Not a Hypocrite

Sometime around 25 years ago, I was visiting a friend. It was late autumn, and I’d gone to hang out in her hot tub. We were coming back to her apartment, dripping wet but still defended from the cold by our jacuzzi-heated bodies. I suddenly had the feeling someone–something–very dangerous was following us.

I didn’t say anything about it. We got into her apartment without incident. I got home without incident. I tried to go to bed, but I felt completely unsafe though I’d lived there for years and never had any kind of problem. Finally, desperate to sleep, I pushed my loveseat and couch together so that I could lie down surrounded by “walls.”

It was the only way I could sleep for days. Eventually the dread subsided, and I went back to sleeping in my bed, in my room.

There was a time in that same apartment –where I lived for some seven years–I don’t remember if this coincided with the dread incident, but I don’t think it did–when all I managed to do was go to work. I would grab the mail from the mailbox on the wall by my door, bring it into the house and throw it on the kitchen table. I couldn’t even sort it, let alone open it. I don’t know how long that lasted. I know it was a table that seated six (though I only had two chairs) and that table got pretty full.

I was young and alone. There was no internet (or if there was, I didn’t know about it.) I didn’t have insurance, hadn’t seen a doctor in years. I just kept going, one foot in front of the other. I got through.

So it was normalized. Just a thing. Sometimes the light just goes out of life. Sometimes the fear is…not unbearable, but omnipresent and miserable-making. Sometimes my sense of time wanders off and I just keep going. On and on, all the same and nothing bright or beautiful. I know it’s a lie and sometimes I manage to look up, but the moment my focus wanders from feeling better, down I go again. It’s a thing that I do.

More than a month ago, I realized I was in trouble with a deadline again. I hate being behind on deadlines. I hate when someone is counting on me and I am trying desperately not to let them down, and the impending doom as I know that it’s going to happen, despite my best efforts…but sometimes the writing just doesn’t GO.

I tried. Oh, how I tried! I was/am behind at work, too. And the more behind I got, the less I accomplished. And the more stressed I became.

It occurred to me this week that I have been very afraid of nothing in particular for some time now–well before the blown deadline, but growing in the past few weeks. That lately I walk around with my hands balled up and the smallest request from my (awesome, beloved) boss makes me stare at my desk for ten minutes telling myself I can do it, don’t panic. That maybe I’m not stressed because I’m behind deadline–maybe I’m behind deadline because I’m stressed and anxious and mostly miserable. Maybe I’m yelling at my home-people not because they’re more annoying than usual, but I’m more annoyable.

When I give advice (more often than I should, I’m sure) one of my most common phrases is “You don’t deserve to feel like this.” So I’ll take my own advice. I’ve lived with this roller coaster for more than thirty years. It is not a fun roller coaster. I want off. I’m older, and wiser, and now I have insurance.

I made a doctor appointment. I am hoping he will help me off the roller coaster of doom.