Hell

Sometimes I dream about Hell, but it´s not how you´d expect it to be. Last night it was a hotel that never ended; and it wasn´t really a hotel in the typical sense of the concept, but rather a series of rooms intended for temporary lodging. There were ship cabins. There were motel rooms. Hotel rooms. Rentals. Mobile home interiors. Course centers. Cult lodgings. All attached to the ass end of the next space in a labyrinth where, once you had entered, you´d be unlikely to ever find your way out. There was no torture but the dullness of it all. There was a sense of doom and a contagion I had to run from, but even these threats were hard to grasp, hard to understand. Less a place of horror, it felt like a place of sadness, of unfulfillment. There were beds and stoves and bathrooms, and yet, a home was nowhere to be found.

I often feel like the longer I spend in the psychiatric system, the more obscured I become to myself and to the world. I am defined by the horrors I´ve experienced, I become trapped in the mud and amber of my past symptoms. I feel fine, and the doctors say I´m deeply depressed and anhedonic. Do depressed people exercise regularly and express themselves through creative writing? Do depressed people dream of the impossible, of a family, of a child, of a home? Do depressed people try and find balance between the desire to express full bodily autonomy and the possibility of engaging in a romantic relationship that usually requires some form of intercourse? Depression is thought of as if it were an illness, a thing onto itself, but it is merely a set of symptoms. A tummy ache can refer to a lot of things. It can be from hunger, from lactose intolerance, from celiac disease, from gas, from constipation, from stomach cancer. If a patient were to go to a doctor and tell the doctor their tummy hurts, and the doctor would diagnose them with tummy hurt and say that it´s a problem and that the patient simply has to get better and go bag screws at a work adjacent activity center because engagement in ”meaningful” social activity is a cure for tummy ache, the doctor would fucking lose their licence. But psychiatry is a bit different. I´m fully convinced that the least talented doctors who want to do the least amount of work become psychiatrists. Their risk of getting into trouble for a misdiagnosis or malpractice is practically nonexistent. If a surgeon fucks up badly enough, their career is done for. If a psychiatrist fucks up, crickets.

I wear green-tinted sunglasses around the clock from March to September; unless I do, I get wicked migraines. The lenses cut off red light and I do lose some of the beauty of the setting sun this way, but the filtration does decrease my migraines significantly. I guess maybe depression is akin to that. Sure, I may feel like an outsider in this world and I have a degree of anhedonia, but I don´t feel enough to kill myself. Emotion is dampened in either direction. But I also don´t think that calling it depression is useful. I am waiting for something in my life to change so that experiencing the world in the full range of emotion would make sense again. If I think about sharing a kiss with someone now, I think about the filth between their teeth. I think it´s because the deep, wise parts of my brain know that only pain will come from that. As if I were a selkie, mixing with human men would only bring about my own downfall. I´d be trapped, used, and discarded, and this is the last chance for me to have a baby. The last person to use me would literally be the last, and the grave would be the only remaining direction for me after that. I have to find meaning, joy even, in facing this harsh reality completely alone. Unless I can negotiate myself the fertility treatments resulting in a baby, I will deserve to be left childless. I… Think I deserve to die if that happens; truly in the sense of finally deserving it, in the sense that I´ve already put so much effort into all of this, and what was I left with? I´m being humiliated and talked down to by the very system that´s supposed to help me. I´ve been here before. It´s something about my face that they hate. I wonder if the doctors who ”treated” me when I was younger were blinded by their lust that turned into hatred that turned into interpretations and diagnoses that destroyed my future. I´d rather be raped than misdiagnosed. I´d rather have my face mutilated and destroyed for life than be misdiagnosed one more time. I can´t, I won´t participate in the bullshit of the employability evaluations clinic. I put years and years into psychotherapy, self-reflection, having my diagnoses fixed! I have all the answers! But they won´t listen, because they have a point to prove and a witch to burn.

There are two faint lines on my left wrist, perfectly symmetrical and cleanly done. You won´t know they are there unless you really look, and there´s a third beside them, faded so well you won´t notice even if you look. They represent three things simultaneously. Their Maiden meaning is that they stand for the past, the present, and the future. The past is faded already; nothing can be done about it. The present and the future are workable with, though. Their Mother meaning is that two lines stand for a positive pregnancy test. And their Crone meaning is that they mark the spot where my radial artery runs. Do with this knowledge what you will. I did not want to draw these lines on my skin, but last fall the pressure and the voices wouldn´t lift until I did. They told me that unless I was willing to bleed, I would not get a child. After all, isn´t the sacrifice of some scarification and a few drops of blood next to nothing when compared to the gift of life? But the voices knew the true risk, the true cost associated with the self-scarification. In the eyes of the psychiatric system, self-injury is one of the gravest sins a person can commit. It allows the psychiatric system to use the heaviest artillery it has to root out the sin and the evil in the self-harmer. Porn addicts and drunks get treated like kings compared to someone who looks like a woman and dares to make their flesh less beautiful, less desirable, less fuckable by scarifying it. And of course, telling a psychiatrist that you self-harmed to avoid becoming childless… Is probably going to have the adverse effect.

The spirit world works like that; it demands high risk for high reward; it requires you to commit to things the dayside world finds offensive. Saying it like that sounds like the requirements are horrific. But what shocks the average day-side dweller is much tamer than that. It´s enough to not be able to work a day job to have them horrified. To live celibate makes them want to scream. The truth about witches is that the majority of them were old or disabled women whose plots of land were coveted by their neighbors, and they were murdered by men who had made it their profession to travel the land and torture women to death. The spiritual descendants of people who used to work as witchfinders nowadays call themselves ”doms”, and women who are too weak to resist the cultural machinery of misogyny flock to them to become punished for their existence. After all, that is what the dayside of things thinks anyway, but claims not to. When women seek out men who claim their hatred and loathing is just a form of love, it reinforces the cultural brainwashing of women as inferior as an undeniable fact of life, as something hung from the firmament like a twisted, tortured, mutilated body while the townsfolk cheer around it. That sort of sickness is called ”liberated” nowadays. At least in the old days it was called hobbling and flogging and execution, burning and hanging, brazen bulls and breaking wheels. We no longer practice that shit, but nowadays there are porn categories to fulfill the same needs, to feed the same incessant darkness and filth of human nature. And yet; I am the Devil for having bled thrice as a sacrifice to allow for my child to be born. The values of this world make no sense. I hate this world. This world right here, this world is Hell. Nothing beautiful can survive here. All innocence is destroyed. Sincerity and principles are punished. Mediocrity wins by definition; there is just too much of it to go around.

This world is not my home; this world is a series of rooms and not a single one of them is meant for me to stay in. This world is an impossible shadow sandwiched between two lights, like the one I saw cast on the floor of the mental hospital as I sat on the floor of my room, with the door ajar, and the space within my head was open to the vastness of endless light-years. I live and I hope in the face of the depravity and ugliness of humanity. Because the true test of character remains to be whether or not you´ll pick up the torch and defy the filth, or revel in it like a pig, justifying it and seeking to infect as many others with it as you can. A witch is not someone who sold their sold to the Devil for personal gain. A witch is someone who sees the world for the Hell that it is and makes something with this knowledge. A witch is someone who writes their sincerest wishes onto their own skin, dedicates themselves wholeheartedly to the pursuit of these, and accepts that their journey may end at the mercy of the worldly powers seeking to destroy them for attempting to defy the status quo.

I am not depressed. I am weighed down by the burden of seeing this world for what it is.