Why I must write

The want to harm myself hits me in waves throughout the day, as I try and drift into the gentle rhythm of the book I am reading, I jolt. At first I don’t understand why my body clenched - but then I realise it’s a wish to stab myself in the breastplate has made my whole body shudder. I ball my hand into a fist and make jagged movements, imagining a dagger pumping into my chest. My body is tense and my temples clear and sharp with the pain. I hear my own breathing, inconstant and forcing air out in panicked, ragged pumps. 

I wonder how long I’ve felt like this today, how many hours this has continued and how many more I can bear before I pick up a blade, before the dark waves pull me under completely and I lose the grasp of my self control completely. How much further before the natural need to protect my own life is torn apart under the weight of this urgent and desperate competing need to silence the hatred I feel for myself. I cradle my head in my hands, foetal and feeble until again I feel my fist tighten and the waves start again. 

I walk the streets of Muswell Hill wanting to ask frailer, older people than I am; ‘How do you continue?’, ‘How do you go on like this, every day?’ Because what never seemed like a question at all before, suddenly seems unanswerable and inescapable. I don’t know the answer any more. 

I feel like there’s a fist round my heart, it feels squeezed, and the same squeezing feeling is inside my head. Whilst my arms and legs need to be exhausted, there are too full of energy and adrenaline, it is as if they are not my own, but the legs of a seven year old at a kids party, aching to skip and carry me away from myself. They shake and shudder and ache.