Third Try…

Sir wants me to try this again.

It’s evening now. I talked to my best friend, S, for a long time this morning and it helped for a while. But, ultimately, what’s wrong with me can’t be talked through or reasoned through or… anythinged through.

I am perfectly aware that my feelings are irrational, illogical, not based in reality… at least not in the reality anyone else around me experiences. In spite of that knowledge, they have complete power over me. And I’m tired of feeling like a failure for not being able to reason my way out of them.

I feel like I’m under assault, under attack, in a foxhole taking fire. I haven’t ever been in combat, so I probably can’t compare anything to that, as I probably have no idea what that is like. But it feels like what I imagined as I was reading All Quiet on the Western Front in ninth grade. It feels like what K describes when he (twice in my life) gets drunk enough to talk about combat…

It feels like never being able to raise my head, never being able to catch my breath, always waiting for the next attack from within my own brain. It feels like holding a door against an intruder that never tires, while I slowly, inevitably weary until I can’t hold it back any longer.

I feel helpless. I feel hopeless. I feel like I cry all of the time. Except when even the effort to cry seems more than I can muster.

I sat on the deck this morning with D and Sir and they were talking about something that I wasn’t attending. I looked at some dead leaves that have collected in the corners of the deck over the winter. I thought about sweeping them up, and felt crushed by the weight of even considering making the effort.

I told Sir that I don’t think my Adderall is working. He said he thinks it is, but something else is wrong. He says that my body stays still more when I am on my Adderall than when it wears off. My tongue rests more easily in my mouth, my words lay more still in my chest, my anxiety loses its energy.

But, I pointed out to him, summoning all of my effort to forming the words, I can’t get anything done. Adderall makes me get things done, it makes things easier, less heavy, less overwhelming… it isn’t working. Everything is still heavy. Everything is still overwhelming.

Sir says ADHD and depression have similar but not exactly the same symptoms. Sir says he thinks I’m depressed.

I don’t have room to be depressed.

I don’t have any space left for this.

All of my space is filled up with PTSD and developmental trauma and ADHD and fucking five medications to even function on a daily basis, and even then, only poorly.

Sir says I’m having a lot of distorted thinking. He’s usually really careful not to be judgmental of my thinking. He avoids words like that… distorted… he treads lightly and says things like, “My perception is different from your perception…”

Lately, he’s given up and resorted to fully telling me that I’m wrong.

And I know… I know that… I know that in everyone else’s universe, he’s right and I’m wrong.

I know that.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t make a shit bit of difference what I know.

What I know and what is real, are separate and distinct things.

What is real is…

My boss hates me.

My coworkers are annoyed by me.

My friends are tired of me.

My doctor hates me.

My therapist is annoyed by me.

Only if I can manage to keep my mouth shut and pretend well enough will I be able to prevent my doctors from knowing how profoundly stupid I really am.

I should quit therapy and medication and doctors and… stop being a burden on everyone.

I made up my trauma. It isn’t real. It’s a story I started telling myself and now I’ve told it for so many years I halfway believe it. But it never happened. I have everyone concerned and caring about me and trying to help me for something that never happened.

I’m a liar.

I’m too fat to love.

I’m too ugly to love.

I am too repulsive to be touched, or viewed, or valued, or allowed to live.

I am weak.

I am stupid.

I can’t keep my mouth shut.

Everyone thinks I’m an addict and trying to manipulate the system for pills.

I’m stupid.

I’m ugly.

I hate myself so much it is like a physical touch on my skin, it is like black tar that I can’t wash clean.

I struggle more times a day than anyone knows not to punch myself in the face when the hatred rises up so much that I think I’m going to die if I don’t hurt myself.

There is nothing anyone can do to help me.

I feel like my sanity is a thin veneer and people keep pushing at the weak places and they don’t realize that one too many pushes is going to shatter it entirely and I won’t… be able to… hide any of it anymore… it will all come spilling out like black, chaotic, tentacles of madness.

I have a student who is struggling. He shuts down, freezes, and then goes wildly, uncontrollably violent.

I feel like I am him, inside, beneath the mask that so far is still hiding it, but is cracking more each moment. I feel it leaking through when my trauma therapist asks me to consider sharing something with my psychotherapist, when Sir says I need to let my psychiatrist know, when my psychatrist says I need to get surgery if the other option is dying…

I feel the freeze rise up inside me.

I feel it seize my body.

I feel my mind separate into strands, pulling away from each other, as the concept of “I’ that I’ve worked so hard to attain dissolves to nothing. The watcher retreats to the shadows, only vaguely aware of the other parts – the responsible one, the angry one, the protector – restless in the periphery. The watcher waits in the shadows and holds the memories for the return of “I.” The others wait for the mask to crack. Wait to see if they are needed. Wait to see if the pressure will easy and the container remain intact.

It’s broken twice.

Then all the boundaries dissolve and everything is real at the same time… reality and unreality, chaos and stillness. My timeline shatters and every moment exists and ceases, one after another, without order or sequence, without past or future.

The shell breaking is madness.

It is crying in public.

It is unconnected words.

It is pen lights in my eyes, and “I want you to try to remember the following words for me…” and forgetting them as I hear them, like they are water poured into my hands and I forget to close my fingers.

It is drugs until I drool, and can I copy a cube…

It is cracking again. Pressure from within and prodding from without and the shells is crazing from both sides.

There is no hope.

There is no help.

I am alone.

But at least “I” will dissolve again when the shell breaks. “I” is last on, first off. The watcher doesn’t feel anything. If “I” ever come back, I guess that means I won’t have to remember the pain.