A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

by Krystal Sutherland

depression was a king at playing hide-and-seek. It concealed itself in reservoirs deep inside the mind, waiting for the walls you built around it to eventually erode. Depression could be at undetectable levels for months or years. You’d be all happy and stable and think you were cured, you were a survivor, and then BAM, out of nowhere it resurged.

Why? So many reasons. Because she wasn’t good enough. Because something inside of her was rotten and broken and unlovable. Because Jonah would figure this out eventually, and why bother starting something if the end of it was inevitable?

The hurt in his voice killed her, because pain was a language she’d learned to speak well, but she couldn’t give him what he wanted. Couldn’t give herself what she wanted either.

Actually, she was kind of surprised it had taken this long for him to get sick of her. There were only so many times you could have panic attacks in front of people before they wrote you off as a lost cause. Too fragile. Too much hassle. Too painful to be around. Hadn’t she done the exact same thing to her father? Why did she deserve any different?

People got tired of mental illness when they found out they couldn’t fix it.

“I don’t hate her for what she’s become. I want to, but I can’t. I love her too much. That’s the problem. That’s what’s wrong with love. Once you love someone, no matter who they are, you’ll always let them destroy you. Every single time.” Even the very best people found ways to hurt the ones they loved.

The one who painted the brightness of the galaxy to hide the darkness that lived inside him.

Perhaps falling and remaining in love with people, even if you didn’t want to, was not the great disaster she’d always imagined it to be.

A close-up of a goose’s face, its expression bloodthirsty (aka resting goose face).

The whole situation made her so angry that she wanted to rip something, scratch something, tear something to pieces. She wondered if this was the feeling Eugene got before he slid a razor blade through his skin. She thought about trying it. There had to be some reason he did it. Maybe it felt good? In the end, she settled on knocking back a quarter bottle of vodka until she was in a different type of pain, an oh-god-there-goes-my-liver kind of pain. What better thing to destroy than yourself?

Inside, though, she found her mother curled up in the hall with a pillow under her head, a hand pressed to the orange door that led down to her husband’s tomb. All the acid went out of Esther. Rosemary’s other hand was tucked tight against her chest, clasping the locket that contained a picture of her and Peter on their wedding day. Scattered on the wood beneath her pillow were sage leaves with wishes written on them. Set him free, they all said. Set him free, set him free, set him free.

Here was solid proof of the ruin love could sow. A reminder of how letting someone under your skin only gave them the power to destroy you in the end.

She wanted to know why she stayed in a relationship that had halfway ruined her. She wanted her venom to burn in her mother’s veins and hurt her from the inside out.

Not for the first time, she wished that his injuries were more obvious. That whatever swollen, infected thing inside his head that made him feel this way could be seen, could be sliced away, could be stitched up and covered with a bandage like any other wound.

There was no Eugene without this darkness. And maybe that was the problem. Maybe Eugene wasn’t afraid of what was in the darkness. Maybe Eugene was afraid of the darkness that was inside himself.

She hated their life. She hated the bits of it they’d chosen for themselves and the bits of life that had fallen on them like dandruff, unpleasant and unwanted.

Esther breathed in the scent of her mother and tried to remember exactly when they’d started drifting apart. The rift hadn’t been a sudden thing, more like something that happened inch by inch, so you couldn’t see how far apart you were until the distance was insurmountable.

How could you save people who were drowning in themselves?

The cumulative total of their collective pain was too much to bear. It was easy enough to hurt for yourself; hurting for other people was what broke you.

Love was a trap, a sticky trap of molasses meant to bind two people together. It was a thing that couldn’t be escaped, a weight that people strapped to their own legs before they waded into the water and wondered why they drowned.

A thousand little moments had made Esther fall more and more in love with him, without her even noticing. A thousand little pieces of his soul had splintered off and dug themselves into her.

You can love someone with all your soul and still hate yourself enough to want to die.”

