House on Fire

Oct 10, 2016

4 min read

First off I want to say that I wrote this a little over a year ago.

I knew I’d want to share it at some point, but I didn’t know when.

I’m glad I’m not in the same place I was September 7th and I more fully

understand now what I wrote on October 13th.

September 7, 2015

So there’s a song, it’s called, “ You Were A House on Fire”.

It talks about pain.

Pain is a funny thing. Everyone has it. Everyone is stressing about something, anxious about something, angry, jealous, afraid of something.

So everyone has it, but no one wants to talk about it. Pain is the elephant in the room that we’re all trying to see over, around, and under. Talking about it? Facing it head on? Staring it right in the eyes? No one does that.

Pain is such a beast.

When you look long enough into that darkness, eventually it looks back.

But it doesn’t just look. It covers your hands in your heavy shame, silences your voice with quivers, and even causes you to look down, because looking up is a lie.

Your pain would have you suffocated and bound inside of it.

Silent, tortured, trapped.

So I think we’re all these houses on fire. We’ve had our insides ripped out, burned down, deserted.

I definitely am. “Pain jumping from walls”.

Recently I hit rock bottom.

I was going to kill myself. I wrote something for the people I was leaving behind but I also wanted something where they could see me.

So I made a video…but in the process of making the video I had to realize that what I was doing would hurt someone very deeply. I don’t want to hurt anyone…I’m just tired of being in pain.

Right this second… I feel the exact same way.

I wish I was dead.

A part of me wants to grab the bottle of oxycodone in my computer bag and just do it.

I just paused and thought about the likelihood of being able to do it and no one finding me….

I can’t promise this won’t be published from beyond the grave. I don’t even know if I can keep writing….

death sounds so appealing to me right now…

But here I am. Still writing.

As I was reading this over and got to this point I became more and more engrossed in the feelings of depression.

But that’s what depression does. It sinks you into itself. You’ve no way of getting away from it and the more you struggle, the more stuck you are. Even the idea of getting out from underneath this suffocating weight is drenched in darkness.

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October 13, 2015

So, houses on fire.

We all are… on fire I mean. And if you don’t know that or haven’t had the audacity to be honest with yourself and admit it…then I don’t know if you’re ready to read the next bit.

Someone denying the pain that they definitely have. Yeah, the person who right now is scoffing at this and compartmentalizing their pain and saying that it isn’t that bad and other people have it worse??? You’re hiding your own pain from yourself. And it isn’t helping you.

It may make you feel like you have some sort of super power to be dying on the inside but look okay on the outside. But all you’re doing is alienating yourself and jumping headfirst into your denial adorned zip-loc bag you’ve placed over your head.

You’ll suffocate alright. But it won’t be because of anyone else. It’ll be because you made that choice for yourself and for everyone else to lose you to pain.

But let me let you in on something that you may not know; something that I’m still figuring out.

Everyone is in pain. Constantly.

Everyone feels inadequate. Everyone feels unloved.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who would tell you that they feel loved too much and they really need people to stop encouraging them.

It sounds ridiculous, right? That’s because it is.

We are all houses on fire. Constantly.

We may burn in different ways, form different patterns with the ashes, and people may come to steal pieces of us for themselves; but we’re burning together.

We’re never burning alone.

So, recently when I was returning to Tallahassee from a trip to see friends, I took all the back roads and found a house that was burned, ripped apart, there was a smashed car behind it, and a pile of pieces of it that had been removed. I saw it as I was going down a state road. I turned around as soon as I could and went back. I stopped the car next to the sign that said, “NO TRESPASSING”.