The Silence of Relapse

©Marissa Alessandria-Kweens - 2007

Quiet.
Quiet.
Quiet.

The ticking of the clock is sometimes if you are lucky these are the only sounds you will hear, however most of them time it is the clanging in your mind the voices that remove you from concentration. You open a book or a magazine and you try to read and you can’t you find yourself reading the same thing over and over again and it not making sense, you flick on the TV and stare mindlessly at the screen and realize a half an hour later what you are watching isn’t making any sense.

You wish your mind would shut off, you wish you could eat, you wish you could crave food and most of all you wish you felt something instead of feeling nothing NOTHING at all. Not the aggravation you are causing your family, not the disgust you feel as you look at your hands and see the variety of pills, pills you wonder why they haven’t killed you yet, pills that leave with you the feeling that one morning you aren’t going to wake up and it will be left to your husband to discover your cache, to explain how his wife died in her sleep.

Yet you can’t stop, you want to dearly, you want to be normal, you want to be human once again, you want the pain to stop but you don’t want to lose the control. Losing control gives to you things you believe you don’t deserve, the laughter of happiness, the eating of something and feeling that tingle in your body of delight, and the support of friends who understand what you are going through because they have been there and most of all you feel that you don’t deserve that at all so you say nothing to them to anyone for fear of disappointment.

You can’t even explain to yourself why you are doing what you are doing, why you know that there are no miracle cures, how you know your body better than anyone as you listen to the beating of your heart late at night, in the silence that has become your existence. You don’t talk anymore because it’s simply too much to get the words out to explain it isn’t worth the effort since you can’t explain it to yourself. You want to go back to the light to the place of hope, but you are terrified of what this will mean of who you will become and most of all you will let yourself go and become repulsive to look at in the mirror, even though mirror’s have not been a friend to you for years now.

You jump on the scale first thing in the morning and the last thing at night and only god knows how many times in between. Half of the time you can’t move your heart is beating so fast you shake you go to the gym and watch your rate go up and down and up and down but you don’t stop, you can’t stop, you can’t be a quitter. In all of this you are silent keeping it all within yourself from the shame of what you are doing, the shame of knowing that people do care about you and the shame of letting them down; when in fact you are letting yourself down the most, slowing killing yourself because you can’t stand to be you, can’t stand to see yourself and the silence continues…***

Note: I had to write this as I have myself have relapsed and got back on track several times and this is how it felt for me, me not telling anyone and I have noticed with close friends of mine who have relapsed they say nothing until they are ready to come back and get help once again. I hope that one day we will have the courage to be in the middle and speak out about not after.