Just Sleep

Once upon a time, I was a girl.  Naive and hopeful, but she was broken long ago.
Once upon a time, I was a warrior.  Fire and steel, but she got tired of eternal battles.
Now, I am a stranger to myself and the world but I don't know how to find my way back to either version of what I was before.
Too broken to be whole, too whole to be broken, I am instead numb.
I feel the painful, picking, tingle of the world around me but I am not part of it.  Not anymore.  Not yet.
I seem trapped in a bubble; seeing but not being seen, listening but hearing nothing, screaming totally silent.
The path behind me is destroyed.  Invisible.  Impassable.
The fire that lit my way has long since burned out.
I am left in the dark, not knowing where to step next.
I spin in dizzying circles of stagnation and an empty, hollow, aching kind of pain.
Everything around me looks hauntingly familiar in a way that knots up terror beneath my sternum and yet, it's not the world I knew.
It's a muffled, fragmented space that no longer has a place for me.
I have no name, no place, no plan to escape.
I feel it should terrify me to my core but it instead inspires in me a bone deep kind of weary.
All it does is make me want to sleep.
Sleep and sleep and sleep until this bubble I'm trapped in pops and the cotton is my ears comes out and the world comes into focus again.
Sleep until the girl I'm meant to be can find me and wake me.
Sleep and sleep and sleep.

Standing Still

Last time I felt this way, it broke me.

He took my hope, my heart, my love, and he crushed it all.

I wasn't sure I was even capable of ever feeling that way again.

But here you are.

My head is spinning and my heart is beating much too loud.

It makes me want to run, to be reckless, to avoid the possibility of a promise.

But I'm trying not to run.

I'm standing still while my skin sets to fire, while anxiety blooms in my chest to choke me.

I'm letting tears burn my eyes as panic squeezes my lungs until there's no air left for me to breathe.

I'm letting fear eat me alive for a chance with you.

I keep thinking if I let it kill me long enough, I'll make it out alive.

But I'm terrified, confused, and exhausted.

I need you to make a move before it's all to much and I run to something I'll regret.

Please, I'll hold still for as long as I can, but you've got to move.

Campus

Walking on campus last night was strange.  I felt this tug in my chest as I rounded the corner and saw the Welcome Center.  And it hit me all at once; that this place healed me in ways I hadn't realized until that moment.  It was like walking into the room where someone saved your life.  It was a turning point, and it didn't feel like coming home so much as it felt like coming back to yourself.

I drove slowly and looked around, remembering the path I'd gone down when I was there.  A path of healing and growth.  The first friend I made.  The boy who lit the sarcastic spark that had died inside of me too young and saw more in my eyes than anyone else ever had.  We spoke in looks and gestures and so many moments being his friend mended the broken pieces of me.  The first class I took surrounded by people who loved what I loved.  People who laughed at my jokes and listed to my ideas and didn't look down on my plans.  The instantaneous friendships that blossomed into twitter conversations during class and Starbucks runs afterward.  The first room where I made my first real "college friend" that I had more in common with than just our classes.  The friendship circles that became a tradition with strangers who became friends.  Snaps and snorts and national days and workshop anxiety and people who loved me just the way I was.  And then the thing that healed me most: the hallway where five people became friends and planned to skip class with trips to the zoo and sailboat purchases and laughed until the bell rang. 

As I sat in my truck, waiting to go meet my fellow sailor friends, I realized how beautiful it was that I was coming back as alumni to see people who changed my life more than they could ever understand.  I walked onto that campus at nineteen, broken, grieving, drowning, lonely, scared, a ghost of the girl I had been and then it changed me.  Every class and every friend and every day blew a little of the dust off of me.  I walked back onto that campus last night at twenty three, a graduate with a job and a friends who missed me and a place that felt like home.

Shadow Self

"You're different than when we met" he said.

I took a moment to think. 

"I'm not the girl I was back then.  The girl I used to be, I think she's still there deep down inside me.  But she's buried under the rubble.  She's asleep; asleep or knocked out cold from the pain."

"Then who are you now?" He asked.

"Me?  I'm just a shadow of her.  An intangible, darker version cast out into the world by the things that fell on her.  I feel temporary but also like I'm stuck because I don't know how to save her.  I'm not strong enough to pick up the debris and carry her out.  I'm not made of enough substance to really touch her and wake her up."

He didn't have anything to say to that. 
I think it's because he's felt like a shadow-self for much longer than I have.  I think maybe he figured out how to live in that world between worlds.  It's ironic; I used to want to wake him up and now all I want is for him to let me fall asleep.  Then maybe our shadow-selves could find peace.

Left

Things in my life keep breaking me.
A little at a time, the cracks deepen.
I'm holding onto a shattered heart.
People keep pulling on the pieces where they used to live, tearing up my hands.
My first instinct is to hold on tighter and not to let them go.
The stinging in my palms hurts, but I know the loneliness hurts more.
The emptiness they leave behind that rattles me to the bone.
So I hold on tight, and squeeze the shards until blood makes them slick and they finally slip away.
And I am left on the ground, broken and battered.
Hands bloodied and scarred.
Heart missing pieces.
Emptiness crushing in.
Looking at a trail of footprints leaving me alone.

