Lingering in Doorways

[Enclosed: Letters to my eighteen-year-old self. From my 12th grade English teacher, and from me at twenty-one.]

Dear,

I am going to dispense with the usual well-wishes since you are obviously not well. The message from Miss Caparas saying that you are not all right came just before I started to pray the 3 o’clock prayer. It made me sad to hear it, though not really surprised.

Though you have not really told me much about yourself, you have always reminded me a little of Don Quixote — not because you are anything like an old man wearing rusty armor and charging at windmills, but because you have always struck me as the sort of person who feels wrongness of the world very keenly, and you can’t just ignore it, unlike many of the rest of us, who can push it away.

Don Quixote decided that if the world was a bad place, the only solution was to live in the world of noble knights and virtuous ladies, which he made up, not in his head, but in his heart. I do not think what you are doing now is your solution, but I think it is your response to a world which is, I agree, a flaming garbage dump, full of garbage people who hurt and destroy each other. And unfortunately, my dear, sometimes we’re those garbage people too.

So I’m not going to tell you that things are ok, because they aren’t. And I’m not going to tell you to cheer up because things will get better, because I don’t believe that, at least not so soon. I honestly think things will have to get much worse before things start to improve. What I am going to tell you is what Jesus told me a little while back, and what I think He wants me to tell you —

Good job, Juela.

---

Juela.

I remember thinking to myself that I had purged myself completely of you. It’s true. I wanted total erasure. It was like the circumstances of that time still continued to linger, ever-present, in the back of my mind, this big open wound I couldn’t help but pick at, and so time ago I had set myself to the grisly task of fixing you the way I knew how, which was through a change so destructive it was almost an act of violence. But the truth is you persist. The truth is you live in me still. You are eighteen years old and have been for three months now, but you don’t feel like it. In some ways you’re more of a child than you’ve ever been. I still think of your feeble attempts at making sense of the world, throat raw from crying at the hopelessness of it all, and how, somewhere along the process, you had fallen apart so irreparably that no one was quite sure what to do. Least of all you.

In my memories, you are curled up in bed in your old room with the purple lights are on. You collect cups in your room and build depression piles. Your room is kept in consistent chaos, because though it’s one of the only things you still have total control over, it’s also a reflection of your skewed state of mind. There are books strewn across your legs, maybe half a dozen, and they are there out of necessity — when there is a book in your hand, you are able to escape, the key to everyday survival. You’ve learned that if your mind is kept distracted, even for a short while, then your thoughts become perfectly, blessedly quiet, and it’s only then you can pretend.

You are a strong, capable person. We both know this. But for you it’s becoming harder to believe, because these days it takes very little to fall apart. You have not spoken to your friends in many months, nor to some of your family members, and you know they worry but you can’t muster up the strength to make space for them. Even the mere thought sends you into panic mode — you hide at the sound of the doorbell. You don’t understand this sudden anxiety, this need for isolation, but you don’t have the patience to. Surely all it will take is a couple more days, another period of silence, and soon your body will get the rest it needs to become a fully functioning person again.

But time is cruel, and soon the days will recycle themselves into even longer days, and you will do nothing with them. Mornings are for wallowing in self-appointed misery. You begin to loathe yourself for what you have allowed your life to become, but make half-hearted attempts to change it, as though you like living in this state of paralysis. Seasons pass this way. You think, sullenly, how disappointed your English teacher would be in you: You are not Don Quixote. You are too disinterested in your own life to be. Forget the world; you wanted no part in it.

In hindsight, the path that ultimately led to healing had been so clear, so obvious, that at first I hated you for lacking the initiative to take it. “Look how easy this is!” I wanted to say. “Look at the love you’ve been denying yourself this entire time!” I was eager for any departure from the girl I used to be, to erase any trace of that version if I could, because the reminders of what she endured within herself were too raw, too painful. It’s only recently I’ve been able to look back on this time with something akin to kindness. I was so eager to discard this part of my life that I’d jumped at the chance to write it off as a myriad of bad decisions, or poor guidance, or perhaps a combination of the two, and that once I knew how to pull myself out of it, I was never falling into that trap again. 

I know now that it’s far more complicated than that. I feel that there will always be some amount of sadness in me that bleeds into everything I do, and that those years I spent lonely and wanting completely altered my chemistry. I was lost once, and that makes me think I always will be.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think I’d ever consider feeling too much to be a disadvantage. I think there’s strength in vulnerability, and in the acceptance of ourselves in our most fragile, human states, which is what we exist in for more of our lives than we think. I feel like my time in isolation has allowed me to perceive the world in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise; you have to see the cracks to notice the light slipping through, as the Leonard Cohen song goes (or something along those lines). It’s the lesson that lay the end of this trying period, one that eighteen-year-old me can try but will never forget.

I still feel eighteen. I still live in that room, still do my hair the same way. I’ll always be that teenage girl breaking her own heart on the bedroom floor, and learning how to pick up the pieces herself. I talk about this to my friends, how I cry thinking about you, how desperately I want to tell you that it does get better. I think you really needed that. I think you needed someone to hold you the way you they do now, to tell you that it’s going to be okay. I think you needed to know that you don’t have to fight your battles — imaginary or otherwise — alone.

But you will learn, eventually. Bit by bit, so gradually you won’t feel the change register, the weight on your shoulders will lift. And one day you will wake up and realize that you can breathe again, and that the days are no longer just tolerable. You’ll actually be excited for them. You’ll start making plans again. And you will come into yourself in a way you never have before, even before things started going south. It will be a version of yourself that you otherwise would never have become. 

I have a lot of respect for the person you are, and by extension by the person I used to be. I truly believe that things happen for a reason, and I now know that I resurfaced from that time as someone stronger, wiser, and more equipped to handle whatever life throws at me. There are days when I feel a longing for the things I lost that year, but I wouldn’t trade what I gained in return for anything. Life is a cycle of these wins and losses, and these wars we suffer through (and eventually overcome) are the most pivotal parts of our growth.

The only way out is through.