We Are the Normal Ones: Memoirs of a Fallen Human

Ravennah

Ravennah stares at her arm. It's full of red scars and her right hand charged with guilt for assaulting it. She stares at it hoping to feel better or feel something. She takes hand sanitizer and she pours it over the cuts. Her arm now burns with more pain and she quinces with satisfaction. But then the pain goes away and she feels nothing again. And shes back to where she started. She lays down and pulls the covers over herself and stares into the space occupying her room. The walls are dark and uninviting. They scribble words of encouragement from her friends and words of pain her mind releases. She shuts her eyes and immediately starts envisioning her cutting herself again. She yearns to feel something other than this. But she doesn't. She can't. This is the same girl who was paralyzed and over came the odds of her dancing again let alone walking. But this was an enemy far more superior than her previous inability to take two steps. This enemy was in her mind. It was her thoughts, herself, her. How do you fight yourself? She opens her eyes and decided it's not best to close them. She tries to focus on something else. But it doesn't help. She's drowning, trying to figure out if it's best for her to succumb to the torture her mind influences her to do. It surprises her how inventive her mind is. So may different ways. So many varieties of infliction. And she's curious to try them all. The other day she flushed all the medication she received when she had gotten sick. She's become too used to abusing her meds and taking more than she needed to. It's not that she wanted to die. She just wanted the thoughts to go away. But if she did die, well then that wouldn't have been so awful. One night, she took 14 pills. Her mind cleared and it was like she was flying. She couldn't feel her body or her mind. It was the first time she felt free from the chains she locked herself in. Her dad was upstairs and had no clue what had happened. Ravennah was free and happy. It was a false positive but she didn't care. She could think. Her mind had parted from the self-destructive imaginations and let her fly. It didn't hit her that she took so many. She just smiled and went to sleep hoping that that would be her ending position. But she woke up the next day. And she kept waking up every day since then. She was always waking up to feel the same emptiness she felt the day before. Each day someone hopeful would text to see if she felt better. She didn't. And that upset her more than their optimism. She wasn't getting better. She felt like she was disappointing them more and more each day because she wasn't built with the same strength they had once knighted her with. She was the same Ravennah who conquered all external blows. Who without fail pioneered and gave comments and helped ones in the congregation. That Ravennah, she was now weak and bitter. She was a fake. And she felt that every time someone said they loved her and she couldn't get herself to say it back. She felt it every time someone came to encourage her and their words had no effect on her. She felt it every time her dad was nice to her and she couldn't even smile to thank him. She just looked at the ground and walked away. She felt that every time she received a text from a friend asking how she was and she couldn't tell them how she felt because it was embarrassing, frustrating, every possible form of "too much to say" as possible. Everyone else smiled. And she couldn't figure out where hers went.
Ravennah felt her arm with all the cuts. She liked that. She liked how it felt. For some reason, her arm was a sense of pride and shame at the same time. How in the world did she get to this place? The one where she gave up just as much as she fights like heck to be able to stand tall again. To feel everything yet nothing at the same time. To feel normal and insane, loved and unwanted, pretty and ugly, hopeful and discouraged, fine but so so not fine all at the exact same time. To feel such conflict. To be at such an intense war with yourself and no one knowing. Or not knowing how to help you.