A Letter to my Former Self

Melanie,

I still see you sometimes. It can be really hard to forget you. I still don’t know if I want to forget you.

Mom keeps asking me why I don’t listen to One Direction anymore. Why do I turn the radio down when Drag Me Down comes on? Why don’t I care about Niall being rumored to date Selena Gomez? Am I finally growing up?

Every time she remembers who I was it reminds me how much I miss who I was. I miss you. I miss One Direction. And I really fucking miss the place I was in. I know it was unhealthy and I know I should have died and I know it was filled with nothing but depression and self loathing and I know I’m healthier now but I really don’t fucking care. I miss it.

I miss the entire days I spent in my room scrolling down my never ending dashboard, picture after picture of Harry and Louis, stalking Melissa’s page to see if she mentioned me or mentioned hating herself too. I miss the mind numbing silence that came with watching the same TV shows again and again and again, then pausing it to concentrate on the emptiness entrapping me. I miss the brief moments of pure ecstasy when I did feel something, when I pictured myself seeing them in concert or saw a new picture of the two of them together or Melissa messaged me and acted like she cared. I really fucking miss it.

Who am I without you? I’ve been trying to define that for a really long time. Every time Troy comes back I forget who I want to be and I remember you again. I have all these great ideas about what kind of person I am and how I’m going to be happy in life, but it all feels so foreign. Am I faking it? What am I trying so hard for?

I have dreams. I have ambitions. I have my meaningful life. But I don’t know if it counts when it’s not me who’s living it. I’m just the shell.

I’m 25, living in San Francisco, teaching Critical Diversity Studies at USF, painting in my free time, playing coffee shops, assistant coaching women’s soccer. Cornflower blue hair and a full sleeve on my left arm. Maybe a piercing or two. Really getting into my queer hippy identity, mindset and all.

I want to be that person. I don’t want to be just a shell. I want to live, not in this cheesy façade I put up for Mom and Dad and Troy but in an authentically real way. Does that mean I have to want to kill myself? Do I have to hate myself?  Do I have to go between incapacitating lows and dangerously powerful highs for the rest of my goddamn life just to feel something?

I don’t know how living for the sake of living is any better than dying for the sake of not living. I think it’s fucked up my entire family and all the other random people who know me put their entire wellbeings on my shoulders so that I don’t accidentally hate myself again and die. I think it’s fucked up that the things I do in my own personal existence will affect the people I’m supposed to love. This whole goddamn life, life and existence in general, how people prioritize it above anything else is just really fucked up.

But, I know I can’t change it. My actions do have consequences no matter what I think about it. I can’t go back to where I was. I can’t keep reminiscing about the great times I use to have in my self induced comas. For them, for right now, I’m a shell of a person. Maybe that’ll change, I really don’t know. But for right now, my foreign dream is still alive, even if someone I don’t recognize ends up living it.

I’m so sorry,

Ty