You know the part in life where you think you’re doing okay—at least, as okay as you can be—and then something hits you on a random Tuesday. And you’re just left there thinking, okay. Maybe not.
Funny, today is Tuesday.
I was just scrolling through the writing folder in my phone’s notes app, then lo and behold, something from 2018 caught my eye. I have a compilation of my writings from 2017 till 2018, where I’d spilled my most random and depressing thoughts. They had me stopping in my tracks.
I scrolled through the note, reading every entry. Over eight years later, I read the words of 18 year old me at 26. They’re so…sad. So lonely. But what scares me the most is how similar I still feel now. It’s like I’ve never changed at all, and it breaks me.
Here are some of the things I’d written.
overthink
i want to fall straight asleep. i don’t like that moment when you close your eyes, waiting for sleep to consume you, but it hasn’t. so you have to keep your eyes closed until you finally do. that moment of time is filled with wild thoughts, not able to be tamed. even the smallest problems become huge, the nonexistent ones, we make them happen in our brains. i create these memories in my head that have never even happened before.
i overthink.
a little too much. a little too often.
dead
my eyes are tired. my mind is exhausted. my heart is shattered. but physically i still move on although my emotions don’t. this body of mine feels so vacant inside, like a shell of a woman who is dead within. smile like the day is yours, but cry like the night is taken away from you. eyes twinkle in the sun, but water in the stars. are you dead inside? or are you just tired of living?
cotton
lying in bed surrounded by pillows, but they have no arms to throw around me. i hug it, wishing that it was a body instead of a sack full of cotton. i wish that it was a person giving me calming warmth instead of a cold pillowcase biting into my skin. it doesn’t have its breath fanning over my forehead as i cuddle it. it doesn’t have a pair of arms to wrap around my waist. it doesn’t have a hand to run through my hair as i fall asleep. it’s just a sack full of cotton.
a lunatic’s room
there
over there
down the hall
there is a room
darker than the soul
of the heart that beats
inside its rotting yellow walls
inside its pungent rotting smells
there
over there
without any light
a lunatic’s room resides
in a hospital for the insane
in a world so, so silent and vain
deranged she sits with papering skin
deranged she sits with a devilish grin
eight years later
It’s funny, isn’t it? Eight years is a long time even though at times it felt as if the years had flown by in the blink of an eye. I was a baby. 18 years old and starry eyed, fresh out of high school and starting a new chapter of my life in university.
The stars have dimmed now.
So many things happened, even if I can barely remember anything now. I’m very forgetful nowadays; it’s actually concerning. I can never trust my memory. I’m scared it’s not real. Maybe I made it up—maybe I’m an unreliable narrator and I can’t tell whether a certain memory truly happened. Maybe all the trauma suppressed the truth and only showed me the bad parts.
Well, based on the snippets I shared, surely you get the gist of the kind of things 2017-2018 Nadiah wrote? Does it sound any different from what current Nadiah writes?
Exactly.
It’s just the same. Maybe my writing has improved in some parts. Maybe I would word things differently now. But at the heart of it, at its very core, I know I’m just being repetitive. The things I feel today, 2017 me had already felt. She had grown with it, let it fester in the roots of her brain and the curves of her blood vessels.
I am a vessel—
All the terrible things that had happened to me and I let dictate my life instead of walking out and starting fresh, shaping better experiences for myself. I bear them all. Carry them. Drag them like a one o’clock shadow. Cup them in my hands and drink like a starved man. Burn them into my eyelids so I see them every night when I go to bed. Repeat them like a mantra until I convince myself that I’m so broken inside I don’t deserve anything good that comes my way.
This only shows that I am in a cage with the door wide open, and I decide to stay inside. I trap myself. I am the barrier, the gates, the troll before the bridge with repetitive riddles I already know the answers to. I’m the hands pushing my head underwater and smothering my face with a pillow, pressing so hard but the heart never ceases its beating. I’m first in line for the self-sabotage club—
I could go on forever.
I feel like I’ve wasted my time. Like I could’ve been so much more if I never held myself back. If I never stood in my own way.
See? I’m doing it right now.
Except instead of a private notes app, I’m oversharing on the internet through a platform made for writers to spill their innermost thoughts. Shameless, real, raw.
But, what about you?
Do you still feel the same thing you did in 2017?