You are fat.
You binge-eat more than your stomach can bear. Your stomach bulges out so much with fat that it makes you look 8-9 months pregnant – just without the unique definition that comes with a baby bump. Sometimes you wish you were pregnant, as that results in a gorgeous child, rather than the early death you’re headed towards.
You blame your eating habits on compulsions from your OCD. Those compulsions tell you to consume lunch/dinner, cola, chocolate, in that order daily. Just like your other OCD routines, you think it is as necessary as breathing, so you spend all of what little money you have to sustain the habit.
Your ritualistic eating is no excuse for the sheer volume of food and drink you consume on the daily. You suspect it is because you feel you need to be constantly full, as when you are slightly hungry, your large stomach growls loudly. When that happens, you think you become the caricature of the fat girl starving herself trying to lose weight. You can’t stand the embarrassment of what people will think so you avoid an empty stomach like the plague.
You will fail university.
You only decided to go to university as your job prospects are blown to hell and you needed something to get you out of the house. You chose business as that is where most jobs are going. You chose business because you have already tried your passion of working with children and failed miserably, so you figured why not try something safe and “boring”?
You are so preoccupied with all of the other change currently in your life that university is the very last thing you think about. You prioritise everything about going to lectures and tutorials because you honestly don’t think it will be worth the thousands of dollars in HECS. You honestly think your mental health won’t improve so you won’t be able to get/hold down a job in your chosen fields from your double-major.
Just like in high school, you are procrastinating. Your poisons of choice are binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy or sleeping. You are so behind on study that you won’t catch up until too late.
You will never hold down a job.
You have landed your dream job multiple times, but you always screw it up. First in admin, but you had to quit for your mental health. Then in childcare, but then when you started to fall in love with it, you were canned because you looked stressed in the workplace. Finally, in Sales building up a client base, but you never even landed one client before you have had to take a step back to focus on uni.
You have a longer list of jobs on your resume than Santa has children on his list. You have tried a mix of all industries that are out there, but you always mess it up no matter how hard you work, how hard you try.
You have no money.
Although you have had many jobs, you have been unemployed for the majority of the time that has passed since you graduated high school. Most people your age have savings, travel and goals they are working towards with the money they earn. Even your own brother, 18 months younger than you, has bought and maintains his own car.
What little money you have earned you have wasted on the temporary happiness of food, contributing to your disgusting obesity. You have nothing to support yourself with, not even enough money to buy a Maccas dinner out with friends. Due to this, you are forced to become dependent on your parents again who are already burdened enough with your presence in their lives.
You sleep too much.
You think sleep is your only escape in the world you cannot bear to face. You sneak in a nap whenever you get a chance, much to the disapproval and dismay of your parents. You prefer sleep to anything and everything, and each day you sleep more and more, wasting away your silly excuse for a life. Sleep is the only thing you have found that will ever give you peace.
You picked the wrong church.
You became a Mormon because you were lonely. You never thought of the implications of the decision you made to be baptised into an exclusive, discriminatory, brainwashing excuse of a “church”. You didn’t know its true nature at the time, no matter how much your parents warned you that you were in too deep.
You became so entrenched in their beliefs that you became one of them. You volunteered to fill roles that you couldn’t handle and felt obligated to accept. You took on the responsibility of teaching others a story that you didn’t really believe in order to get them baptised and saved. You rebelled and saw the light of freedom, but then you returned out of fear of being happy for once in your life.
You have started at a new church and re-met someone who has shown you how wrong you were. You are ashamed at yourself for representing a false, polytheistic religion. You research more and more, read the Bible more and more every day, no matter how much it hurts. You don’t know if this makes you sadistic, masochistic or the most painful mix of both.
You have no friends.
You were a tragic mess of mental illness in high school. People tried, they really did, but you shut them out. You watch on through social media, wondering what could have been; if you made it into the cool group, if you dated the guy you had a crush on. It is nice to think about, but it never would have happened anyway. You were an ugly mess then, and you still are now, just twice the size.
You have one friend from high school who you stay in contact with whenever you are in the same city on uni holidays. In the meantime, you had no one except for your Mum. That is when church came along. You made plenty of friends there, but now you have burnt all those bridges with the flaming inferno that only you could create with your lack of tact and wit. You love those friends with all of your heart, but you are scared to talk to them at all for fear of being sucked back in to Mormon-land. You opt for radio-silence as that is what you think will be a clean break. You are so forgettable, they won’t remember you soon enough.
