Toxic

“…sometimes you’re the one something it’s happening to and other times you’re the one it’s happening through.” – Maryam Hasnaa

One of these days, I checked my old diaries and blog posts, then I realized that my biggest achievement is not chosen as one of the finalists of World Muslimah Award; obtained scholarship from SYLFF for my Master Degree; contributed in a world-class literature festival; self-published a book; or maintained an Instagram account from zero to 1,000 followers. 

My biggest achievement is… to stay alive. 

I know it sounds shallow at one point, as I do believe that every single person in this planet has his/her own problem. But often, right at the time it came to you like a storm, you just… tired of life. 

This year is another year that I have to keep telling myself that everything is going to be okay. If it is not happening today, it will happen tomorrow. But ‘that’ tomorrow is not coming (yet), even when there are only four months left in 2019. 

I became paranoid, as if life wouldn’t let me smiling all day long. If I start a day smiling, there will be something occurred in the afternoon or right before I sleep. If I sleep smiling, I will have a nightmare. Life has crushed me like an avocado in a juicer. Shapeless, almost heartless.

Day by day, I started feeling numb. I act recklessly, because I think at the end of the day nobody is safe enough from anything bad. I wish I could say that I still believe in karma, but I know karma doesn’t always work the way we want to.  

I smiled, I laughed, I frowned, I cried… but deep in my heart I know those emotions are not make sense. I was happy for the ‘wrong’ reasons, and I was sad for the ‘right’ reasons. From time to time, I feel like my soul is leaving my body and I am watching it from afar, make fun of things I do. ‘Look, she is doing something stupid again. What a naïve girl!’ Thereafter a new day arrived, and I wait what kind of stupidity or craziness I will do (or repeat). 

And I feel like I lost the last pieces of me, the one that usually I count on to – it just simply torn apart.

I am damaged.

I am useless.

My motivation just evaporated among the people I met and the privilege they have and their success stories and how life seems very easy for them and how life seems very very very difficult for me. Period. No matter how many times I try to pick myself up, I ended up believing that… 

I must be the unluckiest person in the world. 

Only when I am sober enough, I can recollect the puzzles and I became aware that sometimes it is not just about myself. As the quote above said, life has been taught me so much I become confused on which one is the lesson I have to absorb on my own and which one is not actually for me – but for people around me.

What happened for the last two weeks is definitely another new beginning for me. At first, it seems like there is no solutions so I intensified the frequency of talking to myself. What do I want? What do I don’t want? Revealing the problems to my friends were also challenging and I pick them carefully because I need someone who knows the background of the story. 

So I said to my best friends, I am not going back to Surabaya. After leaving the city in the end of 2014, I have sworn to never look back. There is no way that I would coming back to that kind of life. I deserve to [not only be happier] but also accepting the consequences of my choice. And, I wouldn’t let this toxic person who has suppressed me for more than 23 years – to take an ‘advantage’ of getting my help again and again. It is not a revenge, it is self-love, a thing that I have been learning laboriously and costed me a lifetime. I wouldn’t harm my future by going down that road again, the one that worth my sanity. 

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, next month, or next year – but I know one thing for sure, to live with her under the same roof – again – will demolish what I am trying to build. And I know I don’t want to risk – even the hard life I am having which is for me, is still good enough than what she can offer. Worse, both of us know she doesn’t have anything to offer.

I have been always trying so hard – or maybe too hard – to be a good daughter for her. And all of my unanswerable questions to her returning to me, pinching me all over my body, and confiscating my mental health. I should have let her go years ago. 

And I am finally doing it today. 

Good bye,

Dita