this is how it goes: you sit in a room, and a man stares at you.
you sit in a room, in an uncomfortable linoleum chair, and a man stares at you.
you sit in a room on an uncomfortable linoleum chair and as you stare down at your hands the man stares at you.
and as he stares at you, he is trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
the room, the man, the seat you have found yourself in - all of these things may change, but the clipboard does not. it hovers perpetually under his chin, the latest in a long line of chins tautly clenched, clipboards stretching back to childhood like paper doll chains. the clipboard is clutched tightly to his torso, so ever present you wonder if the arm ever comes down, or if he wanders through the woods for forty days and forty nights with nothing but the clipboard for company, through rain and sleet and snow and sorrow. his wife, if he has a wife, may leave him; his mother, if he has a mother, may die; the earth, if he even has an earth, may swallow him whole and spit him back out again each and every holy, screaming morning, but you’ll never know. you are not allowed to know what this man does, who this man is, outside of the forty-five minute window every two weeks when you sit before him and he declares you still not cured.
if you ask the man what he does outside of work or inquire about his family - if he loves them, if he beats them, if he feeds them haldol mortared and pestled down into flour-like fineness, beats it into a roux, adds it to their soup - this is considered inappropriate. this will get noted in the clipboard.
all you know about the man with the clipboard is that you are not allowed to know anything.
yours is a one sided relationship, one in which you are composed of nothing but sides. he is god, there to judge you for your failures, and you are small, insignificant, voiceless. the only sounds you make are those that he asks you to make. the only story you tell is the one you have been telling this whole time. and if you try to take another incantation - if you try to rewrite the chains you are forged here in, if you try to create a voice that speaks not of you but as you - the judge will not allow such disruptions to the court.
you do not know if he’s sane, or kind, or has any sympathy for the people who sit before him, in his office or on the subway or in the child-sized seats at the dinner table. all you know — all that he is legally required to inform you — is that once upon a time he got the degree that he needed to sit here. you don’t know if he hates women, or gays, or voted for trump once or twice or three times. he could be a murderer; he could be an evangelical; he could be you. you will never meet his mother. you will never be acknowledged when seen in public. you will never read the russian novel of your life as it as written down from clipboard to clipboard. you will never know.
you are not allowed to say no, because he knows more than you ever will. you can shape your mouth, form the words, exhale voice into air into being, come prepared with suit and briefcase and entire legal defense. but you are not really allowed to say no, not if you want him to hear you. he knows what is wrong with you. and if he knows what’s wrong with you, better than you do, little girl, then he must also know how to fix you. he has three degrees. you have a chemical imbalance and self harm scares. why would anyone on earth listen to you?
if he pours your wounds with stomach acid. if he cannot make you happy, or even functional, or even just quieter and therefore more bearable to other people. if he cannot make you bearable even to himself. if he cannot find the right dose. if he cannot make your childhood over. if he cannot stop the tremors. if he cannot stop the night sweats. if he cannot lose you weight, or put it back on. if he cannot keep your fist from cracking. if he cannot break through the block of concrete someone poured between your brain and skull. if he loses you. if you die anyway. if you kill yourself. if you wrap your bloodied skull in bloodied sheet and drop bloodied porcelain before his feet. if you join the holy screaming chorus. if he signs your death certificate. if he himself prescribes the thing that kills you.
even if.
he’s the one who knows.
