By Shane Kaliszewski

As long as I can remember I’ve been afflicted with an unparalleled sense of wanting. It’s like my feelings for the things I desire are so overwhelming that it consumes my every thought. I long for things so hopelessly that simply being faced with living without presses on my chest until I can’t breathe.

As I grew up, this never-ending feeling of wanting led to me successes that I could not have imagined. I used to think that this attribute was a positive phenomenon in my life. When I thought about a grade, or job, or award that I wanted, it became my only purpose. They felt much more like a need, and I did everything I could to acquire them. When I would fail, I equated that failure with my self-worth. I often laid awake at night, feeling like I wasn’t whole, fixated on a wanting that paralyzed me.

I began considering hurting myself during my junior year of college, while I was pursing a certificate in opioid addiction treatment. In the program, we studied the neurochemistry of opioid addiction, in an effort to help those who experienced these addictions overcome them. During these lessons I learned about the biological similarity of inflicting pain on ourselves to taking a painkiller. Although it was more uncomfortable upfront, creating physical pain through cutting eventually resulted in the same feelings of euphoria and relief that taking a narcotic produced.

In November of that year, my best friend suddenly passed away. The events surrounding her death were particularly traumatic for me and a few of my close friends. These ‘wanting’ feelings were no longer manifesting in a desire to have something, or to succeed. Now, I endlessly longed for the presence of someone I could never get back, and longed to forget an endless stream of images that haunted my conscious.

This wanting grew until it became unbearable. I felt like I was constantly missing a part of me, and those parts that leftover were unsalvageable. I wanted nothing more than to start over, wanted nothing more than to be made whole by an endless list of desires. A list that was constituted of nothing more than an amalgamation of things improbable, as much impossible. It loomed over me, and the threat of the permanence of such longing left me desperately searching for an escape.

After months of this feeling, I sought to perform a neurological con-job, and replace these endless unanswered wants with relief. I pulled my razor apart with a pair of tweezers, and didn’t even think twice as pulled the blade across my skin. What started as a clinical endeavor of endorphin production quickly devolved into an emotional manifestation of all the pain I had been feeling the past few months. A desire to relieve the never-ending wanting merged with a deep seeded desire to punish myself for all the reasons I felt incomplete. I remember thinking that it would be a one-time thing, but once turned into twice, and twice turned into months. Before I knew it, years had passed. Although the frequency changed, I still found myself so often needing relief from an insatiable and paralyzing wanting.

This cross-stitch came to me about two weeks into yet another attempt to quit cutting. I was just about to start law school, and was pessimistic about my likelihood of relapse. I knew I was on the brink of one of the most stressful times in my life, and I felt naïve hoping that the wanting that had been stalking me would politely cease, and allow me to face my first year of law school unshackled from it.

It came to me as a gift, from the hands of a guy I was seeing at the time. Unlike I was, he was hopeful for a new beginning, and wanted to get me something special to celebrate this hope and my starting of school.

I used to jokingly recite ‘this too shall pass’ in a way that felt almost satirical. I felt so hopeless that I would utter this phrase in a way that almost challenged the universe to let my wanting pass, to let me feel whole. To let me feel the type of complete that I didn’t need release from.

On the inside of my right bicep I have a tattoo. It is a bee, and if you look just closely enough it might look the slightest bit like the honeybee that adorns the bottle of a certain brand of whiskey. If you look even closer, you’d find three tiny letters fixed in the wing. A few days before I lost my friend, after a night out fueled by a certain honey whiskey, she slept in my bed with me. The day she died I came back and collapsed in my bed, only to look over and see the bottle she left on my filing cabinet that doubled as a nightstand.

The tattoo came after a long week of drinking, story-telling, and fondly remembering a person that meant so much to so many people. It’s sloppy, faded, and by all accounts looks like absolute shit. Looking back, this quality makes sense. It cost me $20, and with all the liquor I had in my system at the time of application, I’m lucky it didn’t slide clean off. Still, despite its aesthetic shortcomings, it is my favorite ink that adorns my skin. It never fails to remind me of all the nights we spent laying in my bed, laughing and drinking honey whiskey until the sun came up.

It has been almost six months since I last cut. No one is more shocked than me that, in what should be the most tumultuous and uncomfortable period of my life, is where I made the most progress. It’s hard to say exactly what has made this time different. And perhaps, the difficulty in pinpointing this variable is that there is no one thing. More likely, this progress is due to the unified presence of so many positive influences in my life. A reinvigorated feeling of purpose, the support of so many incredible friends and family members, and the silent encouragement of a tiny cross stitch that seems to whisper “keep going” when I need it most.

I still feel that insatiable want from time to time. A tiny demon named longing still sits on my chest and seems to pull the air from my lungs. In these moments, I can’t help but remember all the things I’ve lost, all the things that never were, and all the things that never will be. It is here, more than ever, that I’m grateful to have this reminder sitting on my desk. I think what’s different now is the presence of new ideas, forged by the thousands of times I uttered a mantra I didn’t entirely believe. The first, is that just like all things, this too longing too shall pass. The second is,  no matter how far off it may feel, I’m never without my little honeybee.