1st grade: more people much bigger than me that I need to please
2nd grade: Harry Potter, actual green eggs and ham
3rd: snow is my favorite thing; feel like I don’t belong.
4th: anger, frustration, confusion.
5th: the only useful thing people ever did was write books.

I have since childhood struggled to understand certain aspects of my life: the way I experience things, my memory, how I feel, or more to the point, how I don’t. Most people, at least once in their lives, if not frequently throughout, suffer some form of meta-cognition like this. I suspect it’s a part of the “human condition” and not doing so says more about a person than the conclusions they reach while toiling in the stratosphere for answers.

6th: why am I here (if everything just hurts all the time)?
7th: what’s the point (if this is what life feels like)?
8th: why can’t I express what I’m feeling?
Why can’t I even understand it?

This article, however, is for the repressed; not the oppressed, necessarily, though I imagine the two areas overlap. I’m talking about inner repression, the emotionally, sexually, spiritually, digitally, religiously, etc. Repressed among us; those who, for one reason or another, have to bury whole aspects of themselves in order to reduce daily trauma, survive in a tumultuous reality, and to resemble what a “normal” person looks like (quick tip: normal is a concept developed to oppress undesirables).

It doesn’t matter so much what the reason is. I’m talking about the feeling; that strange feeling of living in greyness, as if the world is made of shadows; of living partway in the world and partly in a another dimension composed of floating voids that shift and move in time with your waking mind; of half drowning one moment and gasping for air the next or otherwise trudging through the Swamp of Nothingness trying not to let your unfeelingness kill you (cause there is no Luck Dragon to sweep down and save you).

9th: why doesn’t pretending to be happy make it so?
Why can’t I bridge the gap between myself and other people?
9th (repeat): no self-awareness.
10th: no self-awareness.
11th: why don’t I ever feel passionately about anything?
Why does it feel like I’m blindly grasping at straws when I think of my future?

I’m talking about deep trauma. I’m talking about that thing that triggers you nearly everyday, if you aren’t too repressed to realize it. I’m talking directly to the people who feel a darkness inside of them, too deep to touch, and who don’t really want to anyway. We can’t really help it though, sometimes it’s mesmerizing and we obsess over it, trying to understand but unable to. It’s frustrating, it’s demoralizing, it’s terrifying, and you can never run from it; it is always with you. You can’t run from what’s inside you.

Depressing imagery aside, repression isn’t all about stuffing down a sadness one lacks the tools to process. There’s also anger, hate, lust, love, fear, guilt, shame, and even happiness sometimes. We’re good at repressing; we can repress anything. Just let the pressure explode a couple of times a year in a big eruption of emotion, public or private (the latter for me,) or vent it in small increments, little explosions carefully timed so as not to disrupt regular broadcasting (such as watching Grey’s Anatomy in order to cry heavily for 30 seconds which may or may not stretch into 30 minutes and you forget what made you start crying in the first place but you’re glad you are because it’s the only time during your day/week that you haven’t felt that one wrong breath will leave scattered pieces of you splashed across the campus because everything hurts but you don’t know how to feel things properly anymore…deep breath...for example).

12th: doesn’t anyone even care that I work so hard just to survive?
How can this be what getting through high school feels like?
1st year university: how can I deal with this if pushing down and running away don’t work?

I tried to run from it after high school; I went all the way from Flagstaff, Arizona to Aliso Viejo, California to get away from it. I realize that isn’t super far, but Flagstaff is small and if you’ve never been to Southern California, everything south of Death Valley is Glamorous Los Angeles. I thought a few hundred miles, some sunshine, and a relatively close proximity to the ocean would make the things that go bump in my head disappear. Sometimes, for some of us, that’s the point of pushing things down: we want to make them go away, preferably forever. We’re good at it too; I managed to repress most of my emotions for almost two decades before I ended up in a psych ward.

2nd: little self-awareness; all energy needed to stretch capacity to time manage, work in a team, and multitask beyond the limits of what was previously thought possible.
3rd: is this all I will ever be:a tangle of depressed thoughts?
Will I be a crippled victim forever?
4th: I can only make it to graduation.
That is the only thing I see.
What does it mean to be a person living in the wider world?

If you are one of these people, the Repressed, then congratulations, college is the worst place to begin the journey of yourself. Unless your classes are a breeze and your program a joke, then by all means, take this time to turn around and gaze into the darkness and find the small pinpoints of light within to nurture you. Snag some easy A’s, work part time, volunteer, and massage the sore spots out of your spiritual muscles; make yourself a cast for your broken emotion bones and take some time to relax, let them set for a while before running any marathons.