The Consequence of Sitting Out

Have you ever loved something so much, in such a pure and whole way, that you can't even describe why you love it in words?  For me, there are a few things I love that much.  My family.  Going to concerts.  And mission trips.

Recently, I made the decision to sit out on this summer's mission trip.  Last year was...unfortunately not as great as I had hoped for it to be, so I decided that this year I needed a break.  I genuinely thought it was for the best.  I thought I felt a sense of peace and security about missing it.  Until it started this week and I saw how many people I love ended up going.  It broke my heart.  Looking at the videos and pictures all my friends keep posting makes me nauseous.  Literally.  I'm overwhelmed by this sense of longing and regret and missing out.  It's that overwhelming feeling of failure where your nerves crackle and your eyes burn and your breath comes in short, panicked waves.  And all I can think is "I made a huge mistake."  It's that feeling where all your brain can think is that a time machine is the only way to fix this ache in your chest.  A time machine or a do-over, but we don't have those.  We have choices and consequences and right now, I am drowning in the sadness of the consequence of the decision not to go.

At the time, I was up to my eyeballs in feelings.  I was tired and stressed and disappointed from the events of the last trip.  I was dreading situations with people and over analyzing a lot of the things I was dealing with.  And I told myself I wouldn't mind missing it; that one year wasn't the end of the world and there would always be another one.  But here I am, sitting in the floor, wiping away tears, writing to you because it actually doesn't matter how many more there are.  It doesn't matter how well or how poorly the previous trips went.  All that matters is that THIS one, happening NOW, is happening without me and I'm heartbroken.  There are so many lives I'm missing out on touching and so many new friends I haven't met and so many memories that I'm not there to make.  And I hate it.  It hurts so much more than I ever expected it to.  I guess this is one of those "you don't know what ya got till it's gone" situations.  I'm not a fan.

I guess my point in all of this is I learned a lesson this week, and it wasn't fun.  I learned that if you let people and things cloud your judgement, you miss out on important opportunities.  I learned that I've got to make decisions based on what my heart tells me, and not the imaginary world my anxiety conjures from the shadows of my fear.  Take a lesson from me, and don't let the world get in the way of the things you love.

Growing Pains

I was a child when we met, but now I am older.
You are still children, and I'm sorry for that, but I have changed.
You drag me down, demanding and competing and whispering; like skeletal hands pulling me back into the grave.
I answer to no one, to myself perhaps, certainly not to you.
I find my own way, and it does not belong to you, and you do not belong here.
Along the way, somewhere, our paths split apart and now you're blaming me for leaving.
You kicked me out, abandoned me, and then questioned why I left.

It's different now, with different people.  Not with you at all.
They listen, understand, and care.  But nothing I do invalidates them.
We are allowed, you see, to succeed together without one taking away from the other.
This is real, this is age, this is growing.
And I like it so much better here than where I began.
It hurts to grow like this; to become a different sort of person than who I was before, but it's pain that indicates a better future.
Stagnation is death in this life, and at last, I am growing while leaving you behind.

When I'm With You

I like me better when I'm with you.

The panic doesn't eat at my lungs and my heart when I sit beside you.  Or maybe it does.  Maybe it's just easier because I know the same feeling is eating you up too.  Maybe it's not that you make me feel better, but that we drown together in the fear and it's not so devastatingly lonely.

I like me better when I'm with you.

The laughs come easy and the words that bubble out of my mouth don't feel so out of place when I'm saying them to you.  I don't feel separated from my body and my life when I'm with you.  In fact, I'm terrifyingly alive and present.

I like me better when I'm with you.

You take me serious when I plan to escape.  You listen and you plan to go with me.  You don't let the world feel lonely, and you don't make me take it on alone.  You indulge my crazy fantasy futures and you build yourself a place in all of them beside me.

I like me better when I'm with you.

I like existing in a world where you understand my shorthand and you share my obsession.  I just wish I was with you now.

Suburban Sand Dunes

The sun sets and sight takes over. 
Houses are shrouded in darkness. 
Peaks of roofs touch the sky, suburban sand dunes. 
Dark windows blend into the black and make me think of far away places and of home at the same time. 
Distance, far from here, that I could find with you and homes that you and I could choose. 
All of this beneath a moon that looks down on us in different cities and smiles as we close our eyes to fall asleep, thinking of each other.

Voices In My Head

There are voices in my head all the time. 

Some of them are kind.  Voices of parents and teachers and loved ones telling me I’m beautiful and smart and worth every good thing I have and more.  Voices that encourage and strengthen and commend. 

Some of them are my own, constantly repeating things that have happened to me.  Blissful things and terrifying things and devastating things.  Things I wish had happened, things I wish someone had said to me, things I wish I’d said. 

There are voices from my friends, telling me that I matter and they care about me.  Promising to stick around.  There are voices from some of those same people tearing me down and belittling me and ripping me apart with their words.  There are voices and words spoken when they thought me out of earshot. 

