I Am Talking To A Ghost

I still have your note cards laying on my shelf. I dust around them. The trunk of my car still has a whole box full of your things that I haven’t touched since I tried to drag you out of that rented house.

You were so stubborn.

I was wiping down my counters the other day and I noticed this one spot where you had cut into the linoleum one day when I was trying to distract you from your depression with baking. You left 20 minutes later. I didn’t try to stop you. You wanted to be alone.

I didn’t. I still don’t.

I imagine this silent room now filled with your laughter, and I picture how much better it would be.
I would have hugged you more.
I would have understood how hard it was for you. Had I only been in your shoes. Had I have realized your pain. I have yet to throw away that candle you bought me three weeks before. Or that bottle of wine.
I should have hugged you more.
Sometimes I regret everything. Other times I think it wasn’t that bad. It’s undoable. It’s impossible to return to that place. And that’s when the sadness sets in. Knowing nothing will ever be able to change things.
Why does it have to always be so hard without you?
Why didn’t I realize that then. You probably didn’t know this, but I loved you. With all my heart. I was scared to confront you. I was scared to lose you because I was scared you would get mad. That if I said you needed to get control of your depression meds, that you needed to really talk to someone and open up, that you needed to look at the world and say ‘fuck you world you don’t even know the best me yet, just wait, I’ll show you’, but you never did do that.

You gave up. You made everyone else feel the way you did. Hopeless.

All my hope disappeared the moment I last held your hand, cried cheek to cheek with you, kissed your face, hugged you, and told you I would love you yesterday, today and tomorrow. My hope disappeared that morning I woke up knowing you’d never talk to me again. Getting that text saying you had passed away two hours after I finally fell asleep. My best friend had died. I miss you everyday. Every day. No day is any easier.

They all lied. They said the pain would fade. That it would all be alright. They lied.
I still need you and long for your advice and kind words. You were the best friend anyone could ask for. I grew up with you. We taught each other everything, not always good things, but everything. You taught me to let my hair down throw my hands in the air and let my worries go. I have had one hell of a time even attempting that in the past year and a half. I have been cautious. I have been scared. I have been anything but the person you would have thought I would have become.
You used to always say ‘Abby I wish I was as strong as you’ and I used to laugh…I didn’t believe I was strong.
Looking back on it, me now compared to me then, you were right I was strong. I was really strong. I don’t know if that girl died with you or if she just went into hiding but I sure as hell wish you were here to tell me. I do miss you. I hope you know that.

The Two Kinds Of Life We All Live For

We’ve read too many things telling us how to live our lives, who to listen to, and what matters most. It doesn’t take an epiphany, or a couple of decades (though that may help) to realize the things that have dawned on everyone who has come and gone actually make sense.

There are two kinds of life.

The first kind is our daily life. We wake up, bathe, make our coffee, eat breakfast, drive, roll down the window, light that first cigarette, and head on to face the inevitable of everyday: the art of constant irregularities we all seem to have mastered. That car you cut off yesterday is probably not the same car you just cut off a while ago. Constantly, cutting people off may be your thing, but who you affect around you will not seem to ever be the same unit. This rolls on to your office, your clients, your break times, and everything else.

The people in your life, the things you love doing, your dog, your favorite pen and planner, and everything else are all a part of your first kind of life. Your dreams, your aspirations, your obligations as a sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, a wife… They’re all in this side of that undefined venn diagram.
Who you are and were are all within this border.
The second kind of life is the life we didn’t consciously know existed. It’s the life that takes over us when we first experience the adrenaline rush of surfing, the unexplainable joy of driving 180 kilometers per hour, the pride that seeps in when we win, the exhilarating fulfillment of accomplishment, the inextinguishable fire of the first kiss. This kind of life is like the previous one on steroids. In this life, we’re indispensable, invincible, everlasting and ablaze. This is the life everyone wants to chase, get hooked on, and be lulled in.
After all, living is incomplete without both lives.
This second kind of life however, is the same kind of life that we lose in despair when we’re lost, left, and unsure. Unfortunately so, the source of the moments for the second kind of life is as rare as it being genuine. There are no halves, no sort-ofs, no maybes. It’s either perfect or unreal.
“You should see how she is… It’s as if life has been suck out of her.”
After all, living is incomplete without both lives.
This is the reason why everyone says the same thing when we lose something vital for our souls…
The loss of the second kind is the reason why we all will never be the same again.

