Wasting

A personal essay by Adrienne Marie Barrios, originally published in Native Skin Magazine in 2022 before they disappeared.

What is self when you’ve spent your whole life hiding for fear of going crazy? Or fear that you are already crazy, and there’s no return?

That’s how I feel, when I’m in it: I am, finally, going crazy, and I will never find my way out. The feeling lingers, too, when I start to emerge from the deep, black nothing that consumes me—panic attacks that breed panic attacks, dysthymia, chronic pain, autistic burnout, fatigue I can feel in my bones. The anxiety surfaces in the form of fear that this is temporary; this is a brief reprieve. You’re not actually sane.

I have wasted so many years.

I’ve wasted so much time, staring at walls, confined to my own mind.

I remember jokes—perhaps in person, perhaps in film—about mentally ill people staring at walls in asylums or sanitoriums: The lights are on, but no one’s home! How funny they think themselves, and how little they think of us. But they don’t realize they’ve got it backwards: We are very much home, and in fact we can’t leave, but the lights are off, and we’re clawing from the inside out—fingernails bruised and torn, too weak to make any meaningful progress—searching for the light switch.

 

I’ve been ill all my life, bound to bed or bathroom, missing weeks or months of school or work. I break a sweat from sitting upright; I develop a fever from conversing, forced to lie down and watch the days slip by.

I’ve always identified with Sylvia Plath’s bell jar imagery, stuck on the inside, alone, with everyone else beyond the glass—“To be the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” But sometimes, I feel as if I am the jar, lifting and lowering over my own sense of self, at risk of shattering because I am so fragile that I might slip, at risk of suffocating because I am too weak to let myself out again. In the depth of my panic and despair, I cannot remember ever feeling up, I cannot remember days without desperation. I am too tired to climb up from the pit; I am too tired lift myself back out.

             

A hopelessness accompanies the memory of these desperate moments.

Standing in a room, unable to move because I feel physically uncomfortable in my own skin and I can’t find a way out of that moment—“I wish I could take off my skin and hang it up.”  Or sitting in the bedroom, on the floor in the corner between the bed and the wall, sobbing hysterically with my head in my hands because I’m on my fourth panic attack of the day, in its third hour at that. Perhaps unable to do anything but sit in the bathroom, on the toilet or on the floor, in so much pain and discomfort from nausea and severe constipation that I haven’t eaten solid food in a week.

I wake up one morning as if someone has jumpstarted my heart, buzzing with life. I work eleven-hour days and seven-hour nights, new projects and old. I forget to eat. I forget to shower. This goes on for one week, for two, and it’s too late once I notice: I’m becoming a different sort ill, my sniffles turned to bronchitis, wearing down my body through this mania.

Or I’m in bed, in the dark, watching The OA for the 153rd time for comfort because nothing seems real anymore—all bubbled edges, cold hands, vibrant colors so distanced from my own self—and I can’t find a reason to get up: everything is pointless, and words take too much effort, so I haven’t spoken in days. I’m lost in the nothingness.

 

I’m climbing out of the nothing right now—or I’m trying. It’s harder every time. I don’t say that to be dramatic, and I don’t say that to worry anyone. I say that because it is.

How much can a mind take, do you think, of the ups and downs, the cycles, the severe, debilitating lows and the intense, passionate ups? How flexible is the psyche when met with such extreme changes?

I am glad I chose not to have children. How utterly cruel, to expose them to this.

 

I cannot say I no longer waste time. I’ve developed coping strategies, and I’ve grown to understand myself more: I am autistic, I am ill, and this society wasn’t built for me. Sometimes, I prefer to hide inside my bell jar, even if it means isolation, darkness, nothing. Sometimes, it’s all I can do to survive this world. Many have said it, but that doesn’t make it less true.

I can only ever hope that my grip will hold long enough to let the fresh air in, long enough that I can remember what it means not just to survive, but to live—to live the way that I want, in spite of it all.