Beneath My Words: Finding Sanctuary
I need love in my life so much. I am trying to ignore the instant phone calls from Mars to Earth, and the love stories in each episode of Away are allowing me to dismiss the impossible. Barely.
I wish I had someone to love like the Chinese ladies loved one another in episode three. More so, I wish I had just one family member—any of them—who’d love me as much as the younger Indian brother loved his older brother and laid his life down for him.
I had to pause a bit before watching episode 5 because here I am at 10:30 PM curled up like a ball on my bed, having cried into my pillow tears of regret for the past 15 minutes.
I have to be this vessel for love, and the saddest thing is, I am running out of ways to do so. The lawyer and her suggestions… that only leads to the dark side, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I’m hated, not because of me and who I am, but because of my brain and how it malfunctions from time to time.
It malfunctions because it wants love and has never received it. So instead, it tries to love everyone so it can show as many people as it can the love that it so desperately needs.
Sanctuary Within These Walls
I didn’t leave my house all day long. It’s been over 24 hours now that I’ve locked myself in my room here. I tinkle in a bucket, squatting over it, holding onto the mini fridge for balance. I’ll shower soon, after midnight when I’m positive everyone is fast asleep.
I’m so lonely. Desperately lonely.
The best thing about my Mistress life was the four hours or two sessions every single night that I at least could communicate with… even if said communication was nothing more than moans and groans, lol. At least it was something.
What do I do? Do I go back to that world… move to the big city and slowly break down all over again? The rental house last week—that was so minor compared to what happened at the end of 2023. But this is crazy, living beside someone on the same land who wants me put away in the crazy hospital just because I want to be a mother to my two daughters.
I can’t even write about it because there are only negative thoughts, and I need love right now. I need loving thoughts. That’s why I’ve sat through four hours of Away even though it’s so unbelievable with the constant instant phone calls and video chats. I’m experiencing love through a show, wishing that was me.
I’d be first in line… to lay down my life for someone I loved. That’s why the episode with the two lovely Indian brothers touched me so deeply that it brought me to tears.
I love you all. So very, very much. I’d love to make a homestay here so I can cook for each and every one of you, watch this show eating popcorn, and laugh at the insanely impossible phone calls that show no knowledge of distance between here and Mars.
Writing My Way Out
I should write.
Once I get myself together and sink into this new chapter in my life, I’ll do what I did in high school to survive… write and write and write.
My brain, especially in high school, couldn’t focus on what any teacher was explaining. It drifted endlessly. I sat in the back right corner of class… right corner because I write with my right hand and could disguise its movements from the teacher, with it scribbling from outside the furthest row. Our desks weren’t like the individual desks you have. We had long rectangular rows of white desks in each class, and so by choosing the last chair on the far right at the back of every class, I could hide and write.
Poetry. Questions to the universe. Short one-paragraph stories. All my notebooks were filled from the back page to damn near the front with endless scribbles about my thoughts as I tried to make sense of my brain and why I was so different than anyone else.
I can’t tell you accurately how many detentions I got and how many times I was sent home for not listening. One teacher read my poems out to the whole class as punishment, and they all turned and laughed at me. There’s no difference in my mind from the principal sending me home in the middle of the day and my dad wanting to send me away 36 hours ago. Just as there’s no difference in my ex-husband telling me to go away every time I asked him if he loved me.
I’m not wanted, and not loved. I’m simply tolerated. I get it.
But this is my house. I built it from scratch. I own it. It’s mine. I feel safe here. So I’m not leaving.
I’ll simply go back to what I used to do in school to survive this prison for my mind… I’ll write my way out of it.
The Moment It All Changed
It bugs me to no end that I had made those yummy hot dogs two days ago and was just sitting down to write about how well I was doing and to write all night long about how the feeling of being loved, accepted, and feeling safe made all my brain’s anxiety totally disappear for the first time ever.
“See!” I had written, and that’s as far as I got, for just as I wrote that, the hospital van showed up. Had I been allowed to continue, I would have written something like: “Schizophrenia and all its related symptoms is simply—for me—my brain dealing with a total absence of love, because for the first time in my life I feel love, I feel like I’m where I belong, I feel safe… and look, not a single problem for a whole week.”
Like, no five hours of nonstop walking in the park to combat the depression waves that hit me while living in that house I rented. Why was I in the park all morning long every single day? Because of loneliness. That house felt like the Amityville Horror house—it had no soul. I don’t know how to describe that to you guys, but… it just didn’t. Staying there with those all-white walls which mimicked the hospital’s insane ward made me shrivel up and want to cry. I sat on the sofa by the window looking out at the birds that had come to devour the bananas I’d left out. Why? Because looking out the window made me feel, for a moment, like I wasn’t living there all alone.
