Ship of Emptiness

Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?

Hopefully, at the very least, that question brings a smile to your face.

WandaVision helped bring the theory to a more central focus in the pop culture world. And really, there are thousands of discussions that can be had.

But if we think about it, it’s really intriguing, isn’t it?

Our bodies, our cells, they regenerate and replace themselves every few months and the reality of science is that by the time I’ve finished writing this (because I take forever, I sit and stew on self-hatred and the perfect words, and it could be literally years before I finally finish this stupid thing) who knows how many times you’ll have, quite literally, become a new person?

It’s comforting in a sense.

Because nothing should ever remain stagnant. It’s boring, honestly.

And, ask anyone who knows me, I’m anything but boring.

Life with me is a rollercoaster that you very likely didn’t sign up for. You didn’t board this train willingly but to hell if you’re not here now and being dragged alongside my ramblings and self-deprecating jokes that probably aren’t funny but I laugh anyway because if I make fun of myself before you can, maybe it’ll hurt me less.

I’m young.

I’ve been told this my entire life and it irritates me to no end just how condescending it always is, but it’s true.

In all truth, I am young. For our times.

Flash back a few hundred years and I’m ancient. (I’m making a note here that I originally, accidentally, typed anxiety, so that shows where I’m at I guess)

Flash back another few hundred years, and I’m once again just a tiny baby in the eyes of people who lived up to five or six hundred years.

But here, in the 21st century, I’m young.

A lot of life left to experience (I hope).

But thinking back over the short span of time I've been alive, I've changed no less than a dozen times.

My personality, my desires, my dreams, they’ve changed an innumerable amount.

So have my struggles and anxieties and fears.

As a child, I had undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety, depression, adjustment disorder… I had a lot of issues.

My undiagnosed ADHD heightened my anxiety and depression. Leading to severe, and I mean severe, anxiety attacks. A small child really can’t understand the full range of emotion that anxiety attacks bring.

So they manifested in meltdowns and tantrums. Screaming and crying and stomping my feet and yelling and throwing things until my parents had had enough and sent me to bed early with no supper.

Alone with my thoughts, still screaming and overcome with so many emotions and feelings and pain and anguish but trying to suppress them all because now I feared punishment if I kept causing trouble.

I remember clearly, during one of my many meltdowns while I sat alone in the dark on my bed, I remember distinctly wondering if I would actually be missed if I suffocated myself with a pillow.

I wondered what it would feel like to die.

I can’t have been older than eight or nine years old.

But I thought these things.

I thought about death.

Wished for it.

I would pray that God would kill me. Pray that I would fall asleep and not wake up.

As I grew up, those desires never left. But they felt different.

I started to grow out of the tantrums, as my family and I called them, but in reality, they just took on a different form.

My ship was simply rebuilt.

But make no mistake, it wasn’t rebuilt well.

It was slapped together with no goal in mind other than to survive and keep going.

There were cracks and missing boards, and leaks.

But I still kept going.

The tantrums grew into different types of anxieties that grew over time as I learned that those outbursts weren’t well-received and I learned to suppress and shove down those strong emotions until it became impossible and I exploded in a rage of fear and anger and desperation that resulted in me lying on my bed staring up at the ceiling while my mom sat at the end of my bed and asked over and over what was wrong while I screamed over and over in response that I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what was wrong.

All I knew was that I was filled with too many emotions to process. And I barely even knew that.

All I really knew was that I was angry.

My chest was filled with rage and hatred towards anything and everything and I didn’t understand anything except that I hurt and I wanted others to hurt too.

I was miserable and scared and I had no idea what to do about it.

I just wanted to escape the intense emotions that kept bubbling up in my chest and made it impossible to breathe.

I was told over and over to just let things go, to not be so sensitive.

And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t let things go.

I tried with everything in me to not let things get to me, to grow thicker skin, but nothing worked and so I worked to make it seem like things didn’t get to me. To try to at least act like I was fine.

My acting was bad.

And in those efforts, I just made myself more miserable and continued bottling things up until I couldn’t any longer and I exploded.

The explosions got smaller over time. I started to, I thought, deal with things as they came.

But really, I just got better at suppressing the explosions.

Explosions were bad and they got bad reactions, so don’t do those.

They might get you in trouble.

So I tried to keep them at bay until one night on the way home from a bible study, I shattered.

After a month of being home with my parents over winter break and feeling nothing but dread over the upcoming semester. Exhausted and just completely burned out at the thought of going to any class or doing any school work.

After less than a week of being back in the classroom and already feeling like I was a semester behind.

After watching the boy I had essentially fallen in love with flirt with another girl who was oblivious to what had happened, just like everyone else who knew us. The boy who I let do things to me that no other had done. The boy who, after doing those things for weeks told me that I was nothing more than a friend to him. The boy who, after saying I would never be more than a friend, continued to do those things to me. The boy who, even after all of that, I let do those things to me because in my broken mind that meant I was desirable and wanted and special but the quiet part in the back of my mind continued to wonder why I wasn’t good enough for anything beyond being a warm body in his bed. The boy who, when I needed someone, even just a friend, left me alone in the water to drown.

I exploded.

If you’ve ever seen a shipwreck, you’ll know it isn’t pretty or slow. It’s fast.

And I didn't sink slowly.

I spun and spiraled and screamed and wailed and begged God to understand why I needed to end my own life because everything inside me hurt so badly and I had been enduring for so long and I was so tired and scared and if life was going to feel like that forever, then what was even the point?

I called my mother and I cried. And I begged her to understand that I loved her and didn’t want to hurt her but I had to make the pain stop. To make the parts of me that told me I was worthless and weak and unworthy of love stop.