.
you will spend your life like this. you will be thirteen, eighteen, twenty-seven, forty-one ninety-six dead, and you will still be performing your plea to live for men in chairs with clipboards. you will tapdance in your muumuu and your mottled eighties flesh. you will sunshine sing with full whites on and full hands up, your hospital gown hanging off you like a dirty paper doll, your feet tracing elevator jazz, the conference table full of blank faced men your judge and jury. you will eat your false bright dreams, crush turpentine between your teeth, walk a cobbled mile on cobbled feet your palms in beggars prayer. you will burn inside and the out in a world without water. you will burn inside and out and when you reach out your hand for his, he will tell you there’s no such thing as water, even as his skin stays un-cracked in the crackling summer heat.
this is how it goes: you will get better, briefly, and no one will congratulate you, and then you will get worse, for briefly or not briefly, and no one will forgive you. and then the man with the clipboard will tell you it’s time to bump this up, or trim this down, the ringmaster demanding that the audience wants more. the balancing act between your brain’s own chemistry and the chemical tightrope he wants you to walk growing heavier and heavier and heavier, the distance between your raw feet and the saw dust bottom collapsing into itself like black hole orchestra ad infinitum. but he wants you to go and go and go, until the curtains fall, and like a magician pulling a live rabbit from an otherwise two-dimensional top hat, he plucks you up from the ether and sets you back up on the rope again. this is your job, as the patient, to keep getting back on the rope, even if you get vertigo, even if you have not a single unbroken bone left. you must get back on the rope and you must walk, balancing everything, as the man with the clipboard stands and watches silently. again, and again, and again, and again. until you are so numb you can do it in your sleep. until you are dizzy and you are sick and you are on four or five or six or seven medications and you still can’t get out of bed in the morning. until he is satisfied.
this is how it goes: you will convince yourself, and then your doctor, that the paranoia is because of the wellbutrin; and when they up your seroquel and cut the wellbutrin you will stop feeling so paranoid, but then without the wellbutrin you will go back to feeling nothing all the time. it won’t be sharp, the way some nothings are, or painful, or even particularly intense; it will just feel as if you don’t exist. you are born dead and walking, and the earth is just a collective dreamt delusion, and everything in it is dead, but the game is to act like it isn’t.
you will gain weight, and then people will treat you worse because of it, and then you will hate yourself more. you already know that the universe is cruel. now you will get to learn how cruel the universe’s people are. you will bloat. you will lose weight. you will gain it back. your old eating disorder, which you have confidently declared to be in remission, will roar its way back out of you and prove itself, in fact, to be very much not remissed. you will get rashes, or UTIs, or vivid bouts of paranoia that you will find no language to describe the terror of, a passport into the realms of psychosis. you will go there again, and then again, and then eventually you will pack a weekend bag and head off happily, the delusions a welcome holiday from the reality of your life. you will wonder if you are schizophrenic, or schizoaffective, or just bipolar with psychotic features, but you cannot wonder this out loud.
these are the words that every boy and girl in clipboard world know you can never say out loud.
they will tell you to keep trying, and so you will try. you will try cbt. you will try dbt. you will try talk therapy. you will try hypnosis. you will try meditation. you will try yoga. you will try aa. you will try na. you will try al-anon. you will try acoa. you will try inpatient. you will try outpatient. you will try intensive outpatient. you will try partial hospitalization. you will try drug counseling. you will try reiki. you will try acupuncture. you will try somatic therapy. you will try equine therapy. you will try art therapy. you will try group therapy. you will try gabapentin. you will try lexapro. you will try librium. you will try paxil. you will try wellbutrin. you will try zoloft. you will try luvox. you will try effexor. you will try ativan. you will try prozac. you will try xanax. you will try lamictal. you will try latuda. you will try lithium. you will try trazadone. you will try risperdal. you will try tegretol. you will try clorazil. you will try seroquel. and then they will tell you to keep trying.