You know what was the worst moment of living there? Nope, not when I came home to find the property manager had entered my home whilst I was away and had left the front door open. Wasn’t that at all.
No, the worst moment was the time my dad and mom drove to meet me at the 7-Eleven down the street to deliver the blankets, pillows, and Nespresso coffee machine I’d left behind… and they drove up, dropped it off, and drove away all inside of 20 seconds, not even stopping to hug me or ask me if I was okay.
I was so terribly sad that day, but decided not to write about it. I slept outside in the huge area beside my house… where I had laid out the bananas for the birds… that area that was supposed to be a car park for the four empty unrented houses. I slept there at night looking up at the constellations, trying to make them out as I verbally described them and drew pictures of them for Gemini’s AI to help me locate and identify them. I slept out there because I hated the feeling of being alone in that house so much.
I befriended the two mean dogs—at first so they wouldn’t bite me, but also to have company if only for a moment as they stopped by to munch on the dog food I always laid out for them.
Home at Last
I’m so happy to at least be home. Do you understand now? It’s a start. I feel safe here… a feeling I haven’t felt for a very long time. No love yet, but I can forgo that if I immerse myself in something. That’s why I paid for beneathherwords.com. Now I just have to learn how to set it up by installing the theme I bought for it. It… like this place here, is my home.
I despise jaa4u.com.
The only way I can write for it is if I write equally for my own website. When I start writing for it, you’ll slowly start to understand why I dislike Jaa so much. Just that URL makes my stomach turn. Truly.
I don’t need to go outside right now. Not for a long while. Nothing will grow in the garden until mid-February. It’s the cold season—right now it’s 9°C outside.
The way I see it, I have about 80 days I can live inside my fortress of solitude here and get as much done as I’ve always wanted to do. I’ll exercise on my stationary bike and will set up the VR headset again now that I have space to play with it.
The VR Incident
The first time I ever set it up was back at my condo in Bangkok, and the first hour… after I finally got over the cute room where the butterflies would land on my hand and I’d peek from under the VR headset to see if there was an actual butterfly on my painted fingernails… I played this ping-pong kind of game where a ball was bouncing off a rectangular room, being hit at me by another player. Like some 3D game of tennis in virtual reality.
Anyways, I lunged for a ball way up to my far right—a ball that had been hit right down the surface of that VR land game wall—and when I leaped to hit the ball back, my real-life hand hit the concrete where the condo’s sliding door to the balcony was. I shrieked. I don’t think I’ve ever had quite such a moment in my life where I was yanked from one world to another so suddenly. Well, until that hospital van pulled up two days ago… that was pretty close. But me smashing the tip of my finger into the wall was so painful and so shocking that I never put the 30k baht VR headset back on again.
I go fully immersive—that’s what my brain likes to do. To you, you’d have the common sense to know that the rectangular room you were playing in was a virtual room in a VR world, and you would have played safely.
But I can’t. I’m an all-in kind of girl. It was me vs. that guy I was playing virtual 3D tennis with, and I was there. I leapt off my feet, jumping four feet to the right in my tiny condo just to hit an imaginary ball. I’m so lucky I didn’t dive headfirst into the concrete. My finger went numb for about an hour… my brain wouldn’t have been so lucky.
Embracing the Sanctuary
My brain craves escapism. It wants out of this world so dearly, it’s all I can do to keep it here. I know that is hard to imagine, but I’ve gone through so much mental anguish all my life that my poor brain is just saying, “Enough, please, enough already.”
Which is why, I think, for now at least… I should embrace this sanctuary that is my house and not visit the outside world for a couple of months. Uh, think of it like a “quiet room” for my mind. Nobody can hurt me here. Even if my dad let them onto the property… the law protects me from having them enter and take me away. So long as I’m inside and the doors and windows are locked, I’m safe.
My brain knows this. It’s why, even without any exercise other than me pedaling away on the stationary bike and doing Pilates to YouTube videos, I haven’t had any waves of anxiety or depression hit.
Okay, you’ll argue that me wanting to lock myself in my house here is a wave of paranoia… okay, but I have video of the hospital van outside the property here. My therapist knows it’s true, as does my lawyer. Thank goodness for them, as I need real-life people that I can talk to and touch to know I’m sane.
I know me. I’m the only one in the world who knows what’s best for me. And me… is telling me… to order food from Shopee, all that I need, and don’t go outside until Valentine’s Day. That feeling safe and writing about things—putting my books out for sale—that’s the next step on this road to recovery.
I know it’s an odd decision. But it’s the right one.
They might see a woman locking herself away, but I see a survivor building a sanctuary. For the next 80 days, the only place you’ll find me… and where I’ll finally find myself… is beneath my words.