The parts of me that believed because I hadn’t let things go, that I couldn’t let things go even when I tried my hardest, that meant I was weak and because my best wasn’t good enough I was better off dead.

To make that pain stop.

To let me rest forever.

To escape the endless feeling of hopelessness and worthlessness.

My mother disagreed.

She didn’t understand, which, ironically, is understandable.

She was three hours away from her rambling daughter who was begging her to understand why she was going to go home and kill herself.

I doubt anyone would be agreeable at that.

But my ship was on fire, it was burning and sinking and taking every piece of my sanity with it.

I needed to escape the flames, and the only way to do that was to drown in the deep that was consuming my ship.

And I stood on the deck holding a torch, desperately trying to discern how in the world I set this fire.

If I had to count the number of times my ship has burned, how many times I’ve rebuilt this damned thing around me, I’m going to be honest and say I couldn’t.

The ruins of the ships that have sunk with me sit at the bottom of the abyss I’ve fallen into so many times, waiting for me to find them when I descend again.

And I will.

Someday, I’ll return and stare my failures in the eye like a cracked mirror.

And I’ll crumble in defeat, in self-hatred.

And then I’ll drag myself back out, take the pieces of scrap that remain, and I’ll rebuild.

And then, I’ll become a different person. A newer person. Someone stronger, even if only just.

But I’ll break again.

Am I myself?

But what is it that makes me me?

Others will say it’s my smile, my laughter, my eyes shining when I’m telling a stupid joke, the way I brighten when I’m truly happy.

I’ve always only seen the anxiety, the depression, the self-hatred. The fear and the loathing and the tears. The weakness.

I see the cracks in the bow and the water that rushes in at all hours of the day.

The intrusive thoughts that tell me the world is better off without me.

The intrusive thoughts that tell me putting a pistol in my mouth and pulling the trigger would be the best service I could give.

The shame at allowing myself to even think those thoughts.

Pure, unadulterated self-hatred that burns slowly and consistently in the back of my mind.

Recently, I realized something about myself.

Someone told me that I was a good person.

And it was like a cannonball that ripped through the supports of my ship and I was left spiraling again.

I’m still sinking.

I try, with every fiber of my being, every single day, to be a good person.

To be someone who people enjoy being around.

To be someone who doesn’t hurt others intentionally.

To spare other people the pain and rejection that I’ve felt my entire life.

But even with all of that, with every single cell of my body, I don’t believe that I’m a good person.

And with that, I saw that the cannonball came from my own defenses.

Aimed inward because I can’t possibly be a good person.

I’m too flawed.

Too imperfect.

I’ve hurt too many people and I’ve done too many bad things to ever be a good person.

I carry too many grudges and I dislike too many people and I see the worst in people and I struggle too much to be a good person.

I can’t remember the last time I talked to God and the anger and bitterness in my heart is born from the guilt of knowing I could be doing better but here I am not even trying.

My ship is too broken, too cracked, too me for me to ever be considered anything more than a horrible, useless, waste of space.

A ship not worth fixing.

Not worth guiding.

Not worth saving.

Not worth the air feeding the fire that’s consuming me.

But here I am.

Breathing.

Or at least trying to.

The weight on my chest feels too heavy and the world around me seems too blurry and I can’t for the life of me let go of this damned torch that I used to start this fire to begin with.

The torch contains all of my self-doubts, self-hatred. The flaws I pull out and stare at every single day to remind myself that I’ll never be good enough.

The memories of the people who told me, even indirectly, that those flaws made me unworthy of love.

My fears and hatred and doubts and wants and desires and desperation and absolute anguish that weigh me down and try to drag me to the depths of this abyss within my own mind.

And all too often, I let them.

In fact, I go willingly.

You see, the entire theory of the Ship of Theseus is that, over time, as you replace boards and different pieces of a ship, eventually, you’ve replaced every single piece of it and now what remains?

Is it the original ship?

Is it still the Ship of Theseus?

Am I still me?

I think the answer is different for everyone.

But, the simple answer seems like a no-brainer.

Of course I’m still me.

But who is me?

Who am I?

Because over time, when I repaired my ship, I used the pieces that remained and the pieces offered. The pieces weakened by the harsh words of others.

I let the criticisms and the insults and the hatred seep into the repaired wood like gasoline so that when I took my torch to them, they gleefully burst into flames without a bit of resistance.

I surrounded myself for years, with the people who I thought would build me up, basing so much of my self-worth on what they saw.

That it’s too deeply ingrained in me, too far rotten and weak, to accept the truths that people try to tell me now.

That I am a good person.

That trying is the best I can do and that sometimes surviving is more than enough because at least I’m still here.

I relied on others, shaped myself into a ship that could be easily burned, because I believed that people would stay.

That the people I so desperately craved approval from would see what I built for them - that I crafted my ship painstakingly to fit their wants and desires with the pieces they gave me and told me would work - that they would see all of that and they would stay and make me feel whole.

I built my ship, rebuilding and repairing, with the fragments of others’ words and criticisms. Their expectations of who I should be. I crafted myself around the gaps and mismatches, believing that it would all be fine because they would fill the empty spaces once I was done.

But in the end, I was left with hollow voids.

Because I have to be the one to make myself whole.

Asking for help is okay but expecting them to build it for me, to make me who I need to be, will always leave me empty and broken and half-finished.

You can’t build your ship for others. To carry others forward.

You have to build your ship to carry you forward.

To keep you from drowning.

But I’ve spent so long trying to keep others afloat, hoping that they would do the same for me, building myself with the pieces they gave me instead of creating them for myself, that I have no idea where to start anymore. Where do I start building when I have no pieces? No fragments? Nothing from others?

How can I possibly create my own ship?