Gone Girl? Gone, Self-Identity: Confession Of A Former Cool Girl

With the movie adaptation of Gone Girl now out, the infamous “Cool Girl” passage is making its rounds again online, this time garnering as much attention as the movie itself.
For those not familiar with the passage, one of the main characters completely deconstructs what many guys consider the ultimate woman, and what many women consider the ultimate compliment (aka “the Cool Girl”). The Cool Girl is not like other girls; the Cool Girl is one of the guys. On top of being extraordinarily (and effortlessly) hot, she downs beers, shouts at football games, and – most importantly – never, ever gets upset or angry or needy.

But the problem is that this woman doesn’t actually exist. She is fiction, created by male writers and then emulated by females anxious to be loved and accepted.

I should know, because I was one.

I used to love saying I was “not like other girls.” I loved pointing out how rough and tumble I was, or how much I loved football and hockey and MMA. I molded myself to fit the occasion and agreed with whatever the guys were saying. I acted like I saw no need for makeup (even though I was wearing some) or fashion (even though I agonized over what I’d wear). I considered myself the “perfect girlfriend”, not because I was caring or empathetic, but because I swore I’d never get upset, never show signs of neediness, and certainly never say the L word first, even if the love I felt was slowly consuming me alive.

To be fair, many of those things are actually authentic to who I am. I grew up a bit of a tomboy and I have a genuine passion for the athletic world. But everything else was a façade, including the things I didn’t even realize were façades.
For the longest time, I didn’t think it was an act to never, ever show any type of emotion to a boyfriend if it would in any way inconvenience him. Somehow, without ever questioning it, I would allow myself to suffer in order to be the “low-maintenance girlfriend” every guy aspires to get. The same way I would, without ever questioning it, disregarded feminism and agreed that girls needed to stop being so “girly”. I regurgitated what I heard and internalized a bit of that normalized misogyny, never once recognizing that I was betraying my own gender and, in turn, myself.

The frightening part was that, the older I got, the more I started to wake up to my Cool Girl shtick — and the more I feared deviating from it. At that point, I had seen guys in my life conveniently leave just as cracks were starting to appear in the veneer and a few moments of genuine emotion had crept out. Never mind the part where these guys were already treating me terribly, even with me pretending to be low-maintenance; instead, I’d focus on how I must’ve ruined everything by being so Uncool.

What could I do next time? How could I be a better Cool Girl for the next guy? Maybe if I agree with whatever is being said more often. Maybe if I listen more to his qualms without ever saying anything about me. Maybe if I were more at his beck and call. Maybe if I don’t show any disappointment, even if the next guy cancels plans on me last minute and for no reason. Maybe then I’ll finally get that love and acceptance I’ve been desperate for.
“Yeah, sure, I’m perfectly okay that you want to keep this casual. Of course it doesn’t bother me that you canceled our date for Valentine’s Day because you’re hungover. No, no, no, you see, I’m not like other girls. I’m low-maintenance. I’m like one of the guys. I’m the Cool Girl.”
I even attempted to be the Cool Girl when I first met my husband. At that point, I was so used to feigning nonchalance that I had forgotten what it was like to be unguarded. I agreed with everything and never made plans that were more than a week out. Then, when we were three or four months into our relationship, the first crack in the veneer showed. I said something about my mother, and he stopped what he was doing to come over to me. When I asked him why he was giving me all of his attention, he said, “Because there’s pain in your voice when you talk about your mom and I wanted to be there for you.”

