My Summer Vacation (Patreon)

Hi this is Joey

I know it has been a long time since we spoke. Longer still, since I produced “writing.” I’ve been missing my shifts down in the word mines. I still know all the words I knew before, but a few years ago something broke inside me, which sounds poetic I guess. But something BROKE inside me.

Things didn’t work properly. I began waking up in the night and staring at myself in the mirror, like I was outside of myself. “Outside of myself” is painful to write because it is so cliche, but it is a struggle to find words for the bewildering. How about, I began waking in the middle of the night, staring at myself in the mirror for hours. That behaviour… evolved in an unpleasant direction. I have a scar down my face from one of those nights, another from another night. I have a deep scar that I’ll always have and not know why. That was the night when the pain didn’t give me back control, and I couldn’t stop. That I walked barefoot to the hospital. No Mask, no shoes. Nothing made sense, and it didn’t feel like it had to. But the people around me were scared, and so I tried to find help.

Help, by the way, is the queen of hide and seek.

Drugs did stop the mirrors though - until one night they didn’t anymore. But instead of doing what I thought my body was going to do without me, it put down the medical tape and walked to my brother’s room. I opened and I closed my mouth. Nothing. My body picked up a pen and wrote.

“I love you. I am scared of razors. I am scared. I cannot talk and don’t know why. Can you drive me to the hospital. I understand they are no help. But even the waiting room is safer than here.”

From handing my brother that note until my fifth night in the Psychiatric inpatient ward, I couldn’t speak a word. It was a horrible place, and My next letter will be about that, but in the end, things made more sense. Apparently there is a dissociative disorder called conversion disorder. In some patients it can cause temporary blindness or deafness. In me it causes muteness. It is triggered in high anxiety situations, they told me. And they told me I have an extreme anxiety disorder as well.

I never used to. I used to throw myself into the world. I used to eat a handful of pills and climb up in rooftops downtown. I would write like I was laughing on the page. It was a pleasure. I wrote to make myself laugh. To shock. To make someone I’ve never met feel seen. I wrote to burn down police stations. To enter the Invisible College. Good and bad reasons. But I wrote. And danced in bars. And drank, and took pills. And went home with strangers. And fell in love. The kind of love I still feel every time I talk with them. Love doesn’t have have to last forever to be real, I heard somewhere. I did a pretty good job self medicating for a long time, so when I stopped drinking, when I stopped pills, I took away the unhealthy safety net I had made for myself. When I stopped A Softer World, I took away my concrete totem of self worth. My reason.

So, I still know all the same words I knew before. But I don’t think I’m the exact same Joey. I don’t understand why anyone would care what I have to write. I’ve thought this forever now. Malagash is the only book I understand. I love the others, but they feel like a son wrote them, and he shows some promise. But boy is he full of himself.

A month ago I lost the ability to speak again, this time in response to a different type of crisis. It lasted a week. It was scary, but then it was… peaceful? It was calm and safe to not talk. I wanted to stay there forever.

I’m going to write letters. That’s how I’ll start. Letters. To you. To me. I am still slowly working on the follow-up to Malagash, but I want it to be a sad and strong book and so I write a bit, when I believe it. When I can’t, I don’t. I have no promises of when I will post those chapters. But in the meantime let’s you and I be pen pals.

I really, really hope you are burning down police stations in your heart.

Joey