It’s funny to think of survival in this way: self-imposed, even melodramatic. And sure, logically I knew that this was not a fight for life and death. At any point, I could return to warmth and shelter and just stop riding. I could call an Uber. The point, though, is that when you take on a challenge that’s incredibly hard and that you are not sure you can finish, you decide not to crawl back to safety. No, I was not fighting for my life in a literal sense. But I was standing on the edge, straddling some precipice of what I can do and what I can’t, and trying desperately to simply stand there, without fear.
So why does one decide to try to ride their bike for 22 hours? To climb upwards of 20,000 feet when there is no real goal, no glory, no finish line? Besides the guarantee of misery, there is always that faint gleam of possibility. A flickering light that cannot be ignored, of learning something about yourself when you approach that dark place, enter it, wallow in it and eat it up and surround it and cradle it … Of what happens when you find yourself creeping up on the edge of some place you’ve often tiptoed around for fear of falling in.
This particular void is not new to me. I’ve been toeing that line for as long as I can remember, as a woman at constant odds with the urge to self-destruct. That delicious, satisfying temptation to pull the plug on it all, watch the world burn as they say, that blasé, that commonplace, that constant pull towards nothingness — to make people hate you, to hurt those you love, to make the world around you and the people you love and the feelings in your own body as disgusting and painful as you can.
For many years I found myself operating most often at some boundary between what I was supposed to do, the everyday goings on with which everyone seemed content, and the visceral desire for nothingness, that black void that seemed to live inside my gut — a constant and sometimes painful pulling inward. The awareness of the absurdity of the every day (falling prey to that inevitable if cliché obsession with existentialism so common to adolescence) coupled with the inability to get past the deep pit of sadness that started within my body and seemed to bleed outward ever further until it covered every surface I could see or touch, created a mode of living which seemed impossible to continue. The oft-used metaphor that depression feels like you are operating under deep water, moving in slow motion and working harder than necessary to complete even the most mundane tasks, is not wrong. Though I didn’t feel I was the only one dragging my way through waist-deep water (on some days) or water far above my head (on others) while those around me moved quickly and easily through thin air. It seemed that everyone I encountered (and would ever encounter) was too moving through thick molasses, was too battling each day the insatiable hunger for vacuity: the impulse to slide deeper, to drown.
When I turned inward, I saw darkness … like an empty parking lot of cracked pavement with bits of trash drifting through, floating, just there. The charade I had been signed up to play (without ever having been asked) just seemed too much and too badly put on. I could see the boom hanging just off screen.
This game, too big even to wrap my brain around, is what creates the temptation to run the opposite direction. It’s what makes living (untreated by whatever self-medication you choose) so fucking hard. It makes you itchy, makes your skin crawl, your hair hurt, your eyelids burn. So you drink. Or you have sex with the most repulsive creep you can find. Or you snort shards of glass from a broken vial in a public toilet stall. When what’s inside you seems worse than anything you could put in, there are no limits. See your own blood and you might look down, surprised, because you thought it would be thick black tar.