No. I will get some sleep. It doesn’t matter if it’s 4 or 5 AM, or if my alarm already rang twice or four times—I will wait ’til the sunrise. It doesn’t matter if I sleep on the bed or the bathroom floor, or if I wake up starving or with a hangover—I will wake up. I have to. I have to stay alive until the next morning. I have to hear my dogs barking for their meal, to feed and pet them. I have to fix the flickering lights and the broken sink. I have an appointment with a dentist at six and I have to meet an old friend on Friday night. No one would do that for me, so I have to stay alive.
Why would I? I may not be loved by the person I used to glorify, I may be abandoned by the people I used to devote my time with, pushed away by friends and foes, family; I let my monsters take the wheel and let them ride inside my head, let them repeat a phrase that says I am weak and I don’t belong to anyone or anywhere, plant a bomb and whisper a sound like a detonator to watch me burst and fade in smoke and failure, but I have to keep going. I will pick the debris of my broken self and stitch it back so I can live another day and I can rest another night and I can survive another terror. Sure, breathing alone is not enough to survive; it takes courage, a will to live.
Believe me, I won’t. I eat tragedy for breakfast and a table for one for a bitter dinner, but I can still taste life when I take my first sip of coffee in the morning. I can still smell the scent of sunset and forenoon, hear the wind playing my favorite love song and I can feel my heart beating with the tune of a radio classic. I am alive. Drowning beneath the sea of obstacles with feet shackled, yet battling to rise and reach the rendezvous.
Because I just did. I killed myself last night and the other night and the other. I have been killing myself for a long time, hiding it with glaring smile; laugh, play and pretend as if I don’t have scars on my skin, as if I don’t spend nights looking at the ceiling, wanting to dance while floating. There were days that I finished the race and took home only bruises and wounds, but it don’t matter because I won. What matter is winning. What really matters is living. And I choose to live.
Not anymore.
https://thoughtcatalog.com/joms-zulueta-jimenez/2017/09/i-will-not-kill-myself-tonight/
UJT Fitzgerald, 23
Rochester, New York
Invisible Illness:
Hodgkin lymphoma
When did you first learn of your illness?
I was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma in December 2016. I started feeling exhausted all the time, with strange headaches and swelling in my neck. Multiple doctors told me it was just a sinus infection. People would say I seemed fine until they felt the swelling, but I knew that it was something more.
Does the invisibility of your illness affect the way you’re treated?
During treatment, things stop being invisible and become visible. Everyone has that image of a cancer patient without hair, thin and pale. Once treatment ends and your hair and eyebrows start coming back, everyone around you acts like everything is normal again, but you live with a deep anxiety and distrust of your body.
Every seemingly minor ache or pain is a reminder of what you’ve been through, a potential spot to find another lump, a trigger to send you spiraling toward a panic attack. Some days are easier than others, where everything seems like it did before I was sick.
Going through treatment strengthened my core personal relationships, but sometimes I feel like even those people don’t understand what it’s like now that the obvious illness is over. I get the sense that many people see the physical signs that I’m getting better but don’t understand that sometimes I’m still in pain, and I’m almost always still anxious.
What’s been the hardest or most challenging part?
Besides going through treatment, the most challenging part has been learning to trust my body again. It’s so strange to feel this disconnect between your brain and your body, because your body betrayed you on a very fundamental level. Having cancer made me realize how little control I actually have over my body, and it’s hard to reconcile this new distrust on a day-to-day basis.
How have you managed to cope?
I made it through treatment with the support of my friends and family, and with music. I find now, after treatment, that playing music and releasing music by my friends gives me a tangible thing that I can feel in control of, an end result to work toward, in contrast to the open-ended question of whether or not the cancer will come back. I work every day on accepting and processing the trauma of what happened to me and the new reality I find myself in.
How do you practice self-care?
When I’m faced with serious panic or anxiety, I try to get through the immediate situation by using visualization and breathing techniques. I have anti-anxiety medication I can take if things get out of hand, but I try to practice enough self-care in general so that things don’t get that far. Seeing a therapist regularly has been a huge help for me.
What would you want people to know about having an invisible illness?
Just because someone seems okay on the outside doesn’t mean that they’re fine, and it doesn’t always help to tell someone that they’re strong for dealing with an issue they had no choice but to deal with. To everyone else living with problems that others can’t see: Your pain is real, what you deal with is real, and there are lots of other people who know what you’re going through even if you can’t see their illness, either.
5 People On What It's Really Like To Live With An Invisible Illness
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/living-with-invisible-illness_us_59b03fcfe4b0dfaafcf4f41e
