{"id":10351,"date":"2024-10-02T21:47:17","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T02:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/faithhopeandfiction.com\/content\/?p=10351"},"modified":"2024-10-02T21:47:17","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T02:47:17","slug":"the-strange-place-other-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/faithhopeandfiction.com\/content\/the-strange-place-other-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Place & Other Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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An Essay in Three Parts By Victoria Desmond<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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1. Strange place<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My head is the strange place. It\u2019s the clich\u00e9 answer, the one no one wants to hear, but it\u2019s my truth. I am the strange place. My brain gets stuck on random thoughts and won\u2019t 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\u2019t do anything, I\u2019m speaking from a deep, dark hole of nothingness into which I stumbled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My brain doesn\u2019t work like other people\u2019s. I misinterpret almost everything with a negative slant. I can\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I can\u2019t blame anyone else: it\u2019s me. It\u2019s my chemistry, my neural pathways. And so, I dedicate all of my work and energy into fighting what I can\u2019t be rid of: my own mind. I\u2019m determined to find a way to wrangle it under my control and coax it into repose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What would it be like to have a normal mind\u2014one 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Nothing<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 doll filled with crinkling glass and dull knives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 More often than not, living feels unbearable and impossible. Everything that\u2019s \u201cnormal\u201d more often than not leaves me existentially confused and filled with an anger too large for anything around me. It\u2019s an anger no container could ever contain; an anger bigger than the world it resides in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 More often than not, I feel like an alien in my own skin. I look in the mirror and don\u2019t understand my reflection, don\u2019t know the girl looking back at me. The world around me is magnificently beautiful and stupefyingly brutal, unceasingly bewildering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I wonder if we all feel this way and we\u2019re all pretending to know what the heck is going on. Because I sure don\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Tree<\/strong><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I was little and couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t see me. I was invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She would marvel at how high I\u2019d climbed, asking, \u201cHow the hell did you get up there?\u201d And I\u2019d just smile; she wasn\u2019t like me; she wasn\u2019t one with the trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes I\u2019d 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\u2019t be able to bear our empty, friendless house secluded on this hill, interrupted only by jarring fits of rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the tree was always there, my silent refuge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Victoria Desmond<\/strong> 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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
An Essay in Three PartsBy Victoria Desmond<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"yoast_head":"\n
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