It’s been just about a year since I detached my retina and had to get emergency eye surgery. Still in awe on how the surgery was an out patient surgery and I didn’t have to stay in a hospital. Still remember the colors and the floaters in my eye as my eye was repaired. The weeks of lying and sleeping on my stomach Binge listening Severance while trying to picture the show in my mind as it was being described to me.
Most importantly, I thought that this was the shock that my body and mind needed to get out of the depression spiral that I been in. I thought that I had finally broke free of the thoughts that kept me isolated and alone. I could become the person that I was before; the person that my friends knew and loved.
Was I like Icarus and flew too close to the sun? Going to see my mom after a six year estrangement, I thought I had prepared myself for any situation and had the right numbers and names for support. But if I learned anything in that weeks stay with mom was even more ways to hate myself and to be alone.
I was shaken, but I thought that I could still survive; I still had therapy help keep me afloat. Until they told me that there was nothing more that they could for me after 20 years.
And it quickly went down hill from there. Aunt Jackie death, the bills, the work layoffs. the world itself. But I think the one true event was the return of gift for a new baby. I think that’s when I realize how not worth saving that I am. How foul, putrid, and poisoned that I am. And if I didn’t have the strength to end my life, the best thing to do is to quarantine myself from the world that I know.
I have this weighted blanket that I sleep with at night. When I first got it, it was a substitute for having someone close to me at night to fight off the loneliness. Now I use it to cover my head to ensure that there is darkness all around me and no light will reach me. The question is; was it worth it to fix my eye if I’m hiding from seeing the light? Would it have been better to just be in eternal darkness, at least in one eye?