“You’ve gotta fight it, Eugene. Whenever you feel like hurting yourself, tell me, tell Heph, tell Mom, tell Dad, tell Jonah, tell your friends. I guarantee you that at least one of us will say, ‘Come over, I’ll be your backup.’ And then we fight the dark thoughts together. If you try and do this on your own, your chance of getting ambushed by your own mind skyrockets.”

“Of course it’s not going to be easy. You’re fighting a war against yourself. Every time either side makes ground, you’re the one who gets hurt. But it’s not about winning the war against your demons. It’s about calling a truce and learning how to live with them peacefully. Promise me you’ll keep fighting.”

Was love enough? If a person could offer you nothing but broken promises and disappointment, was love enough to make up for that?

Esther went to her room and sat on her bed and contemplated what it meant that the curse wasn’t real. That it wasn’t a spell that made Eugene so sad, just depression. It wasn’t magic that bound her father to the basement, just anxiety. It wasn’t a jinx that drove her mother to the slots, just an obsession. For the first time, all the broken bits of her family and herself seemed fixable; curses couldn’t be broken, but mental illnesses could be treated.

Esther always thought if you cut your wrists, your life just kind of leaked out of you quietly, poetically, pooling in delicate puddles at your sides. That was not the case.

Jonah had once told her that one day, everybody would realize that their parents were human beings, and that sometimes they were good people and sometimes they were not. What he failed to mention—what she was only coming to appreciate at that exact moment—was that most of the time people were neither good nor bad, not righteous or evil, they were just people. And sometimes love, even if it was all they had to offer, was enough. It had to be.

“Is this the superstitious Esther Solar acknowledging the existence of mental illness and not just behaving like I’m cursed?”

“Everyone we let into our lives has the power to hurt us. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t, but that’s not a reflection of us, or our strength. Loving someone who hurts you doesn’t make you weak.”

“Sometimes you’re brave if you run. Sometimes you’re brave if you stay. It’s important to know the difference. Important for both of us, probably.”

She liked to keep all of her emotions locked inside where she could see them and catalogue them and control them and make sure they didn’t spill out.

“I know you think love is dangerous. But I look at you and me, and I don’t see that.” “Really? Because you have more power to destroy me than anyone else. I gave you that control by loving you and you went and tried to kill yourself. Why would I want to give anyone else the power to hurt me like that?” “That’s just the thing. It had nothing to do with you. So maybe love isn’t the poison you think it is. Maybe people just make mistakes. Maybe they’re even worthy of our forgiveness if they hurt us.”

She also mentioned something about a “fear of commitment” and how Esther was attempting to “mitigate any future pain” by finding faults with the people she grew close to. By finding excuses to stay away from them, by avoiding intimacy and any deep emotional connections, by cutting off her feelings to preserve her emotional well-being, she insulated herself against pain but also against life.

Externalize anxiety

Correct thinking mistakes

Exposure

“My greatest fear has already happened to me. It’s been happening to me for fifty weeks. My fear is being seen, truly seen, for who I am. For a long time, I believed that I was a square peg in a world full of round holes, and that something inside me was fundamentally damaged somehow. I believed that I was not built to love or be loved, and I was afraid that if anyone saw me—like, really saw me—they would realize I was broken.

But life was rarely full of clean and tidy resolutions. Good moments would inevitably, again, lead to bad moments, which would lead to more good moments, until there was nothing left but dust and stories.

she wondered if people really fell in love with others or if they fell in love with the best parts of themselves. Love was a mirror that made our bright bits shine like stars and dulled even the harshest ugliness. We loved to love because it made us beautiful. And maybe there was nothing wrong with that.

I beseech you to read Adam Silvera’s article “Happiness Isn’t Just An Outside Thing”—you

Dawn Huebner’s “Rethinking anxiety: Learning to face fear” from TEDxAmoskeagMillyardWomen in 2015.

Shakespearean insults came from pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/—an