Faith Hope & Fiction

An Essay in Three Parts
By Victoria Desmond

1. Strange place

            My head is the strange place. It’s the cliché answer, the one no one wants to hear, but it’s my truth. I am the strange place. My brain gets stuck on random thoughts and won’t let them go, no matter what I do. I get caught in their cycle and start to lose faith in anything. Feeling like I can’t do anything, I’m speaking from a deep, dark hole of nothingness into which I stumbled.

            My brain doesn’t work like other people’s. I misinterpret almost everything with a negative slant. I can’t trust my head. It leads me astray and badgers me incessantly. My head led me into a partial hospitalization program and away from my friends. It sends me into a panic at things other people wouldn’t even notice. Like some evolutionary quirk, my head has lost its self-preservation instincts and is trying to destroy me from within. I have to fight against it to see any semblance of joy.

            I can’t blame anyone else: it’s me. It’s my chemistry, my neural pathways. And so, I dedicate all of my work and energy into fighting what I can’t be rid of: my own mind. I’m determined to find a way to wrangle it under my control and coax it into repose.

            What would it be like to have a normal mind—one that wants me to succeed, not crumble and wither under a rock? I catch glimpses of a healthier mind when I take an anti-anxiety medication: what it feels like to be normal. It wears off in about three hours, and then the dread sets in, but at least I get a glimpse. A glimpse into the ease of existence.

2. Nothing

            I always knew mental illness ran in my family, but never expected that I would be hit so hard. Everything I knew about myself, everything I had been so proud of, came crashing down. I felt like a nothing-person, like a paper-mâché doll filled with crinkling glass and dull knives.

            I had no idea what was inside me or what I was made of anymore. It was as if everything had evaporated, leaving me with only a sticky, tired residue. I had been scorched from the inside out.

            More often than not, living feels unbearable and impossible. Everything that’s “normal” more often than not leaves me existentially confused and filled with an anger too large for anything around me. It’s an anger no container could ever contain; an anger bigger than the world it resides in.

            More often than not, I feel like an alien in my own skin. I look in the mirror and don’t understand my reflection, don’t know the girl looking back at me. The world around me is magnificently beautiful and stupefyingly brutal, unceasingly bewildering.

            I wonder if we all feel this way and we’re all pretending to know what the heck is going on. Because I sure don’t. Are we all floating islands? I understand little to nothing of how this world operates. But I know I have to figure it out just to survive.

3. Tree

            When I was little and couldn’t take the screaming anymore, I would climb up the tree in our backyard. Up branch after branch, I would cling to it, watching ants crawling up its bark. I was so high up the dog-walkers on the sidewalk below couldn’t see me. I was invisible.

            My mom never looked for me when I escaped into the sphere of my tree. I could take a break from living at home and be anonymous, unseen.

            I never brought anything up there with me. I would just sit and wish things were different. I would be steaming with anger, wishing I had a car to drive down the isolating tall hill and never come back, wishing I could hurt my mom the way she hurt me, wishing I could have some power over her the way she wielded hers over me.

            With nowhere else to go, I would just sit up in my tree and steam, filled with feelings too big for me to handle. I never brought my sister up with me; we were never on the same team. She was batting for my mother, escaping behind her closed bedroom door into her computer, reciting rap lyrics on YouTube and curating her own elusive secret Tumblr blog I was never allowed to see.

            She would marvel at how high I’d climbed, asking, “How the hell did you get up there?” And I’d just smile; she wasn’t like me; she wasn’t one with the trees.

            Sometimes I’d even go from the tree to the roof, climbing its cascading Spanish tiles until I reached a pocket of cement filled with empty water bottles left by the builders. This was a more unsettling place than the tree because I was on top of the culprit, yet still part of my home life. That house could collapse at any time and pull me down with it. The house was cold and barren, but outwardly pristinely beautiful. My mom needed it kept perfectly clean. Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear our empty, friendless house secluded on this hill, interrupted only by jarring fits of rage.

            But the tree was always there, my silent refuge.

Victoria Desmond is a 23-year-old writer from Los Angeles, California. She studied Political Science in university and plans to go back to study Creative Writing. She loves writing poetry on Tumblr (@girlinwriting), swimming at the public pool, making art, and singing in her church choir.