Even then, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept waiting for the part where revealing even the slightest hint of my “issues” would become all the proof he needed that I was not the desirable Cool Girl of his dreams.

I would lie and hide truths in the beginning of our relationship, telling him things I thought he wanted to hear, because I was worried that the truth would scare him off. Ironically, I had to become comfortable with my Uncool Girl self in order for our relationship to last.

The hardest thing for me to accept was that, in many ways, I was the opposite of the Cool Girl. Before I even knew what a Cool Girl was, I hated myself for having emotions and succumbing to societal pressures. I berated myself every time I snuggled in without the guy initiating it first. I criticized myself every time I checked my appearance in a reflective surface and hear a guy friend make a joke about it. I would accidentally deviate from Cool Girl status and grimace, waiting for the guy to call me needy or high-maintenance and leave me for an actual Cool Girl.
Here’s the thing the indie movie producers and TV show writers don’t tell you: you cannot truly love yourself if you are, consciously or unconsciously, chasing after Cool Girl status. When you are chasing after qualities that you do not possess (but qualities you think a guy would want), you have decided on some level that you just don’t cut it. You feel a need to put on this song and dance, because you feel like the real you doesn’t deserve love.
But the concept of the Cool Girl is so pervasive that sometimes you don’t even realize you’re doing it. You grow up watching movie after movie, TV show after TV show, where female characters are essentially props to further the guys’ story. You are told in not-so-subtle terms that this is what guys find attractive, and you hear the men around you wholeheartedly agree. You’re surrounded by sayings like, “keep a man,” or “find a husband,” and you process it without even being aware of it. You go into the dating world hoping to be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl or the Hot Girl from Afar, but never, ever, You.
You grow up where terms like “daddy issues” is said with derision, saved for broken Uncool Girls, forgetting that everyone has demons to overcome. Because you’ve seen that TV show; you know that the character with “daddy issues” is the crazy one, the opposite of the Cool Girl. You go out, confusing healthy, supportive relationships with pretending nothing is ever wrong, never once aware that what you’re doing is only going to harm you in the end.
It has been mentioned that the Cool Girl façade eventually fades from every woman. Perhaps it is because we grow a little more confident in ourselves with time; perhaps it just gets so exhausting that we drop everything that isn’t 100% authentic to us. Perhaps, consciously or not, we experience enough of the real world that we inevitably move past these movie and TV ideals.
And maybe it is just a phase; something that we turn to, consciously or unconsciously, when we’re still trying to figure out who we are. A place to retreat when we’re at our most vulnerable. The proverbial cheat sheet for a rigged and unfair test.
Some look down on the Cool Girl, the same way the Cool Girl looks down on “all the other girls”. But I think that’s the wrong way of going about it. Instead, we need to recognize just how easy it is to fall into the Cool Girl trap, and what it says about our culture that this archetype is so prevalent and so powerful. Perhaps it’s time to call out writers who veer back to this overused trope. Perhaps we can focus all that energy we once used to be the Cool Girl – or to hate her – and channel it towards a new definition of “cool” for women.

What Would The World Be Like If Obituaries Started Saying, ‘Lost Their Battle With Addiction’?

I’m going to hate that this is my opening paragraph and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But, for the sake of starting this, let’s just get it over with: another person from my hometown recently died from a drug overdose.

There was no big overlap in our lives. He graduated from our high school four years before I did. I didn’t know his family and he was not part of the same groups as me. But it didn’t really matter. My heart hurt for his family. My heart hurt for his friends and my heart hurt for his life cut short. My heart hurt in a way that would make people accuse me of being unnecessarily sensitive. I was holding back tears for someone I had never met. I was mourning a face I was seeing for the first time in an obituary.

