The Year I Stopped Existing (Director’s Cut) - Jonathan Harnisch (Georgie Gust)

The Year I Stopped Existing (Director’s Cut)

by Jonathan Harnisch

It didn’t begin with an explosion. Or a heartbreak. Or a goddamn siren.

It started with silence. The kind of silence that doesn’t echo—it erases.

They pulled the plug. Not from a ventilator or a dialysis machine, but from the one thing still barely anchoring my nervous system to this earth. Klonopin. Gone. Cold turkey. After forty years. No taper, no bridge medication, no prep. Just yanked like a weed they didn’t want to explain anymore. And with it, twelve other prescriptions vanished overnight. Decades of medical dependency wiped out with all the finesse of deleting a file you forgot to name. Just poof—goodbye, reality.

And then came the descent.

Pain is a word too gentle. This wasn’t pain. This was desecration. It wasn’t that my body hurt—it was that it stopped being mine. Muscles jerked of their own accord. My arms flung themselves against walls. My fingers let go of objects I’d never meant to release. Silverware, mugs, phones—projectiles launched by a body that no longer answered to me.

Even sleep refused me. My skin turned traitor, simmering from the inside out. Each nerve hummed with static like I’d swallowed a nest of hornets. My joints locked. My breath stuttered. There was no comfort, not in bed, not in water, not in stillness. Rest became a myth. So did peace.

And thought? Oh, that died next.

I couldn’t follow a sentence. I’d try to speak and the words would dissolve midair. I’d try to write and forget the sentence I was halfway through. My mind was a house where every hallway led to a locked door. I’d open my laptop and forget why. I’d pick up my phone and weep because I no longer remembered how to use it.

I became a ghost haunting my own routines.

Try showering when the water feels like boiling acid on flayed skin. Try brushing your teeth when your arms convulse like they’re trying to escape you. Try blinking when even that feels like dragging a rusty nail through your eye socket. Try existing when every second is a new crucifixion.

And yes—sometimes, when the body fails, humor has to pick up the slack. That’s when I became my own back-alley proctologist in a hellish fever dream of DIY horror-comedy. I’m talking mirror, rusted scissors, and the holy spirit of rage and insanity pulsing through my spine. I didn’t clip that hemorrhoid—I exorcised it. With no anesthesia, no grace, just a feral grin and a whisper to Satan that sounded like a dare.

Blood? Oh, it didn’t bleed. It testified. A scarlet eruption. My asshole staged a full-blown Pentecostal revival. It winked at me like it enjoyed it. I didn’t feel shame—I felt baptized. Ecstatically reverse-orgasmed into some deranged liberation, like my colon finally screamed, “We ride at dawn.”

Fuck your sitz bath. This wasn’t recovery. This was guerilla martyrdom. Anal crucifixion meets slapstick hysteria. You think you’ve lived? Try baptizing yourself in rectal blood while hallucinating your ass is possessed by the ghost of Christopher fuckin’ Cross. That’s life, baby. That’s art. That’s war.

But after the absurdity fades—and it always does—you’re left with the real horror: the silence. The abandonment.

I reached out to over forty doctors. Emails. Voicemails. SOS flares of desperation. Most ignored me. A few replied with patronizing suggestions. “Have you tried yoga?” “Maybe it’s just anxiety.” One even said, “Maybe it’s in your head.”

In my head?

Tell that to the 25 pounds I lost. The peeling skin. The detached fingernails. The hallucinations. The stuttering, garbled speech. The vision that blurred, then narrowed, then almost disappeared. My muscles twitched until I couldn’t even hold a spoon. My tongue swelled. My teeth loosened. My hands curled into claws and refused to uncurl.

And still—people thought I was exaggerating.

But this wasn’t withdrawal.

This was erasure.

This was watching yourself vanish in real-time while everyone looked the other way.

Even language betrayed me. Words stopped making sense. My phone garbled my messages into nonsense, like it too had given up on decoding me. I’d send out a cry for help and reread it later, only to realize it looked like gibberish. Like madness. I became a parody of myself—misunderstood, misfiring, and utterly alone.

I avoided mirrors. Because the man staring back wasn’t me. He was gaunt. Hollow-eyed. Slumped. A stranger. A ruin. And it wasn’t just the physical decay—it was the fading spark. The look that says, I am here—gone. Just flickers and static.

I missed the smallest things. Holding a cup without spilling it. Finishing a sentence. Knowing what day it was. Drinking coffee without my nerves staging a riot.

I missed sleep more than I missed people.

And I was alone. No friends. No touch. No human witness to the slow, sacred horror of becoming nothing.

And yet—I write this.

I write it not to beg for help, or pity, or absolution. I write it because bearing witness is the last human thing I can do. Because somewhere out there, someone else might be losing themselves too. And if they read this and whisper me too, even in silence, then something sacred has happened.

You want to know what real hell is?

It’s not flames or demons or the seventh circle. It’s waking up every morning in a body that feels like it’s rotting from the inside. It’s screaming silently in a room where no one can hear you. It’s the moment you realize that even your reflection has forgotten your name.

This is what happens when medicine turns its back. When systems collapse. When the world doesn’t believe the agony it can’t see.

This is what it means to be erased.

And still… I am here.

Maybe not all of me. Maybe not the same me.

But enough.

Enough to tell this story. Enough to claw my way through the syntax. Enough to bleed into the page and say I am still here.

However faintly. However grotesquely. However absurdly.

I exist.

Even now. Even if only as the last laugh echoing from a bathroom floor, holding rusted scissors and whispering amen to the drip.