I took a break.

CW: Mentions of self harm, suicide, and declining mental health

My last essay for Joe was six days ago, breaking several of my own rules. I am going to—for the sake of legacy and to fill the spirit of the challenge—provide recommendations of essays for all the days I missed, but I will never make up that time. I think that is a good thing.

The piece I last wrote on January 8th was an accurate indication of my mental state when it came to this project: unfinished, unflinchingly negative, and unhelpful for the universe to receive. Even when crafting my essays for Joe or Blog of One’s Own about my misery and mental despair, I’ve felt that there’s something intrinsically selfish about it. I wanted an outlet for the swirling masses of locusts in my spirit, but that outlet shouldn’t be you, dear reader. It is not my place to wail and scream and rip apart my skull and force feed you what is inside. That is the job of a paid professional or a google document, and I was instead relying on shoddy html code and innocent bystanders.
You are a spirit just as complex and beautiful as my own, and I believe in participating in a common good. I want to add beauty to your spirit just as I wish that for my own. This is not to say writing about pain or our personal evils is not beautiful, in fact some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read recently contains those very things, but that is not what I was crafting. I built a space to relive my pain, regurgitate it at you without edit, without compensation, without consideration.

Returning here has allowed me to see this. Home for me is a trap, feet in nets, heads in metal jaws, minds interrogated. I fight ghosts and run from shadows in my bedroom—although it’s hardly mine anymore. Cellular division alters, I morph into a younger, angry, undead self my friends would not recognize. Writing, I disassociate into suicide and float out again, returning to the material world half as feeling as I was before. Patterns of the metaphysical are hard to break. Each day I whittled away at my spirit until there was hardly any more. I was stuck, piloting around a Pallor Mortis soul, curdled from the pressure I willingly applied.

(One day, I wrote a piece in a continuous blind blur containing intimate details of my self harm and suicide attempts, as though they were fiction, as though I had spoken to another soul about them meaningfully before. I returned to a body years younger than mine, mindless and unfree, and returned to my current continuity, all without consideration, without for a moment doubting if that was a careful, right thing to be doing. I was undoubtedly being irresponsible, repeating patterns that harmed me in my past, without a second thought. That caused me to see I needed to stop. I needed to pause. I was making myself unwell.)

I am going to make myself well again.

Being home, in Minnesota, with laughter to accompany cigarettes, worse food with better conversation, tasting the blend of randomness and strategy with those I love, it puts me back into myself. Here I am happy much of the time. Fits of despair crash into me, but here I have remedies.
Writing for Joe began at home. Continuing to write Joe at school transmutation me into a hybrid—half of each soul in the same body. Word by word in conversations I would change, personhood exchanged for animalistic tendencies.
I do not need my teeth at school.
I do not need my claws at school.
I should not have packed them.

So I will continue Joe, as I think there is intellectual and spiritual value moving forward, but I am going to be the person I am in Minnesota when I write, the person I like to be loved as.

My friend got me a flower and I didn’t understand why. I must become myself again.

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