You have started going to a new church. Yet again, you are nothing compared to them. They have jobs, friends, clear skin and are happy. You aren’t. You are afraid of opening yourself up again, for fear of being taken advantage of and sucked into dodgy religion again. You trust them, because people that nice and beautiful have to be decent, right? They don’t hurt you, you trust them. But you are going to hurt them eventually, and that thought stabs your heart.
You have ruined your family.
Your constant breakdowns have worn each of your family members down and shaped them into different people. Your parents are so cynical that they aren’t happy when you get a new job, they only point out the flaws. They are right. You have been scammed before, its probably happening again. Your parents are unmoved when you are sobbing, begging to be taken to hospital to be sedated. They calmly tell you that the hospital won’t accept you. No one else will accept you in any area of your life, so this is no change.
Your brother hates you. With a burning passion. You want him to be a brother, to have normal sibling fights, but you never will. Your parents tell you to give it time, but you have given it 3 years and every conflict-resolution tactic in the book. He doesn’t want you, so you guess you don’t have a brother. One more person you have hurt, one more person you have lost.
You will never be loved.
The only people to ever have truly loved you never met you in real life. In your memory, they are words on a screen. One was borderline abusive and controlling, the other used your last conversation to make you promise to remain Mormon although he wouldn’t.
You are too fat, ugly, self-deprecating, narcissistic, dirty-minded, sarcastic, plain old selfish, and more, to be considered a decent person, let alone someone worthy of love. Those boys who love you never saw the real you, the reason why every guy you meet in real life is completely uninterested. You are repulsive.
You will never be a mother.
Since no one will ever love you, you will never get married. Therefore, you will never become a mother. Your most desperate desired is to have children and raise them to be considerate and kind, traits that you don’t seem to have yourself.
You want children, but you never thought about the painful, uncomfortable parts of pregnancy, the red-tape of adoption, and the part of child-rearing that comes after the cute baby stage. You can barely hold yourself together, how the hell would you be able to raise one child, let alone the 5 children you dream of having. But that’s it, it is only a dream.
You are judged for your self-harm scars.
Your mother bought you oil to get rid of them, which you refuse to use because you like having them as your battle scars. But then you meet new people whilst wearing short-sleeves and become self-conscious. You feel their eyes wander, and their assumptions made. Those assumptions are right though. You did it because you felt worthless, because it was your only way out at the time.
You are lazy.
You choose not to do things because you don’t want to, because you can’t be bothered. If your actions seem particularly unjustified in certain situations, you blame illness or car troubles to take the blame off you.
You haven’t made a further appointment with your psychologist because it is hard to find a time that fits in around uni classes. You don’t show up to uni anyway because you prefer a sleep in, and it is all online anyway. You revile the effort that it takes to participate in social events and exercise, God forbid if those two were to ever combine.
You let your mental illness define you.
In your eyes, no one else suffers from mental illness, you are the only one, suffering alone. You are a rock, you are an island. You think that it is your story, how wrong you are.
Your OCD rules you. In the times you aren’t doing OCD rituals, you are asleep or staring blankly into space wishing you would fall asleep already. Your Depression makes you numb, figuratively and literally. Your Anxiety is minute compared to the others, but rears its ugly head when you think about going to uni lectures where they will all stare at you.
You feel like you are developing more. The voices in your head occasionally surface and scream, you fear you’re going Schizophrenic. Your mood bounces to the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in anywhere between minutes/hours and weeks, so you fear you’re going Bipolar. You realise that this is stereotyping and demeaning to these illnesses, so you stop.
Your arms ache, feeling the empty void another person should fill if you were worthy of love. Then they ache in the other way, desperate for your nails to dig in. But you have moved past it, no matter how much you want it again.
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Your psychologist told you in your last session to name particular thought patterns in order to categorise and diminish their impact. Well, all the things you have written seem unrelated, but are one big thought pattern. You will call it what it is.
It is the “Kill Yourself” Narrative.
This Narrative will fight, and scream thousands of voices in your head, anything to get you to listen. But you will fight. You will win….. you hope.
