THE MORNING AFTER

I once read somewhere that if you wake up one morning, and even before you are fully conscious, the insides of your stomach churn revoltingly at something you did, then you know you have royally messed up.

We wake up one morning and know for sure that we do not have enough willpower to get out of bed and face the world. We look back at the happenings of yester-night, the week before that and two years before that morning, and the only emotion we feel is disgust...

At all the wrongs we have done, at all the stupid, most idiotic things we did, at how good a liar we have become, how bad we know our ‘friends’ and partner are for us, how all they do is put us down, at how our life is one big trashy, messed up jungle.

Suddenly, you can feel the vomit rise, you jump out of bed and start to throw up just outside of the bathroom door. Could it be the vodka shots?  Probably. Could it be that we hadn’t eaten before the shots? Maybe. But deep down it’s mostly the disgust at ourselves that has brought us to this point.

We get back to bed and the only complete thought our minds can conjure up is, ‘stay in bed all day’, we call in sick at work, which is not actual work in this case, an internship that you seriously hate, and then we lie to those we still consider closest friends that it’s just ‘another of those days’. We curl up into a ball and hate ourselves for everything. The tears flow freely and just when you think they are about to stop, another wave bigger than the first one knocks you down and the crying begins again. It’s three and a half hours later when you need water because the hiccups just won’t stop.

On the days when skipping work or school is not an option, we drag our feet in a haze, mechanically doing all the morning stuff. Get to work/school an hour late and why is the sun so friggin’ hot this early? We wonder.Your shame burns you on the inside with the intensity of a 1000 suns.The first person we meet asks why we are angry on such a bright morning. We plant a fake smile on our face but when we catch a reflection of ourselves on a window somewhere, it’s not a smile, it’s two crooked, wicked lines our lips have formed, more like a sneer. Even your reflection is disgusted at you.

It is a point in life where 8 out of every 10 things you do are most probably wrong, some in very small ways, others simply earth shattering wrong. We are ashamed to face people, and worse than that, we are ashamed to face ourselves. In the midst of all the self-loathing, you pick a mirror and you cannot recognize the person you see, you hate the person you see. The magnitude of your wrongs and your shame shakes you to the core.

You remember the 16yr old you who knew right and wrong, the 20yr old you who was excited at all the new experiences and opportunities that were waiting to be explored, and who had a plan for their lives. And now 2-3 years later, how could we have committed every plausible mistake that a single human being can seemingly commit? Oh God! How did we get here? …the vomit again, no, not here, not in public.

We think to ourselves, this is the famous rock bottom, we have just hit rock bottom. We think of calling our best friend, but we haven’t spoken in 3 weeks, and she is the only one who still thinks I am better than this. We think of our mother, but how will we begin to explain some of those mistakes?

We get to our house and this time we make it just in time to throw up in the toilet. We rinse our mouths with the bathroom water and go ahead to take a few gulps. We take a mirror, stare long and hard, hatefully and ashamedly at ourselves and accept that we cannot change the past. We go to bed and hope for a better day tomorrow… or a coma.

This is all part of the process.