Letters Written in White Read Online Free PDF Page B

might be different. It’s not that I need him to fix me. I don’t want his pity or sympathy. I just want the man I love to see me, hear me. When I’m hanging by a thread, being heard, seen, and loved is a life preserver. The simplicity of what I need is never simple though. I’m hanging from that thread now. I’m dangling at Death’s door, and I’m tired of holding on.
    Nervous energy pulsates through my body, causing me to want to claw my skin off of its bones. My first instinct is to stand up and pull my hair and yell as loud as I can. I want to scream back at the bullshit things running through my head. It’s not voices I hear. Well, it is, but it isn’t. It’s a voice, my voice. The things I tell myself every single day drive me to the brink of madness. I thought I’d learned to shut these thoughts off long ago, but here they are, louder than ever. With a vengeance they snarl while creeping into every fissure of my life, poisoning everything they touch. It’s destroying my marriage. It’s poisoned motherhood for me. The one thing every woman covets and holds most dear has been turned into my own personal Hell.
    The day I became a mom, I found myself on the edge of a rocky cliff. The mountain I had worked so hard to climb became a plank. I walked it on wobbly feet. The moment I stepped off, I fell, hard and fast. The worst part is the falling. I keep waiting for the excruciating landing. I’m almost to the point of begging for rock bottom because the place I find myself in now is vexing and purely exhausting.
    I want to rewind my life back to my pregnancy, when there was nothing but joy and happiness. We were so incredibly excited about the new journey we were about to start. Now, here I am, feeling like an outsider to my own family, my own life. Looking back on memories of how excited I was about starting a family is almost too much to handle because of the reality I’m living here and now. I was so incredibly hopeful then. Our life was just beginning as a family, and for the first time, I felt contentment like I’d never known before. The emptiness I had endured from a certain trauma in my childhood was finally filling up. Little did I know, as soon as it was full, it would overflow and drown me.

 
    “Once depression unpacks its bags and moves in,
    you lose all capacity to trust yourself
    or others.”
     
     
    THE DAY I married Grayson, we promised each other for better or worse. I just never realized worse would visit us so soon. Thinking back to our wedding day, my heart swells with love. A tinge of pain threatens to infiltrate it. I can’t help but wonder if I solidified a life of too much worse for him. He deserves so much more than that. That’s why I’ve lied to him for so long. Each day when the door would open, I’d instantly model a smile on my face just for him. I can’t even manage that anymore. I was once a smiling liar. I just can’t do it anymore, and my resolve is wearing paper-thin.
    Now, I’m just the ugly truth.
    Another night, another fight, that’s how it seems to go for us lately. He mentions I’ve lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time, and when he points it out, things quickly go south.
    “Are you eating? Because your clothes are just hanging on you and you look sickly, Riah. Please consider seeing your doctor again. This isn’t healthy.”
    I know I’ve all but stopped eating for the most part. My ability to do even the most basic of things for survival, such as eating, has waned. When I think about eating, all that crosses my mind is the cooking of the food and how hard that will be, the cutting up of the food, the chewing, the swallowing, and as ridiculous as it may seem to anyone else who hasn’t ever experienced depression, to me, these things feel so substantial that I can’t even manage the motivation to do it.
    The melancholy isn’t even the worst of what I feel most days. It’s the anxiety. The anxiety is crippling to the point of no return.