The Night Sea

in the end, it doesn’t really matter

This isn’t really how I had hoped to return to writing but reality is as it is, and I have been in possibly the worst depression of my entire life since January.

Everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong, and then gone further wrong some more.

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My Grandma is dying.

Or has been for some time.

Years ago I struggled to face this reality and stayed away because it hurt my heart to see her suffering, but now that she is running out of time and I do go to see her, I have to face the despair of being unable to do anything to help the person I love.

We were called to the ICU twice and each time I steeled my mind expecting the possibility that I might arrive to witness her death.

Each time she has survived, and while thankful, the strain of this on top of my already incredibly stressful job, and the decision to reopen painful communications with my long past yet still present unfulfilled childhood love, has contributed to the ever widening crack in my mental health within the last year.

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And it has finally collapsed, as I now spend my weekdays in Partial Hospitalisation Program.

I go to the hospital every day, and spend 8 to 10 hours in therapy like it’s my job.

First group IOP (intensive outpatient), then a one on one talk therapy session with a trauma focused psychologist.

Then I see the psychiatrist to discuss my medication (I used to be on Duloxetine, came off it because I wanted to have a child, and now I’ve been prescribed Bupropion).

Then trauma coping skills group to close out.

And it’s not really helping but I have to go so I don’t die.

All of this is supposed to help me prepare for EMDR, which I have heard is extremely effective for the persistent shame, anxiety, and complex PTSD of sexual trauma, which has dominated my entire adult life, so I am cautiously optimistic that maybe if I just get to that finish line, that all of this suffering will have meant something.

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I have been depressed most of my life.

As I discussed with my therapist, I think the cause is that becoming aware of the world very young, compounded by my own experiences with being the subject of severe bullying, mockery, and other such casual cruelty, and then of course, grooming and assault left me struggling with suicidality since I was a teenager.

It’s not just being victimised by other people, but also seeing how much society, especially Nigerian society rewards aggressors and despises victims for having been harmed in the first place.

It was so jarring the first time I experienced it, but as it kept happening I became withdrawn in the sense that I didn’t feel connected to the world and such a vicious society, and I became inwardly afraid of people, knowing they have the capacity for such cruelty which they view so casually.

Then with fame (or should I say infamy?) I gained the desire to not be perceived. Possibly because for me, with perception came becoming the target of other people’s projections, assumptions, outright rumours and lies, and ultimately ire.

I don’t want anyone to see me or know me or know I exist.

And the ultimate manifestation of that is that I don’t want to exist.

And if I don’t exist anymore, I don’t want anyone to know that I had ever existed at all in the first place.

I wish I could snatch back every memory anyone has ever had of me. Every single atom of anything that was a record of my existence, every photo, every audio recording, every video, every letter I ever wrote that someone received, every text message and email I ever sent, every like on Facebook, everything.

I want everything I ever touched rescinded by the universe, every memory of me in anyone’s mind erased as though they had never ever met me, it would be the peace of non-existence in its truest form that I have longed for since I was seventeen.

I understand now how cultural beliefs like “the evil eye” and other such ideas came to be. They are a byproduct of how people behave in social groups.

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So the last seven months since January I have struggled and struggled with not ending my life as my mind ganged up against me.

My mind is a very harsh place for me, and since the world outside my body is a very harsh place for me as well, I had to at least acknowledge that I was using someone else’s presence and mind and internal world to regulate my own self.

This is how addiction forms is it not? Or how one becomes addicted to a person rather than a drug.

Still I think it no different because it’s probably the same chemical reward loop in the brain feeding the endless desire for more.

In his case, more of cocaine or whatever his substance of choice may be.

In my case, more of him.

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The most unfortunate part of complex PTSD like I have is the rumination it causes.

I find myself thinking a lot and inhabiting the past rather than just thinking about. Inhabiting the moment when my life fell apart and blaming myself for not knowing more, not choosing better, not doing something differently, not somehow having been the superhero I had so desperately needed in those moments when had only myself, and a child’s utter naïveté about what was happening and the way the world would respond to it.

What I hate the most are the stretches where I think I’m getting better. I thought I had made it. I was over everything. I had survived. I had let it all go. I could now finally move on with my life and be happy.

I hate those stretches because I hate false hope and the cruel sense of safety it lured me into before the ground disappeared and I realised that not only am I falling down a bottomless pit, but the entire time I thought I was climbing my way out of it and hoping to soon see the sun, I had been falling down all along.

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Tangentially, it’s only mildly interesting that despite this torment of my thoughts being consumed with death as an escape from life that is too painful, I have felt no desire for religion.

Despite growing up an Anglican, and then baptised and after Catechism, confirmed a fervently practicing Catholic, my whole childhood I had had doubts about (as I privately called it) the Abrahamic Cinematic Universe, because reading more and studying the theology more deeply, had precisely the opposite effect of bringing me more comfort.

I was disturbed by its worldview which primes society for the tolerance of ambient exploitative cruelty, concealed behind hypocrisy and performative piety.

But I stuck it out for a while longer until my illusions were finally shattered with Islam. Not that I was unfamiliar; a small, much beloved quarter of my family has been Muslim since before I was born — but despite for a time pursuing that faith too after taking my Shahada, I came to understand that all of these beliefs are systems we constructed both to cope with the terror of finding ourselves alive in this world about which we truly know so little, and to control others, because all fear comes from lack of control.

So now, whether my end is today or many decades from now, I cannot betray myself beyond all the self betrayals I have already committed, by pretending to believe so that my soul if I have one, will be saved from a punishment I already lived under threat of, purely for being created by some sadistic deity.

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I hope death is nothing.

Or if it is something, I hope it’s you getting to go back through time and space to save yourself in all the moments that you needed a saviour and you had no champion.

My tears and my broken heart are for myself at five, myself at fourteen, and myself at seventeen.

Even myself in my thirties.

All of my selves needed me to come from the future to rescue them.

Perhaps this is why so many religions believe in messianic figures because some lives are an inexorable train of tragedies from which one desperately needs rescue, but there is no messiah, and nobody is coming to save you or even accompany you to witness that you are suffering.

There is no saviour but the self.

But there is no guarantee that my self can win both wars within and without, and somehow survive and prevail.

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The worst part is how there’s also so much guilt before you even do anything.

I don’t want to die and cause inconvenience for others.

I want to be completely forgotten as though I never did exist.

Who will find my body, how will they deal with it, will I cause my family financial burden with my death?

I have to get my affairs in order first. I have to sort out my finances, pay any debts, add beneficiaries to savings and investment accounts, write a will, set up a living trust, secure all my passwords, cancel unnecessary subscriptions, create backups of important documents, itemise, organise, and give away all of my needless possessions to reduce clutter.

Find a burial plot and buy it.

Calculate the cost of flying a body home and put that in a separate bank account.

Debate the pros and cons of where to be buried.

Anambra where I’m from or Abuja where I lived and loved with all my heart? My heart says Abuja.

Even the decision to die is a mountain of administrative work that just like other areas of my life in which I deem myself to be a failure, I would be no better at successfully dying than I currently am at living.

And so I cannot die regardless of how little I want to live.

As I have fucked up everything in my life, I am almost guaranteed to fuck up my one chance to permanently escape the suffering of thinking too much all the time, everywhere, all at once.

My entire adult life has been an endless war to grow happiness in tear drenched soil, and I am tired of trying not to drown in the night sea under the black sky of stars I cannot reach, and I don’t want to learn another lesson from something I wanted to be permanent.

Pascal’s wager is a coward’s way out.

And I am no coward.

💛

Lotanna