Half Dead

I never thought I would be alive, let alone survive. I grew up not understanding what mental health was. As a child, I felt self-conscious about the space that I took up. I had countless nightmares focused on death. These concepts were much too complicated for my feeble mind to comprehend. I was ten years old after all-in the prime of my life. I didn't understand what this pain was. "Why are you sad," an elderly woman asked while I sat on the bench in a shoe store. I was around twelve years old. My mother and two sisters were browsing shoes on the adjacent aisle. I ignored the woman and forced a smile at her. After all, my mother told me to never talk to strangers. I wasn't going to be subjected to a lecture for disobeying her. The truth is that I didn't understand why I was sad. On the outside, I had my mask on. The mask that I wore to school and in public places. I was pretty good at hiding my true feelings. Not on this day. I felt solemn. I couldn't muster up a smile to prove to that woman that I was ok. My mother overheard the woman and said something to assure her that I was alright. Was I? I didn't know how to communicate what I was feeling. There was a familiar empty feeling that I couldn't shake off. I was comfortable with it, but I wondered if there was some piece missing. I felt like one of those thousand-piece puzzles with one piece hiding in the corner. I couldn't quite reach that piece, but I knew it was there. I knew it was that piece that would give me the much-needed serotonin to make me all better.

By the time I arrived in high school, I started to ignore questions about my mood and began to obsess over my body. My body was literally dripping from the seams of my school uniform. I felt as if my flabs were like waterfalls that couldn't be contained by my clothes. I started covering up with dark-colored jackets to give a slimming effect. My body also started being the topic of conversation in my family. "I never wanted fat children," my mom told me in one of her seemingly innocent lectures about the ways that my body flows. I felt numb. I was used to her criticizing my appearance. I never thought she would resent what I had become. Part of me didn't care. I wanted to adhere to the strong black woman archetype so bad. I wanted to be superwoman, but I couldn't. I was too busy working out a plan on how to kill myself. I couldn't fit in no matter how hard I tried. Covering up felt like I was hiding my battered body from the world. The scabs from my body were just falling off with nowhere to go. I knew that if I killed myself that I would be blamed for killing myself rather than the state of mind that got me here. I had to find something to soothe myself. I always loved food. How ironic it is to medicate with food for being called fat. As a result of poverty, I couldn't medicate with food until I was in college in 2013. I ordered out nearly every night from Dominos to soothe my pain. Each slice of pizza that I ate made me feel guilty. I kept having flashbacks to that bathroom floor back at my mom's house, where I poured my tears into the toilet and attempted to flush them away. I couldn't flush this down. I was drowning. I felt trapped between my dorm room's four walls.

As the years went by, I kept feeling this way—a seemingly sick to my stomach kind of feeling. It finally all came together in 2019. I had my first experience with dry heaving. I was sitting in my apartment trying to prepare for a presentation. I started to feel...