Normally I share my posts via Facebook so that people can read them and hopefully have a chuckle at my bizarre life experiences. This will not be one of those times.
Sometimes I feel desperately sad. It isn't always the gut wrenching, drowning in your own tears type of sad. The vast majority of the time it's a sort of hollow, dragging feeling in my throat that makes me want to sleep for a week.
It happens in uncomfortable and mostly random waves, all triggered out of nowhere by reminders of things that caused the dragging to start in the first place. It appears, for the most part, without warning, and my eyes drift and my mouth pins itself closed and my lungs fill with sour air and my brain feels like it's floating in a pool of water inside my skull. My heart beats quickly and awkwardly in my chest as if it isn't mine, and I feel like my internal organs are missing at times... or as if someone is trying to pull them out of my mouth piece by piece with a long hook.
Trying to explain this to anyone is difficult, at best, and is almost never done for several reasons. One being that the vast majority of people will think I'm either a) exaggerating it, or b) f*cking nuts. The latter probably isn't too far off the mark.
I have had two therapists in my brief stint on this planet. One who, upon filling out a check-list of depression and anxiety inducing life experiences and only leaving 4 out of 15 unchecked, complimented me on my level of general sanity. The other was a calm and quietly spoken gentleman who tried to help me get over past events by making me relive every minor detail of them in his office. He was met, during most sessions, with a blubbering wreck of a person who couldn't form sentences after five minutes.
The very small handful of people who know me best know that these things are something that I relive frequently, and even some of those people don't know what all of those things are. I have to truly love a person to let them into that side of my life. Not to mention the fact that I have to be comfortable in the knowledge that they aren't going to assume that I'm either making it up, or that I'm telling them to evoke some sort of onslaught of sympathy or reassurance. There are certain parts of my past that my own family aren't aware of and that I probably wouldn't tell them about if you held a gun to my head. There is a certain amount of dignity, that a sprinkling of other people have stolen from me in a variety of sadistic ways, that I would at least like to pretend is still in tact to the people who raised me to be the strong, outspoken person whose mask I wear on a day to day basis.
In the company of others I am a ridiculous idiot. I put on silly accents and dance with the rhythm of a pigeon with a missing toe and contort my face into a wide spectrum of unappealing shapes. I think that, for the most part, my ridiculous, idiotic behaviour is an elaborate disguise that I wear to hide the fact that inside I feel a little like I'm rotting. It might also be because it's my way of trying to convince myself that everything is okay, that one day I'll be able to act like this *without* it being used as a coping mechanism.
On my own I am an entirely different animal. I sit in my room and I draw, cry, sew, crochet, sing, cry, write, cry, stare off into space... sleep. I do it all within the confines of my bedroom walls and I do it for no particular reason at all. Nothing vastly horrifying has happened to me for a good few years now, and yet I can't shake the feeling that I'm due a shitstorm of some description; that, just around the corner, is something watching and waiting for me to feel happy and comfortable in the arms of my daughter or my other half, before it strikes me down and I end up back in a pit of abject misery. I have felt this way since the first "incident" when I was 13. 13 is an unlucky number for most, due to the social universe telling them that it should be, but for me it packs a bit more of a punch. For the first 9 years of that period I was right. There was something else brewing and it seemed to be on an 18 month cycle. I'd move on and recover from something and then something else would kick me in the teeth. 2009 was when my brain decided it had had enough and I fell into what my second therapist described as a "textbook mental breakdown." The world and the more sadistic members of its population had chipped so many pieces of me away by that point that I didn't have the emotional capacity to deal with it anymore.
Doctors have given me pills and blank-faced therapists. The people who care about me have tried to understand and give me time, support and love.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I go and lay next to my daughter for a while. I stroke her face and whisper that I love her and she sleeps soundly in my arms... and for a moment, I remember why I'm still going. She is my most treasured gift and she will always be my reason for living. Always.
The best thing I can do for myself now is be happy, and feel safe in the knowledge that I am surrounded by people who want me to get better; and I will, in time. I have no doubt about that. Once I'm able to let go of the things that drag me down and can truly appreciate the things that lift me, I'll get better.
I'm hoping that the thing I can feel waiting for me around the corner is, this time, something good.
