shoulders | spoken word poetry

six

my old friends told me

"depression isn't something you can put into words. you're drowning but no one hears you."

but since i write, i can explain everything that hurts inside.

i can explain how it feels like im stepping into a bucket of warm grease. the bad days seems to last longer than the good ones. no- it does not feel like im underwater drowning and screaming. it feels like im in the middle of a high school hallway and no one wants to stop.

but, my friends say that isn't depression. friends know best, right? that it's just a bad day. but every day is turning into a bad day. every day i find myself in the backroom at work sobbing with a bucket of carrots with me. the days we run out of carrots i sit there in quiet.

my friends tell me they're depressed. i ask them why? they get insulted at me, as if i just insulted their family. they tell me their mom yells at them for staying up until 2am. theyre depressed because their mom won't drive them to another state for a concert. that they can't stand their family for not being perfect. 

dont get me wrong. i know their problems are still huge and that theyre suffering. but when my daddy smacks me across my face, i still don't hate him. i dont understand how they hate their mom about caring for when they go to sleep to get up in the morning. 

why do you want to slit your wrist because your mom spends too much time with you? my mom is fucking dead because i didn't spent enough time with her. 

my friend told me she was experiencing an eating disorder. my heart hurt. it hurt because so was i, but i didn't feel as if i could tell her. bulimia was the worse thing i've gone through in my life. the pain in my throat, the pale in my skin, the bruised knuckles. i asked her why she was going through an eating disorder. she said she felt fat. she had never once complained about her weight in the last ten years we have been friends. she has the body of an eight year old, this was before the eating disorder. she started taking photos of bruised knuckles and posted in on instagram. the bruised knuckles were on her left-hand, but her dominant hand is her right-hand.

i decided to open up to her and tell her my own struggle. i told her i had been secretly making myself throw up for months. she asked me why. i told her i want to throw up the ugly in me. i find myself so ugly inside and wanted to puke out the toxic.

she told me i didnt really have an eating disorder.

i had a friend who was beautiful. he was smart, an a student. he's very talented with music instruments and he can draw well. he will be famous one day. 

he told me wanted to die. he moved away the beginning of the summer and got to start over. he said he felt as if no one loved him. an hour after i told him i loved him and that he would be okay. that i would visit soon, he went on snapchat. he posted videos of him kissing his girlfriend and posting him with five different friends at their pool party. the entire night they were smoking pot and laughing. 

how can you be lonely when you're surrounded by those who love you? 

my sophomore  year i made a new friend. she almost became my close friend. almost. she called  me saying she cut up her legs and her wrist. she was bleeding and didnt know how to stop it. i calmly told her what to do and she ended up falling asleep on the phone with me. the next day at school, she came smiling wearing a tank-top and shorts. her cuts were gone. 

the first friend i made my junior year used to talk about how he hated his dad. he said he would bully him and hit his mom. but when his dad died from alcohol poisoning he suddenly loved him. he called me crying because he was hurting from his dad dying... but what about the pain her brought to your mother?

my ex used to get awkward around me when i was sad. he didn't know what to say, i mean its okay, no one really did. but whenever i didnt answer him- he told me he wanted to cut himself. 

i don't get it. why do we all treat mental illness like we're fighting to see who has it worse? aren't we fighting against our mental illness enough. why do we post online that we hate ourselves for everyone to see? so someone can come up to us and ask us if we're okay? or how we just lie about hurting ourselves- to write online about the pain as if it was beautiful. if you're hurting- you need to be in a mental hospital. not on instagram posting pictures of your fake bruises.