Collateral Damage
I woke up to a text from my cousin: “Hey Cole Butt! I’ve tried to call you several times now but can’t get an answer. I’m worried about you. I know this month’s hard for you, you promised to check in tho. Please, please call me back.”
As I was reading it, another one came through, this time from my paid bestie: “Hi Necole. Let’s touch base before today is over. I’d like to adjust the schedule to talk to you 2 times a week this month and have at least one in-person session before month’s end. Let me know when is best for you.”
I stared at both messages, but I didn’t feel anything. No warmth at the thought of someone checking in. No sting of guilt for ignoring them. No desire to write back. Just… nothing. And that’s when it hit me… yesterday brought the familiar shift.
It always comes quietly, like a thief slipping in at night. Yesterday I woke up with a lump in my throat, that raw ache of trying to swallow something too sharp to go down. Grief was pressing against my ribcage, begging to be let out, but I shoved it back where it came from. By midday, it was gone. At least that’s what I told myself. The body doesn’t lie, though; it keeps score. My brain must have sensed the breaking point and flipped the breaker before I even noticed. One second, the weight was unbearable, the next I was hollowed out. Emptied.
That’s what dissociation feels like: a sudden vacancy sign flickering on in the windows of your own body. You’re still there, technically, but you’re a ghost in your own skin. It’s survival at its cruelest form. You think you’re being saved from drowning, but really, you’ve just been dragged onto the shore, forced to watch yourself sink without the ability to care.
And then comes the distance. I push people away before they can notice the light has gone out in me. Not because I want to, but because numbness turns me into a weapon. I can’t hold conversations, can’t hold connections. My words cut too sharp or come out flat and lifeless. I become unrecognizable even to myself. And so, I shut doors. I let texts sit unread. I let calls go unanswered. It feels safer for everyone if I just disappear into the static.
September always does this to me. The air gets colder, and so do I. The world shouts “Suicide Awareness Month,” filling timelines with stories, statistics, and reminders to check on your people. And I love that awareness, I do… but it’s also the month Chris left by the very thing we’re all shouting about. Every post I scroll past is another mirror, reflecting my brother’s absence back at me. Each story, each statistic, each candle held up in the name of “awareness” catches me by the throat and drags me back to the night my world cracked open. People talk about prevention, about checking in, about saving lives, and all I can hear is the silence of the one I couldn’t save. It’s impossible to breathe in the language of awareness without also inhaling ash, choking on the memory of my brother’s absence, the way it burns down my chest like smoke I can never clear from my lungs.
Chris has been sitting in my mind like a storm cloud that refuses to move. Writing about him keeps him front and center, refusing me even the mercy of distraction. That’s not new. I think about how desperately I need him still, how he was the only one who could read me without translation. And then my mind drags me back to the last time we spoke, standing in the glitter aisle at Hobby Lobby. Such an ordinary place for such a final memory. I had no idea I was memorizing the sound of his voice without knowing it was the final time I’d ever hear it live. That call echoes in me even now, sharp and unfinished, like a door slammed in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes I replay that moment until it doesn’t feel real anymore, until I can almost convince myself there should’ve been more, I should have went to him. I know that the conversation shouldn’t have ended with craft supplies and sarcasm.
When the switch flips and dissociation takes over, even that memory starts to rot at the edges. The sharpness dulls, the grief turns grainy and out of focus, and suddenly it feels like I’m watching it all through dirty glass. His voice, his words, that final call… it doesn’t feel like mine anymore. It’s like studying a stranger’s tragedy, dissecting someone else’s heartbreak, while my own chest sits hollow and silent. My therapist says it’s part of the process; she calls it survival. She says my brain is mercifully protecting me from the fire. But it doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels like betrayal. Like my own mind is scraping away the last fragile pieces of him I have left, sanding them down until they’re unrecognizable, just so I don’t shatter under the weight of remembering. Survival shouldn’t cost me the only thing I have left of him.