If, however, you attend a small, difficult liberal arts university and surround yourself with the kind of people who get good grades and party like it’s 1999 and play a sport or run a club and volunteer for school spirit/entertainment/fundraising events, then I’m sorry to tell you that you will be running at full speed on a sprained ankle, with smoker’s lungs and and a 120-year-old person’s heart. If you feel slightly dizzy just reading that, you’ll have a sense of what the experience is like: non-stop, chaotic, barely endurable, sometimes neurotically fun, sometimes psychotically hilarious, frequently nauseating.

postundergrad/pregrad: there is nothing for me on this Earth.
I’ve waited too long, now it’s too much, and there’s no way I can do this.

If you are anything like me, you will not stop until you have that heart attack. Most people are not completely blind, and no one can repress everything forever. Long before it happens, you start to see warning signs, cracks in the foundation of the prison you built for your undesirable memories and emotions. You might start seeing a therapist; it could get so bad you need to start anti-depressants just to be able to put one foot in front of the other.

Once the signs start to show, you are already familiar with waking up and wanting to die; it seems a natural part of life, not good but right, because life is unfair. You may tell your teachers, depending on how bad it is and how private you are, because the bureaucratic grade system is really the only thing you understand anymore (insert paper there, receive grade here; describe problem to teacher for a chance to win a freeeeeee deadline extension!). Not understanding almost anything you see or hear or touch feel is another one of those “not good but right” kinds of things; after all, the second thought you have each morning when you wake up is “but why?”

If you’re like that, then let me tell you this: I have no idea what to tell you. Can your life come to a complete halt because you probably have undiagnosed PTSD? Maybe, if you’re lucky. Seriously, if you have a place to stay, food to eat, and something to do so you don’t go mad in another way (i.e., if you have the best possible support system any person could possibly ever have), and there’s a way you can take yourself out of the world for a while as you sort things out, I strongly encourage this course of action.

I had that kind of luck for a while. I fell apart after college, especially after losing my insurance; first I had no plan, then I had no meds, then I stayed in a psych hospital for about a week, and through it all my parents supported me. Even after they found themselves without jobs, they wanted to take care of me; luck doesn’t hold out forever even if you do have it. But for a while, I was able to stabilize, get right with myself and finally stop running.

Most people aren’t really that lucky, though. There are a million different reasons for it, each one as unfair and unrelenting as the last. Since my luck more or less ran out, it hasn’t been anything resembling easy, and I’ve almost rushed to the admissions office a couple of times to quit. Once or twice it occurred to me for about the millionth time in my life how easy it would be to stop living.

Thanks to my stint in the hospital, though, I had another stroke of luck, or maybe it was a moment of clarity: I finally decided that no dream is worth pursuing if you don’t love it, if you can’t imagine breathing it day in and day out without ever getting tired or bored. The point of higher education is to find and prepare for a career, and forgive my optimism but the point of a career is fulfilment and making a living, in that order.

I had asked myself once (or maybe several thousands times) why I never felt passionate about anything, and my future always seemed to be just out of sight, in the corner of my eye, waiting for me to simply reach out and grab it. In my little room, and in the courtyard just outside with little tables and benches everywhere, and the day room where we watched television or played games, and in the cafeteria, and in the shower - everywhere, over and over, it occurred to me that I had known all along what I wanted to do, what I was passionate about and good at: literature.

1st semester grad: this isn’t too bad - oh wait, it’s worse than I could have imagined.
But if I want something more, something different, something better, I will have to walk into dragon’s den and take back my life.

So I applied to a graduate program in English literature (ASU West, New College), got in, and here I am, still sort of writing about how miserable I am. This time, though, things are different. I am more frequently overwhelmed with fear and misery, but I am more certain that I can defeat them. The depths of my darkness and the depravity of my demons continue to knock the wind out of me, but I know it is just a matter of time before I reach the furthest depths to tame them.

So, I suppose I could say: find a reason to change your life. In time you will find you have no choice, anyway. The figurative heart attack will come sooner or later, and it can literally kill you. The mind can only take so much stress, like how a dam will burst if pushed beyond recommended limits for too long.

I’m not saying that it’s as easy as finding and doing what you love, or just “somehow” moving forward. I’m saying that the sooner you let the pressure on yourself up, the sooner you can move forward. Once you remove the walls, your mind won’t feel like a prison anymore. Once you have a reason to, you can begin to move beyond the sucky, suffering bits of life, and have some hope for something better.