this is how it goes: you will turn twenty-seven and have the worst mental breakdown of your life yet. while everyone else is getting married and buying houses and saying yes to a fat shiny rock ring at the beach, you will throw up your meds in the morning and have to clutch your chest crying because the cold water takes too long to come out of the faucet. your former classmates will get promotions and you will get put on lamictal, up until it starts to poison you, at which case you will have to come off the lamictal. your childhood friends will fall in love and you will lose your job in the dead hot heat of summer. your ex lovers will get engaged and throw beautiful bridal showers and you will be put on lithium. after lithium they will put you on tegretol, which will turn your life from a thing you are living into a memory you can only watch behind a half veiled door with the confusion of a dementia patient trying to situate themselves in a reality they do not and cannot be a part of. your college friends will start their phd programs and you will no longer listen to music. you will no longer read, or bathe, or eat, except for dry crackers and yellow gatorade and the occasional frozen burrito you force yourself to keep down. you will not get out of bed until three or four pm, and then you will spend the next six hours or so blinking in confusion at all the books you own. you will stop doing all these things and more, and then you will wake up one day with the voice in your head whose sole refrain is to remind you how much nicer and easier and relieving it would be if you were just dead. and you will tell your doctor that the voice is back, but only after you’ve burned down your whole life again, after everything you thought was solid has disintegrated, after everything you once loved about yourself is long gone, and the doctor will take you off the tegretol and determine you are one of a tiny minority of patients with severe mood disorders who cannot process mood stabilizers. after tegretol they will put you on latuda, which will cause you to throw up so violently the first time you take it that, as you are ejecting everything you’ve eaten in the last three days because you are so constipated from the other meds you’re on, you will piss on the floor like an animal, involuntarily and straight onto the white tile. and after latuda they will put you on trazadone, and after trazadone they will put you back on latuda, and after they will give up.
and this will all be before the summer’s even over.
after nine months of trying to find the meds that work for you, your brain will become a wall watching paint dry on itself. your brain will become a four-by-four box without light or windows. your brain will become a lump of gray matter with the same color and stench as coal. your brain will become the worst place in the world for you to be, and everywhere you go, trying to keep going, trying to pick up your groceries, trying to fumblingly unlock the apartment gate, you will be in your brain, and your brain will suddenly be both bigger and more solid than you are, and you will become the small thing inside of it and not the other way around. and your brain will hold you hostage, and your brain will become a warden, and your brain will do what jenny holzer knows everything with power does, and it will abuse you, and it will not even surprise you anymore, because you as you remember yourself no longer exist. you a ghost of a thing that can gesture to the outside world, can point dumbly at the cup in the kitchen for someone to fill or can pretend to inhabit a body that sits in a bar stool between two of your closest friends without processing a word either of them say because both of their voices are simultaneously too loud for you to not feel pain when they hit your ears and also so far away that you can’t actually hear a thing, and you will live in this cage and become smaller and smaller and smaller while the thing in your brain that wants to kill you takes bleach and tranquilizers and pours it over everything that you once thought you were.
you will remember who you were, once, before it all became bad again, but you will not be able to access her. you will miss her. you will have loved her. but you will no longer be capable of being her.
this is how it goes: you will be hospitalized forcefully, against your will, and you will lose entire days in the screaming. you will feel your throat close and your chest constrict and the electric panic of being seventeen and locked in a padded room in a basement against your will where the nurses tell you that if you don’t learn to listen you will never see the outside world again will bubble up from a place that was so long forgotten and so banished that when it breaks back through to the surface it has the stench of the rotting dead. and then you will scream, in the terror that you are about to have your freedom taken from you again, and as you are screaming, the nurses will restrain you, and you will feel time and space flatten all around you into this one singular instance in which you are no longer a person, you no longer have rights, you no longer have a future. and then the man with the clipboard will come back.
this is how it goes: you will be good and happy and okay and then you will not. you will be good and happy and okay and then you will lose it, and you will never know in advance when it’s all about to be taken away again. on month three or four of the worst breakdown of your life, you will find yourself mired in existentialism, the meaninglessness of everything so loud that it’s all you can do not to clap your hands over your ears and scream until the rest of the noise goes away. on month four or five is when it starts to get miserable: resentment burning hotter than cocaine in a cut nostril, feelings like terrifyingly sentient tendrils reaching out and grabbing each and every thing in its rumbling path. on month four or five you stop seeing your friends. on month four or five your friends have already stopped wanting to see you. on month four or five you still exist, to some degree, can still distinguish yourself from the numbing fog that envelops your every thought, but you hate it just the same. that loss, the one where you are eaten by the fog completely, will happen around month seven or eight.
