Everything feels heavy, my body and my soul. It is like dragging around a ton of bricks on every limb and the harder I try to shake them off the heavier they grow. My bed is my new sanctuary, a hiding place where the cocoon of duvet makes me feel the only sort of warmth capable of touching me at present. Ny eyes are heavy, despite sleeping they want to close, as if internally my mind is telling them that if they close that all of this will go away. I spend nights wondering whether upon waking anything will have changed and hoping for some small sign that things are improving. Every morning I am disappointed.
I find myself again wondering whether this is going to happen every year. It is like having hayfever, on the approach to summer you think “well maybe this year the pollen won’t be so high and I won’t have those running eyes, stuffy nose and general yuckiness”. Every year I hope I won’t get to this stage. I have wished this every year since I was about 14 when there were the first signs of big mood swings. When people started noticing and saying there were two parts to me – the happy fun side and the quiet, sad, shy side. Year upon year it has been worse, although this year seems to be a little better due to medication. Better in the sense it is later this year than last year. It ruins Christmas as I run away immediately after the Christmas meal to go for a sleep. Because my body is physically heavy and also because being social for any length of time when I feel like this is like running a marathon.
That is why I am hiding, I need to conserve some energy to fight this, to make it go away. I want to undi the big thing that I have done wrong at some point in my life. The big mistake. I am not sure what it was or when it happened but I know it must have been pretty damn bad to lead to feeling like this. It is tedious being able to almost predict moods and exciting when they come from nowhere. I haven’t had a high in ages and it really sucks, more so because the lows still appear.
I just feel drained and I know that writing this post will probably be all that I achieve today. If I make it through all of my meetings tomorrow I will be impressed.
I feel like a complete failure as all of my classmates enter their final week of placement. Even more so when I met some of my ex-classmates at the weekend. The ones that all have nice jobs, money and new lives. They don’t need me anymore and if someone else hadn’t arranged it then they wouldn’t have wanted to see me at all.
IU don’t care anymore that people use me and are friends with me only when they want help, support and a break from loneliness. It doesn’t bother me because it is all I have ever known. I used to cling on to friendships when I was little because I knew how volatile they were, that people had different best friends every day of the week and whoever didn’t have one on any given day hung about with me so as not to be on their own, however, when everything blew over and they became friends again I was the one left standing alone again. I learned to prefer my own company and to this day that is still true.
I have spoken a lot with my psychologist about loneliness although it is not what we have decided to work on. We have decided to work on the fact that I am apparently too hard on myself. If I wasn’t hard on myself I would never achieve anything but apparently we need to find a balance because pushing myself too hard is causing problems. If you don’t aim high you will never achieve anything though so I am not sure I agree completely wqith his idea that this is an issue.
I would like not to feel lonely. I don’t mean in the sense that “I am lonely I have no-one to hang around with” or the “I am lonely no-one has spoken to me in a couple of days”. I want to get rid of the “I am standing in a room with a group of friends and I can’t connect with any of them.” kind of lonely. I want to feel engaged in life again. I want to feel alive and not like I am trapped in this shell that finds it hard to move and hard to breathe.
I am tired, physically and more so tired of fighting. Tired of pushing through this. There is only so much you can fight and year on year I grow a little more tired. Tired to the point where I think “What is the point? Where is all this fighting leading to?” The answer is probably nowhere. I won’t give up yet though. I owe it to people to try and I will. Only because I owe them that much. I owe everyonewho has helped me thus far, even the ones who don’t know it. I owe everyone who has tried to give me a good life and tried to guide me in the right direction. Most importantly I owe it to everyone that I have gotten involved with and consequently the people who have been in the line of fire when it comes to getting hurt by my actions.
I will try for a bit longer.
