An Open Letter to My Past Self

When I was fourteen, I didn't want to live past age twenty-one.

I rarely talk about this, especially not so bluntly or so publicly. But today, I felt like I needed to. Seven years ago, I didn't realize what I was feeling wasn't normal. I didn't know it was dangerous. Conversely, I also didn't know anybody else knew what I was feeling or could relate to it. I was torn between the fear that either nobody would understand what I was feeling and so if I opened up, they just wouldn't know what I was saying, and the fear that everybody felt this and it was normal, that feeling like I didn't want to keep living for much longer was a part of life everyone experienced and I just had to suffer through it. I honestly believe that if I didn't have my fiction to pile some of my feelings into, I would have had to face them directly, and might have ended up in a much darker and more dangerous place. 

When I was fourteen, I didn't want to keep living past age twenty-one because I couldn't imagine life as something I could enjoy. I couldn't find joy in anything anymore and I didn't think that would ever change.

But it did. It did change. I'm twenty-one now, and I'm so, so glad that I have many years still ahead of me. The life I once used to dread has become my greatest dream. I've rediscovered the joy that used to evade me constantly. Even with anxiety or caffeine making my heart race right now, sitting on the couch with a cuddly little kitty sleeping on my legs, a fuzzy blanket, a good thick fantasy book, and soft music playing? That's the good life. So, to my past self, I promise, it gets better. You won't be in that darkness forever. You will rediscover what it means to be happy. You won't always face the future with such dread. You will find joy again in the things that used to excite you. It won't always be easy, and in some ways, that darkness will always be with you, but you won't always be in the pitch-dark cave you're in now. You will find a way out into the soft twilight and the cool morning, the darkness just shadows lurking behind bushes and wrong turns on wooded paths. Here's the secret that will keep you going through the darkest night:

It gets better.

So don't give up because you think the rock-bottom you've hit will be the rest of your life. It won't. You will find solace in realizing that the thoughts you live with aren't normal, but they aren't unique either. A fictional character and an author that becomes one of your good friends will help you see that constantly hating yourself isn't normal or healthy but it is something you can walk out of, a pattern you can break. You'll leave the church and pastor that haunt you. You'll find grace in the God that never meant for you to beat yourself up with the Law you were never able to live up to, finally realize that sanctification doesn't mean you're a failure if you're not perfect now that you follow Jesus. Your crazy hormones will come under control, and while they will still mess with your head worse than they probably should, you'll be able to recognize that for what it is. Your health will come more under control, and for the days when it's not, at least you'll know you're not alone in that either. You'll make friends that won't drift away and desert you and be able to handle it when others do. One day, you'll be able to talk about this to others and you won't feel anymore the crushing weight of being alone.

If you're someone who feels like I felt seven years ago, just know that you're not alone. And that this darkness you're feeling isn't all you'll ever feel. It gets better. I won't lie and say that it's always easy, that I'm completely cured and the darkness is completely gone. I can't even say quantitatively what made it better because I don't really know. But life gets better. You will live and love and laugh and dream and you will find happiness again. And you will be so happy you're living to experience it all. Even the darkest times. Even the stress and the anxiety and the college classes that make you want to rip your hair out and the waitressing experiences that leave you in tears and the triggers that remind you of the darkness that still tries to take over sometimes. Because now that you've faced wishing you were no longer there to experience it all, every day that you do experience it is a gift you never thought you'd be glad to have.

And also, just know this: fiction can save lives. It sure saved mine.

All my best,

Addyson

(P.S.: the book series that saved my sanity and probably my life is just amazing and frankly everyone should go check it out right away and yes, I'm not ashamed to make this a post about mental health awareness and a book promo)

Also, if you're ever experiencing thoughts about ending your life or simply wishing it would end by natural causes, don't hesitate to call 988 immediately. Don't be afraid to get help.

Nope, Not a Phan

 Not sure what it says about me that it takes dumb pins on Pinterest swooning over the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera to come out of my blog hiatus, but here we are.

Ladies, here are just a few little tips to evaluate whether or not the man pursuing you is worth marrying or whether you should, in fact, run as fast as you can to the nearest police station and refuse to leave until the man who wants to be in a relationship with you is locked in the deepest dungeon they can find. 

1. If he sings to you through the walls and teaches you how to sing as well, but refuses to disclose his name, run.

2. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, implies that he is an angel sent from heaven by your dead father when he is in fact a living human being who has never even met your father, run.

3. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, overhears you stating that you think he might BE your dead father and refuses to correct your assumption, run.

4. If he continually harasses your workplace, frightening some of your coworkers into quitting and your boss into fleeing by retiring in another country and selling the company, by pranking people, vandalizing the place, imitating a ghost, and causing numerous people near-death experiences, RUN.

5. If he squats in the basement of your workplace and, instead of pursuing gainful employment, extorts the building owners into paying him a wage through vandalization and murder, RUN.