lately you have been thinking there is no god or hell.
around month four or five, when it becomes obvious to everyone around you that something bad is going on, people will tell you, in an attempt to build your spirit, that you are brave and strong and resilient, but they will not look you in the eye when you ask them why did you of everyone have to be? they will tell you that it gets better, that you’ll find someone or something or whatever the fuck it is other people who already have what they need to stay alive think it is that you will one day magically stumble upon and suture your hopes and dreams onto. people who have never prayed for death just so the voices in their head will stop will tell you that if you kill yourself you will have just given in or failed or let the bastards grind you down, but what they don’t know is that you don’t want to be fighting either. they will tell you that you are fighting a noble fight, that you must win at all costs. but it doesn’t really feel like if you left here now it would be such a disastrous defeat. it will just feel like finally you can sleep.
this is how it will go: you will have one moment, one brief, small, miraculous moment, where it all stops to hurt. you will emerge from the underground victorious, a full flesh and blood pumping miracle of the human spirit who has come from the tombs of no color and no warmth and no sunshine and no music back into the world where people laugh over dinner in a crowded restaurant and mothers smile at babies and baristas smile at customers and the earth smiles at you. you will be the golden child. you will be everybody’s miracle. your meds will work. your trauma will mostly be processed. the avalanche will mostly be contained.
this will be your salvation.
and you will think - and here you will have to be forgiven, and you will have to forgive yourself for thinking it, because the second you do you will curse yourself to never really feel it again. but you will think you have won. you will think it is over, and that the sudden clear bright open silence all around you is because whatever the demon you’ve been wrestling with all this time has finally died, and you will do the thing that rescued small children do when they are finally tucked into bed at the end of a harrowing time, and you will think, the bad part of my life is finally over. but it won’t be. it will slip, slowly, or else it will all crash down in a split second, but however you lose it you will lose it. you will find yourself on the other side again, the side you’ve spent most of your life on but which you briefly really believed you wouldn’t have to go back to.
and this time it will feel worse.
this time you will be bitter. this time you will you feel true resentment. this time you will come to understand that it is infinitely worse to briefly grasp what everyone else seems to have in plenty, and then to lose it, the entire stash flushed down in a flash, eyes blinked and lips zipped and ships sinked - finite, final, done, ended, over.
you will now know what all of the damned know, which is that it would have been much kinder to have never had it, than to have it and to lose it with the quickness of a bullet.
you will never know what you are doing wrong to make it bad like this, but every time you start to slip the clipboard man will make it known that you are supposed to have figured out how to stop falling down the same hole already. you will try your damnedest and you will try your hardest and you will try with your entire soul, on the days that you have enough hope to even believe in a soul still, to make yourself be better, to fling yourself over the air onto the other side of the cliff, but always when you land you will have flown this entire length only to feel your feet on ground and look up excitedly on your new home, only to find you never even left, only to find you are still on the cliff you had leapt into the great expanse of empty air to escape.
(you will spend your whole life trying to be a student of the light. you will spend your whole life trying to see what everyone else can see.
nobody will be able to show it to you.)
this is how it goes: you will wake up one day and realize that you no longer wish for an afterlife. you will wake up one day and realize the most peaceful, rewarding gift you can think of would be total oblivion. you will wake up one day and know, like when you wake up the morning the day before you actually get sick and you know that the sickness is already waiting in your throat, that there is no god.
