First off, thank you so much for all the reach outs, comments, texts, calls, and other means of connecting. It’s meant the world to me and really helped. I know it’s tough, but I am hoping by writing real things that it may help me and others.
Onward!
Scene: the clinic.
I can feel it coming on. Like a slow, grimy, thick, weight. I’ve now known what I’ve been doing, attempting to do, to suppress all the hurt, obsessions, eating disorder activity, and general pain and weariness that the past few years has caused. I think part of me really didn’t think it was this bad…I have things under control, right? That should be every eating disorder/OCD patients battle cry. Like if we say it enough it will come true. Its a pathological lie we tell ourselves. Convincing ourselves daily that it will be OK until its just, not. And then we break. Break down, like we need to do, but also like we don’t want to do, and also like how scary it is, and also like how necessary it is. Because without breaking down, there is only continued suffering. There is always pain, but the suffering…that can be…managed? I try to find the right words. Maybe managed. More so, curbed, if you can face the pain. But the pain…the pain of lost chances, lost efforts, lost regrets, isolation, lost opportunities, lost connections. The existential pain that you are missing out on opportunity, but you must allow yourself to face this, or else it will perpetuate for eternity. Consume you. More than it already has, if that’s even possible. Sacrificing one day for a life time. One year, for a life time. It somehow makes sense, but it doesn’t sound logical in the moment. Or at least, fun. Its never fun. But it can be peaceful. Right now, its still suffering though. Trying every trick in the book to not go, to not face it, to convince myself into believing that its OK without any help. Without any voicing. Without any facing. If only, I could just go back, if only, I would have had it all under control…its become a manifesto of sorts. The kind of pain that says I-don’t-want-to-do-this but the intelligent part of you says you need to be then the emotional part just cycles in hurt because you have connections, jobs, chances, opportunities, loves, flirts, mountains, trails…all to conquer. But it just can’t be, today. Probably not tomorrow. Maybe not for a little while. This is what I wonder was obvious to everyone but me. Did it always seem this bad? Or was it an ever increasing escalation of shit that led to it? I’ve tried to control the past for too long…how obvious it seems, but how ineffective I am at stopping the machine. Ahh, to break down and see. As someone once said somewhere, you must break it all open in order to build anew.
I seem to oscillate sometimes between true clarity and absolute madness. Like my mind is constantly playing tricks on me, keeping me in a circle of doubt and the aching for control. Maybe its running? Literally and figuratively? Knowing the pain we must face? Likely. Its hard to go down when you’ve been up so high, so present, for a long time. It feels, soul crushing. I so desperately yearn for something to control, the past, likely, I feel – for the last 4 years, especially since the incredible mess that was 2020>2021>kind of 2022.
Since the incredible mess that was the Pandemic, (I still cringe at those words; it doesn’t seem wholly…real; like it was a fake? Not fake, but, so, disillusioned on all fronts) I feel I have experienced a complete loss of all things, with a gradually escalating sense that things aren’t right, that’s not right, this isn’t right, EVERYTHING is not right. Trying to put a world back together that just doesn’t exist anymore…maybe that’s where the break was…in a world that seemed so obnoxiously out of control, I went inward and so desperately tried to control myself, and my life, and everything that I had at that point in time. But ah, the tighter you squeeze, the more pops out. Sadly. Every thought, emotion, doubt, uncertainty, and choice. I try to control. Its constant, on a day to day, hour to hour basis. Every thought could be the end of me. Every emotion could mean I made the wrong choice in my life. Its all too much to control. Impossible to control, really. But the opposite is to experience the depth and despair of true loss, of a world that I wanted so badly to work out.
The weird twist in all of this is that the summer of 2020 was honestly one of the best of my life. I had never felt more present, more, weirdly, giddy. I was laid off (hurtful, but not in this moment), had a core group of friends, and I swear all we did was just go camp and drink and adventure and party and have fun. It wasn’t so much the fact that I didn’t have to work, I mean that was nice, but it more so showed what really mattered. Friends. Connection. Present. Slowing down, finally. And then, fall of 2020, time to move forward. And I think thats where it all stopped. Or came crashing in. Down. I cant quite tell. The reckoning of a time that was so crystalline, so, focused, into now the mess that I can’t seem to deal with, or not even deal with, but, how, just how do you move forward from all of that? A life that was realized but never fully fulfilled? It’s an impossible loss that wasn’t really lost but it was lost but I kind of tried to put it back together but it never truly worked and never truly could be put back together. It was over. But I didn’t want it be over. Ahh control. I think I was forced to reckon with things and have been running ever since.
Bye for now.
The Search for Gratitude 