This Is Thirty - My Mortality - Part One

My Mortality

Edited 4/23/2017

It slept outside my front door unwilling to come in while I still had company. Despite it granting me such a courtesy, its presence was never forgotten. It taunted me, casting his elongated shadows in my foyer from under the cracks of my front door. My friends were in town celebrating my 30th birthday. A milestone that has stopped me in my tracks and has forced me to come to terms with my own mortality. It's unsettling, a 30 year old girl still in the prime of her youth, crippled by the thought of inevitable lifelessness and despair. 

I should be happy right now. But with it sitting outside my door, I knew misery awaited. While I slept that weekend, I could feel it grow at my front door step. I felt its presences more and more: minute by minute. I was surrounded by friends, but my mind was be preoccupied with the culprit that waited. 

I'm 30 now. A friend joked and said that my best years were behind me. Terrible joke, might I add. It seems like it's me against the clock now. Literally. My body won't promise me a chance at motherhood for much longer. 10 years the least. 10 years use to sound like a long time. But now I know 10 years can happen in a blink of any eye. And I've already blinked three times. 

By Sunday night, I dropped my friends off at the airport. I played BBC World News on the radio on my way back home to drown out the sound of my heater blasting. The temperature outside was below freezing… which complimented my anxiety. After arriving home, I reluctantly climbed the two stories of stairs, limping due to my right knee. I was terrified to reach my condo's doorstep, not knowing what I would find. I tried to come to terms that the culprit that sat outside my door, accepting that he would now devour me because I was finally alone. I was vulnerable, left with only my pessimistic thoughts and harsh realities. My cynical outlook on what's to come. I felt it suitable to drown in my emptiness. 

When I got to the door, the culprit wasn't there. I should have felt relief that he wasn’t waiting in the corners of the building halls. But I think that I became addicted to a certain kind of sadness. My ambivalent relief was short lived. He must have thought me to be a fool. His natural instinct to prey on the weak would not deter him from having me as his prey. I knew he had to be close by because I could still smell his odor... Like wet rags soaked in dirty mop water. He was a filthy thing that enjoyed the illusion of being clean.

As I put my key in the door, I happened to look down. That's when I realized that he slipped under the cracks and now resided inside my home.

After an entire weekend of fearing our confrontation, I realized that more so, I was fearing fear itself. Can anything be more crippling than knowing he stalked me all weekend? The anticipation was torture… confronting him head on... our first face to face encounter was now something I yearned to get over with. 

I opened the front door. My living-room was dark but the TV was still on, casting dark shadows that flashed with every change of brightness coming from the screen. In the shadows, there he laid on the floor. His eyes didn't move. His face expressionless until he cracked a sinister smile. 

“Time is ever fleeting. I can hear the thumbing of your heart... as evasive as each second”. 

His voice was like a cold knife running effortless through my spine. The hair on my arms stood to attention, the only thing on my body that was mobile while the rest of me remained paralyzed with fear.

It wasn't that long before he moved from his positioning on the floor and seeped into the air. He disintegrating from  this creature from the pits of despair to a thick smog of black smoke that infiltrated my airways the closer it moved towards me. And from my airways it filled my lungs with a stench deathly foul. 

How can I escape this demon that now lives inside of me? A question that I ask, knowing there is no answer.

The Great Wall

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.”

― Shannon L. Alder 

My manager was telling my team and I that his daughter is super feisty. He talked about how his daughter fights back whenever he or his wife tries to discipline her. And then he looks at me and says “She reminds me a lot of you”.  I guess that is a good thing... that I remind him of his daughter.. even if it's only because I am feisty. 

I am a lot of things. And who I am, has been some wonderful combination of genetics and my environment. I can be hard to handle. Hard to read. Hard to deal with. But most of it is what I pretend to be. There is so much more that comes with behavior... a back story that others often know nothing about. The reason why I am the way I am and why I respond the way I respond. I am sure you have a story too. We all do. 

Oh yes, I am a feisty one. I think it’s from me growing up a bit isolated and not really understanding social norms. Not to mention I was relentlessly bullied as a child in elementary and middle school. I had no friends in elementary until 4th grade. My older sister tormented me at home. I truly felt worthless and alone. What was the point of living a life where you were constantly being bullied? I was broken and my mother couldn't even see it. So, now, when I am interacting with motherfuckers on a daily basis, my childhood is the only thing I can think of as to why I am so defensive now. 

Sometimes, it isn't as simple as 1, 2, 3. Sometimes we look at people and we think we know what makes them tick. What drives them. What keeps them going. We see someone respond a certain way and we think we have an idea as to why. But we really don't. Unless we live in that persons brain, we really have no idea why he or she may react or behave the way he/she does. And that is the point I want to get across... I know this sounds cliché but I honestly feel like I am misunderstood, I know many of us are.

 I’m enigmatic, for sure. I can tell why I am hard to decipher. But I really don’t mean any harm. I have my own internal shit that I battle on a daily basis. I have my own demons dancing in my brain. Every day I am trying not to jump off the 13^th floor.

There are times, when I want to be excited. I want to be happy. But something inside me stops me from smiling. Something inside of me tells me to not get so excited because I don’t want to get hurt. Because I didn’t want to look stupid at the end. It makes absolutely no sense at all. But that inner voice wins most of the time. This holiday season my grandmother came to stay with me for a month. During that month, I probably hugged her twice. I wanted to hug her, but something told me not to. So I just told myself that I would hug her before she left. And the day she got on her flight, I didn’t get a chance to hug her. Now, I am thinking “what if that was my last chance to hug my grandmother?” Why didn’t I just fucking hug her while she was at my house? Why was it hard for me to show affection to my own grandmother? What was I afraid of?

You see… this is shit that goes on in my brain. When I have friends or family visit me I try not to get excited because I don’t want to go from a very emotional high to an emotional low. I start thinking about shit that is irrelevant. Like, what if we argue on this trip? What if this person gets mad at me? So I try to numb myself before it happens. I get stressed easily and then I shut down. If only you could live inside my mind for a day. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

What you see on the outside, usually is different from what is going on internally. While I am an emotional person and very expressive about my emotions, there are some things that shut me down and it’s hard for me to step out of that. Yes, I am feisty. But most of the time it’s just me trying to protect myself. I constant have my guard up and I don’t know why, exactly. I am working on it.