this is how it goes: you will go through all the requisite motions, and make all the requisite moves, and show up to all the requisite appointments with the requisite clipboards and requisite progress reports, and you will say you are depressed, or feeling nothing, or that the meds maybe aren’t working, or else they’ll ask you how you are and your tongue will be as heavy and dead as a cow in a drought dry wheat field, and you will tell them you are fine, the point from question to recognition to thought to moving your mouth to forming the word to being done with the word taking a full minute and a half. because what can you say? you cannot name any of the shapes that take place around you. you cannot place the things that have formed in your wake, the hollows and the gallows and the swinging silhouettes of dead men and children and puppies puked over in rat poison. you will not be able to articulate the depths of the lows you have experienced, and once you reach a certain point above sea level you will lose the ability to speak in truths at all. you will just nod and mumble and try to explain something to yourself or someone else, but mostly you will make no sense and you will have no one to explain things to anyway because you will have proven yourself a fundamentally incapable person in keeping people around. and you will not blame them for leaving you, because you would also leave you if you could. you do not blame anyone for walking away toward something easier to deal with because the one thing you have ever wanted, other than to feel better, is to also walk out from the rooms of your own life. and you would, if you could. you like to pretend that you wouldn’t of course, like to pretend that you love yourself now and you’re grateful to be here and you’ve gotten gotten the hang of things at this point, but you can’t. you can’t say without lying that you wouldn’t leave, and you also can’t leave. because it’s you. or it’s in you, or it’s attached to you, and both you and the psychics and the doctors and the clipboard man don’t know how to get rid of it, and no matter how much fucking yoga or clean eating or meds or essential oils or journaling exercises you do you still just want to fucking kill yourself.
this is how it will go: you will fight the good fight, the best anyone around has even seen someone fight it, for twenty-five endless and brutal years; and then you will lose something, or someone, or a series of someones, and you will find that all the old stories you were telling no longer sound like anything you can tell yourself anymore. you will have lasted infinitely longer in this life than anyone, including you, ever really expected you to, and half the people in your life will be impressed and the other half will roll their eyes and change the channel. but you will have convinced the people around you that you are someone who is capable of doing impossible things, and so when the next wave comes you will be expected to fight it, and when the next waves comes you will be expected to rise above, and so on and so forth until you are no longer allowed to not beat it. you have unintentionally become your own keeper. you are responsible for keeping yourself alive so nobody else has to feel bad about you dying. that is your job. that is your duty, as the one who keeps almost getting better. but no one knows you’ve never really gotten out of it. no one will know how much you hate everyone who expects you to keep yourself alive.
this is how it will, because this is the only way it’s ever gone for people like you.
you will be sane, and you will be happy, and you will be living, and then you will lose it. you will be sane and you will be happy and you will be living and then you will lose it and you won’t even realize it’s gone until it’s all of the way gone, so far out the picture that you can’t even call it back, the way you would a cat darting off into the sunset. you will have no name for this small darting shadow to call it home by, for the small little knot of hope you kept clutched between your fingers all this time. and you will try to believe that it will come back, and you will pace the house with the porch lights on, and you will try to tell yourself that this is just temporary, but deep down you know what happens to cats who wander off into the canyons at night. and then the thing that held you stringed together, and the inner quiet that believed things would be good, and the part of you that sits within all people that repeats resoundingly and with full belief that your innate humanity dignity will triumph over evil in the end, and the part of you that believed you would survive, will all break off at once, and you will no longer be able to believe it. it just fell apart one day, and the horse kept walking, and you were halfway across the middle of the desert before you realized it had fallen off the pack; and then you will wonder if it ever really existed at all, or if it was just something you had told yourself when you were young to make the dark at night less scary. one day i will be happy. one day this will all make sense. one day it will be easier, and i will have someone to love me the way a human needs to be loved, and i will know for certain that the worst of it is over.
one day i will be loved enough to be made real.
this is how it will go, give or take: you will spend twenty-seven years thinking everything matters so much, only to realize nothing does.
you will not know what to do with this realization.
and no one will be able to tell you.
the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is an occasionally free newsletter (and occasional poem) from joelle schumacher. if you enjoy their work or would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber, subscribe to or write in to their advice column, or buy them a coffee. they are also currently offering a limited online-only class for interested students who want to learn how to access their innate creativity and how to become (and actually embody) a real life artist.
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