He was my anchor, the weight that kept me from drifting into nothing. My echo, the voice that mirrored back the parts of me no one else could hear. My shelter, the place I could collapse when the world became too sharp. My baby brother, my soul twin. The only one who carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. And yet, I can’t stop wondering if my weight became the thing that splintered him. If my storms lashed against his already fractured walls until they finally gave way. That thought courses through me like shards of broken glass, tearing at me from the inside every time I breathe. I miss him in so many ways… his laugh that could light up the darkest rooms, his sarcasm that felt like a private language only we spoke, the way he read me without needing a single word. He was the one person who never faltered, who shouldered me without complaint. And sometimes, late at night when the silence presses too hard, I wonder if that devotion was the very thing that broke him. If in carrying me his entire life, he lost the strength to carry himself.
And maybe that’s why, when the switch flips and numbness takes over, I push everyone else away. I can’t risk letting someone stand too close when the ground beneath me caves in. I can’t let them feel the shrapnel of my storms the way he did. Dissociation turns me into a weapon I don’t recognize… my voice goes flat, my eyes glaze, my words cut without warning. I go from bleeding to ice, from begging for closeness to recoiling from every touch. It’s not intentional, but it’s instinct, as if my body remembers how dangerous it was for someone to carry me and swears it won’t let it happen again.
So I retreat. I stop answering the phone. I let texts pile up like unopened letters from another lifetime. I convince myself it’s safer for everyone if I disappear into the numbness, if I fold into the silence where I can’t hurt anyone but myself. Survival has become synonymous with solitude.
But dissociation is a traitor, dressed in the guise of safety. It feels like a shield at first, like slipping into cold water that numbs the sear of grief. The frost licks at your skin, and for a moment it’s mercy… an escape from the fire raging inside. But frost is silent and patient, and it doesn’t stop at relief. It creeps, spreads, sinks into the marrow, and by the time you notice, it has claimed pieces of you that you didn’t even know could die. The numbness dulls the pain, sure, but it also steals color, warmth, and connection, leaving the body moving while the soul rots inside. And what terrifies me most is the truth I feel in my bones: by the time I ever thaw, the heart I once carried may be gone, and there may be nothing left to save.
The damage I do to my relationships when the switch flips and the numbness takes over, is irreparable. And yet, right now, in the midst of the freeze, that doesn’t bother me. Right now, it feels necessary. I will do whatever it takes to keep everyone at a distance, to keep them from becoming casualties in the aftermath of my storms, to shield them from the wreckage of a heart turned into a Category 5 hurricane. But I know the truth waiting for me, lurking behind the numbness: when the switch flips back, when the flood returns, what then? I will be left gutted, hollowed by my own hand, staring at the ruins of what I have done in self-preservation. And still, even in the wreckage, I apologize, in the quiet of my journal, where only the paper bears witness, because no one should ever be collateral damage in the constant war waged inside my own mind. So I push them away, hard and fast, until the air between us is empty and safe. I convince myself that in their absence, they are spared, untouched by the hurricane beating at the walls of my chest. They are better off there… distant, protected, while I rage and fracture alone.
So here I am. Hollow. Detached. Drifting through days like a ghost in a body that no longer belongs to me. The world presses against my skin, but I cannot feel it anymore… there’s no warmth, no texture, no sound to anchor me. I move through motions like a puppet, pulled by strings I can’t see, while the storm inside waits quietly, biding its time. I tell myself it’s better this way, that shutting down is survival, a shield against the tidal wave of everything I’ve buried. But I know the truth beneath the quiet. I know that when the switch flips back, when the dam breaks and the flood surges through me, I will be swept under once more. I will drown in the torrent of grief, anger, guilt, and longing, pulled under by the weight I’ve been trying to escape and the weight of all the people I hurt in the name of survival. Every heartbeat will feel like water in my lungs, every memory a wave crashing over me, and I will be powerless to stop the devastation I’ve already sealed inside.
I exist here moving through the world like a shadow of myself. The storm waits inside, patient, because it knows I cannot outrun it. I push people away, numb my own body, and watch the pieces of myself and others I care about crumble in silence. There is no rescue, no light at the end of this. Only the relentless cycle: the switch flips, the numbness feels like safety, I hurt others, then it flips back, and the flood comes, and I am left gutted, flailing in a sea I cannot control.
I am both the hurricane and the wreckage it leaves behind, and there is no one to carry me now, not even me, and I’ve pushed away everyone who might have been able to.
