The Demons Inside Of Me

The Demons Inside Of Me

A Poem by Shaynuh Silken
"

my thoughts

"

I don't know what I want in life. I don't know what I want right now. All I know is that I'm hurting so much inside that it's eating me, and one day, there won't be any of me left. Everything that ever caused a tear to trickle down my cheek, I run away and hide from it. But now, everything is unwinding and finding its way back towards me. And I don't know what to do. I just know that pain I felt so long ago; it's hurting ten times more.

 

 I know it seems like I'm this strong person who can get though anything, but inside I'm fragile. I've had so many things thrown at me, and each one has only made a crack. What I'm afraid of is shattering. You look at me and think, 'she's so happy' but there's so much behind this little smile that you will never know .Do you ever have those times you cry and you don't know why? People are always telling me to smile, like smiling is going to just take away all the hurt and pain. Well I've tried that I've tried hiding my sorrows and covering the sadness in smiles and what I've learned is that when it hurts this much inside your heart always has a way of showing it no matter how many masks you wear. I just wish I could roll back the clocks to when things were the same... then we were all just a bunch of crazy teenagers looking for a wild time. But now, thing aren't the same.

 

 Each of us has gone our different ways. We change, people change, things just change, and we aren't those crazy teenagers looking for a wild time anymore. We're teenagers looking for a person to love and a person to hug when we're in need. I start to feel like I can’t maintain the facade any longer that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is. I don’t know. Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don’t know the answer; I know only that I can’t. I don't want any more vicissitudes, I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am only near 17 and I am already exhausted.

 

  I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. Depression is like a never ending sad story, where you're the main character. I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phoney, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union.

   Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible... And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.. I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

 Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumouris mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most f*****g god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know.

 There is a girl in my mirror and she’s crying all night. I don’t think there is anything I can do, to make her feel alright. 

On the outside I looked like a smart, happy and talented teenager. On the inside I was wilted and dying. And I don't want the world to see me, because I don't think that they'd understand. When everything's made to be b r o k e n, I just want you to know who I am!

© 2013 Shaynuh Silken


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Added on February 26, 2013
Last Updated on February 26, 2013
Tags: abuse, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak, fear, parents, dad, beaten, bruised, broken

Author

Shaynuh Silken
Shaynuh Silken

Marathon, Ontario, Canada



About
If you really want to know who I am... Well.. You know the girl, the girl that walks in a group of outcasts, that has her feet planted firmly on the ground, but her eyes look a million miles away. .. more..

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