I awake feeling as though I am the sun. As though it is midday and I am glorious and shining at full capacity. As though I radiate the type of warmth that would melt away the sins of every dark moment ever experienced. I am alive. I. Am. Alive. My mind whirls with ideas that spin and twirl and bounce ecstatically from wall to wall. I believe myself to be capable of anything and most likely, everything. That there are no parameters. No boundaries. No limits to what I can achieve. I am expansive. I am hopeful. I call every friend in my contacts list. I speak to strangers as if I knew them all along. I am flirtatious. I am rambunctious. I am captivating. I am in a manic high, which I know will only end in tears.
I awake feeling as though the walls have come crashing in. As though the sky has darkened and proclaimed that sunlight has been banned. As though everything is impossible. I am heavy. Everything is a burden. I hold my dreams, my joy, my loved ones, yet there is thick glass between us now. I am numb to all the hope that had once left me sleepless in excitement. I walk and wish the road would never end. I feel as though I am incapable. I cannot possibly imagine how any day will be good again. How anyone will ever understand this thick fog I have found myself wading through. I run from love as if it is the plague. I destroy it. Set fire to it as though it were tissue paper and I a lit match. I do not know how to work through this, so I work myself out of it instead. I am a tornado, unable to maintain the growth I made the day before. I am a blizzard, icing everyone out. Words no longer drip from my mouth. I am a violent streak, hitting and screaming and biting a piece of flesh I resent for not working as it should. I am the bitterness at how my brain is dead wood, whilst everyone else’s is a forest, bursting at the seams with life. I am a ghost before I am dead. I am distant, whilst being held. I want to die, because I cannot cope with this anymore.
I awake light as fresh linen, drying in the summer’s breeze. I am forgetful of the sorrows I once felt. I feel as if today I am a new version of myself. As if yesterday was someone else. Thinking of that person I feel embarrassed and ashamed. I feel confused at how my mood can swing like a pendulum, attempting to find grace. I feel lethargic from all the trying. I think of doctor’s appointments made in the shadows that I consider cancelling in the light. I think of pills that made me motionless. Pills that saved doors from ripping off their hinges and my head from being hit again. I think of unanswered calls and harsh words and big decisions made on top of mountains and suffered in the bog I rolled into when I fell. I am tears cried into an ocean of my greatest despair at never being in the middle of the boat which is now sinking. I am hopelessness. I am the inability to know when this will get better. I am sick of this shit.
I am twenty years of hiding. I am the smiling face concealing all the pain. I am the one you turn to. I am the one who disappears for days and weeks whilst I fall apart and put myself back together again, whilst you didn’t even notice I was gone. I am trying to tell you without knowing how to tell you. I am struggling. I feel alone. I feel unsupported, whilst pushing everyone away. I am unable to explain the magnitude of how each day is difficult for me, as I walk out the door that took me twenty anxious minutes to escape through. I am the one falling apart, wishing you would hold me. I am the one breaking under the weight of your constraints. I am the one putting on as brave a face as I can make, as I know you do not understand what it is to have a rotten brain. What it is to be stuck. To be fragmented, yet still look whole. What it is to get through each day as if it were a marathon. I wish it was my leg that was broken and not my mind. I cannot count on the plans that I make in my best moments, which become distant memories before the day is done. I am a boulder inhabiting a house I have outgrown. I am the meltdown over the smallest of things. I am incapable of processing when things don’t go to plan. I am the one who has dragged my carcass to every work day, every appointment, every yoga class, every country in some vain attempt to get better. To power through. To keep going. To seem like the relatively well adjusted person I am not. I am the one who can count on one hand the nights I have slept through. I am the one who is impressed when I actually manage to get anything done. I am resentful of how strong I have to be when no one realises. I am bitter at all the times I am accused of being weak, in the midst of a battle no one would know how to wage. I am the one who waits patiently for things to fall apart, whilst holding onto the goodness as best as the moment will let me. I am the one who longs for a family I am afraid I will fail and ruin. I am the one being kept afloat, whilst I fear I will never support myself again. I am the one who is hurting. I am the one dying for it to be recognised. For it to be named. I am the one who cannot conceive of how this will ever be fixed. I am the one praying it would go the fuck away.