Mourning Chaos

There’s less than a month until my 26th birthday and I’m mourning.

I’m mourning my youth and my freedom, the crazy naivety and drama. I’m mourning something that I haven’t physically lost yet it feels like my whole life is coming to an end.

I’m mourning my teenage school years that I spent disassociating so hard the bigger part of the decade sitting at a desk is nothing but a blur, flecks of life shrouded in fog so thick I can never begin to try and whisk away. Cute crushes, growing pains and solitude in which I both found and lost myself indefinitely.

I’m mourning the little parties and the burning yet sorrowful jealousy I felt towards the people experiencing their first kisses giggling away in rooms locked while I sat away unsure of myself, unwilling to speak up in fear of being discovered as the boring friend nobody even wanted there in the first place.

I didn’t realize it then, but in my teen years I harboured a contradictory desire to be seen yet wished to hide away from the prying eyes, I wanted to fast-forward to later years while I watched time slip through my fingertips with crazed desperation. I was depressed beyond measure, the only thing bringing in feeling being the open wounds and blood trailing down my legs as I bathed in my own brokenness. The drama inside my own head the only comfort I ever found.

I’m mourning my young hopeful self who hid away behind her drunker persona allowing alcohol to take full control of her life as though she had found the true secret to happiness. Alcohol brought forwards a more confident me; I was talkative, people paid attention. I was free to drink as much as I wanted and do whatever the hell I wanted. I danced, I sang, I kissed, I fucked all with the help of the sweet fluttery booze slowly but surely colouring my blood black with poison.

I don’t mourn the fact that I can never drink again, no. It was never about the alcohol itself.

I mourn the chaos of a soul breaking.

From the very beginning, it was all about turmoil, about wallowing in my pain and trying to impose meaning upon the numb emptiness that veiled my heart. The nights I stole drinks from my parents’ alcohol cabinet, the nights I drank too much just because I could – I craved chaos, I wanted to let go and to let someone else take control for once. Unfortunately, most usually alcohol would be the thing to claim the reins.

Heroin chic. Beautiful tragedy. (I even have a Pinterest board for this exact mood for fuck’s sake)

Ripped tights, self-harm scars, cigarette stench, smeared mascara, and those sad glassy eyes.

I aimed to give my suffering meaning, finding comfort in the chaos of glamorised disaster that was the quintessential broken adolescent experience. Dumb luck being the only reason I’m still breathing, had there ever been drugs nearby I doubt I’d be here now, chewed up and swallowed by my uncontrollable desire to “live fast & die young.”

Drinking ’till the sun came up, never understanding how others would just get-up and leave. Didn’t the dull light creeping up the sky at 4 am bother them? How come it didn’t cause them the same immense fear and the sense of strangulation the same way it did to me? Why were they able to call it a night and go home while I stormed another bar not wanting to be alone for even a minute before the night had fully exhausted itself?

Convinced that I’m invincible, above all rules and laws, while cutting people out the moment a possibility of getting hurt emerged. Not caring what others might think and yet caring way too much. Rebelling against everything I held true, pretending to embrace the dark and alluring unknown while trembling in fear when inevitably left on my own. 

Begging people not to go, please, not yet.

“Living off of booze and saying yes to drugs, whispering intoxicated hopes and dreams into a stranger’s lips that taste like cigarettes and Jack Daniels, but it’s okay, ’cause so does yours.”

I lived like tomorrow would never come because god knows I prayed for it not to. Reckless and lost, betrayed and scarred, scared and damaged and yet somehow still so incredibly naive.

And I mourn that poor child that I was, that in part I still very much am. I mourn those days and nights wasted in pigsty bathroom stalls drunk on the liquor, high on the chaos that was my life. I was free, I was young, I was letting my depression take hold of me convinced that it was what made me me, that this suffering was the reason behind my creativity, the driving force behind my whole existence. 

I still cling to this chaos even though alcohol lost its high status in my life. It took too much away when I already had nothing left to give. But I do still crave for this glorified disaster of a lost damaged soul all alone in the big city desperate to find their footing amongst all the pain. 

But I’ll be 26 in a couple of weeks. I’m sober. I’m boring now, I’m supposed to go to bed early and wake early, I should be eating healthy and working out, participating in mellow hobbies on my days off, daydreaming to escape reality after a hard day at work.

Is this all that’s left in life for me? Where’s my chaos, where’s my drama? I can’t live like this for the next 50 years slowly approaching the end of my time.

A broken fuck-up of a life is only permitted to college students and rockstars and I am neither.

So I mourn the innocent scandal of teenagers hooking up at a party, I mourn pretentious conversations at 2 am discussing the meaning of life, I mourn surviving off of booze and energy drinks, I mourn my eating disorders, I mourn the self-harm and I mourn sneaking sips of cognac in the midnight of my childhood home, I mourn the heated flirting our inhibitions loosened our movements sloppy.

I mourn all the years my dissociation took away from me, I mourn all the memories I willingly drowned in a drunken haze.

I mourn the drama of a high functioning alcohol-infused depression.

I mourn the chaos that I never ceased to chase, the chaos that near destroyed me yet the same chaos that I crave.

I mourn the ability to let myself go and make bad decisions because I simply didn’t know any better. 

But now I do and I can’t allow myself to surrender the control the same way I used to.

Is this what it means to transition into adulthood? To want to keep fucking up because it’s more exciting that way yet knowing that it will only lead to further suffering? 

I’m torn between turning around and embracing the chaos I had been chasing for the better part of my life and doing the right adult thing and settling down into responsible living.

Admitting to myself that I crave the brokenness, that I crave the disaster that I can’t help but glamorise is no easy feat.

I might not be drinking anymore but I’m still depressed, I’m still on edge and I have no idea how to drain it all without drowning it away, without blanketing the loneliness and the desperate cling for human affection in layers and layers of booze, sarcasm and bad decisions.

Today I celebrate 6 months of sobriety.

It’s excruciatingly lonely here.

My sick mind telling me that no one understands my craving for such chaos and self-destruction or the growing pains and solitude that come with sobriety.

Constantly fantasising about letting loose in drugs and alcohol. 

One more year until I turn 27. Maybe that’s when I’ll go out with a bang.

Living fast and dying young, just like I hoped to when I was 16; excruciatingly long yet unexplainably short 10 years of this never-ending see-sawing between the determination to live and the longing for death.

“When you don’t want to give up yet have no strength to continue, when you want it all to end but do not want to end it when you want them to care when you no longer do.

When you’re so deep down a hole you dug up yourself that it seems easier to pour down the dirt than to climb out, when you’ve been hurt so many times you lost count yet remember every single time you hurt someone else, when you’re living the glorified disaster of an adolescent life that you’ve seen on tv, yet you can’t help but cry when the first cold rays of light signal yet another today.”