was barely able to stand, and my mum was taking me to the hospital.

I tortured myself.
I stopped eating, stopped dressing warm, ran through thorny hedges until my shins were a criss-cross of angry red lines, exercised until I was dropping from exhaustion.
They said ‘mental anorexia’. They were right, but also wrong.
I didn’t want to get thin.
I wanted to disappear.

I don’t want to have this body.
Oh God, do I have to do this? Let me out, let me out, please.
I don’t want to be here.

3.

I didn’t die. Maybe I might have.

I was a young teen, and we were playing a game. The kids were chanting: “Happiness, unhappiness, love, marriage, child, death.” 
The ball stopped at my feet when they said ‘death’. You were supposed to say at what age you want to die.
“Forty,” I said.
I didn’t want to be here, and forty years on this Earth seemed like an eternity.
“Are you sure?” they asked.
I was sure.

I turned forty last year, and I didn’t die. 

The day before, I was thinking about ending it all. I was suffering from the Benzodiazepine PAWS anhedonia for a good part of a year. I didn’t feel anything but gray emptiness, every good feeling a shadow. Everything that was left was anxiety and depression.

I wanted it to end.

And yet, I have woken the next day, gone for a walk like every day, putting one foot in front of the other. Went to see my friends. Ate some cake.

And I didn’t die.

Before, I was afraid of the forty-year mark. For me, it was a time when you officially, inescapably turn into an adult (turn into my mum!), chained by the expectations of society. But my soul was crying out for the playfulness of youth. I was afraid I was going to lose it all, live forever as a child trapped in an adult life, never free to just climb trees, run barefoot, dance in the middle of the street.

I was afraid that something terrible would happen. That I have jinxed it all those years ago.
And something terrible did happen – I have come off benzodiazepines and had to relearn how to live entirely.

But I have a new therapist, and together, we are untangling my lifelong trauma. I have made new friends and reconnected with some of the old ones. I started to go to art therapy and a ceramic workshop. Last Sunday, I went to a picnic. And I wasn’t overwhelmed. It was good.

I still want to disappear.
Life still hurts.
I still feel trapped in my body.
It’s hard to overcome a lifetime of conditioning.
Oh God, do I have to do this? Let me out, let me out, please.

But, for the first time in my life, I’m beginning to want to be here.

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