But there was something that caught my eye. For the first time in my life – for the first obituary in an absurdly long list of obituaries that I’ve read – I read that he had died, “after a well-fought battle with addiction.”
He died after a well-fought battle with addiction. A battle with addiction. I’ve lost count of the number of obituaries I’ve read where the person had died from something addiction-related. This was the first time I had ever seen that kind of phrasing.
What if this approach to describing an addiction-related death were the rule, not the exception? What would happen if we dropped the euphemisms – or if we stopped omitting the cause of death entirely, afraid that people wouldn’t show sympathy if they knew the truth?
What if we labeled these overdose deaths what they actually are: a lost battle with addiction?

I know I’ve gone on spiels like this before. After Robin Williams’s passing, I said that we needed to start seeing suicide as a lost battle with depression. And, while I’ll be the first to admit that the phrase “lost their battle” is problematic (making it sound like the onus was on the patient to “beat” it, or that they would’ve been guaranteed a win if they had just fought harder), to phrase that kind of death as a lost battle is lightyears better than what we have right now.

What would happen if we stopped acting like addicts got what they deserve? What would happen if we finally let go out some seriously outdated views on things like addiction and finally looked at them the way they are supposed to be looked at?
We still have such specific attitudes and value judgments about addiction. We scroll past the parts about genetic predispositions (which accounts for over half of all addictions cases) and past the parts about neurological rewiring. We deliberately turn our backs on the reality of the situation. Instead, we look at the full spectrum of diseases and label people the victim in one, but a perpetrator in the other.
Some are even hesitant to call addiction a disease in the first place.
It reminds me of a Mitch Hedburg joke: Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only disease you can get yelled at for. While every disease will have it’s own varying shades and layers to it – and while every patient will react to their individual illness in different ways – the fact remains that the tone shifts when you find out someone is struggling with addiction. Dammit Otto, you’re an alcoholic. Dammit Otto, you have lupus.

Ironically, Mitch Hedburg would lose his own battle in 2005.

So let’s get back to my opening paragraph. What feeling does, “He died of an overdose” usually elicit? Maybe we’re sad. Maybe we’re angry. Maybe we think he had it coming. Either way, we get a very set image in our head: he took too many drugs, his body couldn’t handle it, and he died because of it. We gloss over a history of addiction and focus on one specific action, as if he carelessly went bungee jumping without checking the cord and hit the ground instead.

Dammit Otto, you did this to yourself.
We tiptoe around the subject. We use euphemisms. We omit and lie with the truth. She died in her sleep – meaning she was unconscious on her bed when she died. And all this does is cement a lot of old and outdated attitudes. It keeps the taboo and the stigma preserved, making it just that much harder to solve a very real problem.
Some argue that, had we recognized addiction as a disease from the very beginning, we’d be upwards of 40 years ahead in research and treatment. Think about that. Think about the medical world in 1975. Think of how antiquated and outdated almost every method is. Imagine being able to look on how we treat addiction today as if it were how we did things back in 1975. Where would be today? How many obituaries would we be reading for men and women who ultimately lost their battles with addiction?
Sometimes I feel like a broken record. I’ve already wrote, downright begged, for us to actively change how we go about addiction. And I hate that this time, much like the last time, it was all inspired by yet another death. Another obituary, another part of a frightening trend. But think about it: where would we be if we replaced all of the euphemisms and omissions? Where would we be if we started seeing overdose deaths as a lost battle?
Maybe it wouldn’t do much. Maybe it would be a pointless change in the ever-evolving world of semantics. Or maybe it would be just enough to rethink how we go about addiction. Maybe for a brief second, a flickering moment as we read “he lost his battle,” instead of “he ODed.” Maybe it would be just long enough that we understand that it’s an illness. That, like many illnesses, you can be born with a predisposition for it. That, like many illnesses, it can chemically change you. That, like every illnesses out there, it’s not something you can overcome by telling yourself to get over it, ignoring whatever few resources we have out there.
More people die every day from overdoses than they do from car crashes and I’m exhausted from the sheer number of obituaries for people in my hometown, for people that I once knew, for people that those I love once knew. Words are a powerful force. Maybe it’s time to see what one little change can do.