6. If he makes a sport of murdering your coworkers, especially if they insult him, tell frightening stories about him, or literally just stumble upon him while cleaning the basement, RUN, DO NOT WALK, TO THE NEAREST PERSON WITH A SWORD AND/OR A GUN AND DO NOT LEAVE THAT PERSON UNTIL THE MAN PURSUING YOU HAS BEEN LOCKED UP OR KILLED.

7. If he is fifty and you are eighteen and he has been spying on you through the walls for months, possibly years, and now is pursuing you, perhaps consider that that age gap has all kinds of red flags on it.

8. If he has been spying on you through your walls for months, possibly years, in your dressing room and your bedroom, watching you change, CALL THE POLICE.

9. If he takes you to a secret underground lair alone the first time you've ever met in person while still not knowing his name and he's the only person that can actually take you out of his lair, meaning you're trapped there at his mercy, all I'm saying is, his physical deformities should be the least of your worries.

10. If he catfishes you, do not pursue a relationship with him.

11. If he screeches like an unholy demon and calls you a "lying Delilah" for exposing his catfishing, drop this relationship like you'd drop Jack Dawson into the freezing Atlantic Ocean while you hog the door for yourself.

12. If you feel like you can't tell him that you're interested in someone else and hide your engagement to your childhood best friend because you're afraid for your fiancé's life if your voice teacher finds out you're not interested in him, perhaps consider bringing down a countrywide manhunt on your former voice teacher instead of wondering whether you should have chosen him rather than your sweet fiancé.

13. If his only friend reveals to you that he has built the shah of Persia a literal torture chamber, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

14. If you find out that he so enjoyed torturing people in his torture chamber that he even freaked out the literal shah of Persia for being too sadistic and was kicked out of the country, DON'T JUST CALL THE POLICE, CALL THE ARMY AND THE NAVY AND THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT DOWN ON THIS CREEP.

15. If when a freak accident causes a chandelier to collapse and kill someone in the audience, you're not entirely sure it wasn't engineered by him because he's salty the prima donna got the main female role in the opera instead of you, part of the ensemble, just because he's teaching you and tried to blackmail your bosses into picking you, maybe you should wonder why you had to be reassured he didn't commit that specific murder and look further into how you see his character and how dangerous he is.

16. If he forces you to perform in an opera for him and you have no choice but to do it so you can help your fiancé get him arrested, I don't think a meaningful relationship with him is possible.

17. If he murders your costar and takes his place so he can flirt with you while impersonating another man, grab the nearest gun and shoot him in his deformed face.

18. If he literally strangles your fiancé and threatens to kill your fiancé if you won't agree to run off with him instead, forcing you to choose between a nice, sweet nobleman with a steady paycheck who loves you for who you are and respects you as a person and a deformed sewer goblin who's over thirty years older than you and is a sadistic serial killer, don't feel bad about dumping him. Seriously. He doesn't deserve you, honey.

Via Pinterest

I mean, look at this! Just look at it! Literally strangling a guy to death because he had the audacity to win over his childhood friend and fall in love with her and then object when you kidnap her and try to force her to marry you. Not the mark of a man who would make good husband material. Good husbands don't regularly strangle people.

19. If he fills the basement of your workplace with a ton of gunpowder and threatens to blow up your workplace, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds--especially if he manages to take out several other buildings with the massive pile of gunpowder--if you don't marry him, run and don't look back. Maybe move to Norway, I hear it's beautiful this time of year, all that snow.

NO. NO. No. Just no. Not forcing someone to marry you and not murdering her fiancé because she's just not that into you isn't love. It's not being a despicable human being. Look, you can ship messed up ships because they're messed up and you love reading about or watching the unhealthy dynamics, but don't pretend a ship is healthy when it's not. This isn't healthy. It's messed up. The Phantom of the Opera isn't a good guy. He's a sadistic serial killer that enjoys torturing people, does not hesitate to blackmail and extort to get his way, and no amount of a nice singing voice can sugarcoat the fact that at the end of the musical, he's just finding the one tiny little speck of humanity he had in him by letting Christine and Raoul go, not making some great sacrifice out of his love for Christine. He does not deserve Christine and he sure as Mustafar doesn't deserve someone better than Christine. No. The book was a horror/mystery, not a love triangle. The Phantom is never a realistic option in the book (see the Persian torture chamber stuff and the whole "barrels of gunpowder under the opera house" thing). Let's not pretend Raoul isn't a way better guy than the Phantom (and don't come at me with that dumb Love Never Dies crap, that musical never should have been allowed to exist). Love the messed-up ship if you want, but don't pretend the Phantom is anything more than what he is--that being a dangerous messed-up monster.

Via Pinterest

Via Pinterest

Ladies, choose better. Choose Raoul de Chagny.

Dedicated to my creative writing professor, who, while she always thought Christine should have chosen the Phantom, recognizes that that probably means she has a problem with being attracted to bad boys.