There are voices of characters I’ve created, telling me their stories and urging me to change their fates.  Challenging me and pushing boundaries and melding old ideas with new. 

And then there are the voices that don’t belong to a body, the voices that my head itself makes up.  Voices that have no foundation in reality.  Voices that my sick mind has made up just to torture me.  Voices that call me worthless and awkward and useless.  Voices that tell me to read into conversations and see that I’m not welcome.  Voices that tell me that I’ve made too many mistakes to turn back now, and that nothing I can do will ever be enough for anyone.  Voices that tell me I imagined every friendship I ever had.  Voices that tell me no one wanted me to begin with and that I am an imposition on the people around me.  There are voices in my head that pull me down with no prompting from the world, and I can only fight them with so much.  I tell them to stop.  I push them out.  I scream for them to end.  I sob and rock and cry until I gag, begging these voices made up in my mind to stop hurting me, to stop telling me the lies.  Because they are lies, that much I know.  But something about them is so real.  Something about them is so hard to fight.  I fight them every day with varying degrees of success.  I can tell them to stop and they listen, sometimes.  Sometimes, it’s a compromise and I drive around the parking lot but they’re still too loud to let me go inside because they tell me I have no place in there.  But sometimes, it’s been a rough day, and the sun sets, and the voices come on so strong and so hard and so loud that all I can do is succumb to their words and drown in the waves of tears that wash over the edges of my eyes and choke out pleading words until I dissolve into sleep.

Unmasked

You unmask me and I am no longer afraid.
I let my secret spill freely from my lips and I give you sad smiles when I tell you of all I've lost.
You hold my gaze and watch me, quiet, as I tell you of all the ways this world has broken me and you never look away.
Around you, perhaps because of you, I am not ashamed of my past or my broken, jagged pieces.
I am not ashamed of my fears or my doubts and I let the tears come because with you, I am not ashamed of them either.
With you, it's easy to be myself.
I don't have to put on a good face, and I can be happy or heartbroken or giddy or devastated and you support me equally in each case.
You unmask me, and I thought I would be afraid to show you who I am, but I'm not afraid at all.
I am strong and brave and fearless now, because of you, around you.
And I know that when the world comes crashing in, you will hold my hand and I will not be ashamed because you are the face I do not have to hide from.

Run Away

I want to run away.
I want to run through the countryside of a foreign country and lay in the grass and stare at the sky.
I want to laugh until I can't breathe and hold your hand, away from all of this.
I want to say your name quietly underneath the stars, and loudly from the top of a waterfall.
I want to leave this place and never look back.
I want my future to be in maps and hotels and new places.
I want my plans to be in new languages and unseen faces and in your eyes.
I want a plane ticket and a bag and my passport and you.
I want to run away from here, just the two of us until we forget our past.
I want to make up new identities and be new, and untouched by the past we both want to run from.
I want to climb mountains and buy books and sit on beaches that I've never been to before.
I want to exist in new time zones and breathe new air.
I want to run away from here with you, and I know you want to run away too.

Confessions

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how often we unintentionally lie to ourselves and to others.  I’m totally guilty of it too, but I want to take a minute to be honest with you, with me, with everything.

I’m not happy in this town.  That’s not a secret.  I’m terrified that if I walk into Walmart I’m going to run into one of the dozens of people I used to be friends with.  I’m afraid of confrontation.  I’m afraid that they’ll hurt me again.  I’m afraid they’ll walk past me like I never mattered to them at all.

I’m afraid I don’t matter very much to anyone, except my family.  I know that mattering to my family should count more than anything else, but when I look back on my life, I wonder if they’ll be the only ones who remember me.

I can’t tell the difference between genuine affection and fake affection anymore.  The minute someone starts to talk to me, I assume they have some ulterior motive.  I don’t trust anyone, even my friends to have my best interests at heart.  I’ve been hurt so many times by people who said they cared about me and loved me, that it doesn’t surprise me when it happens.  Now, I just wait for it and think “saw that coming” when it ends.

I’m falling fast for someone who probably won’t be there to catch me.  Falling for another person who doesn’t have the same feelings for me.  Falling because I imagined there feelings that weren’t really there.  Falling for someone who is probably the best thing that ever happened to me.  And I hate myself for going there with him, because I was able to keep my feelings at bay for such a long time.  And I will never tell him how I feel.  I tried that once, or twice, or a few times and I always get hurt.  I don’t want to look foolish by doing it again, so I won’t.

I don’t look forward to things anymore.  The most exciting thing I’m setting my sights on is Avengers: Infinity Wars releasing in a few weeks and after that…I don’t know what to be excited about anymore.

I have six friends.  I only talk to one of them every day and not for very long.  Most days, it feels like I have no friends at all.  No one calls, no one texts, no one wants to hang out.  Most days, I am alone.  

I realized recently that I have been changing my behavior so someone wouldn’t be mean to me or have reason to talk about me behind my back.  That sucks.  I trap myself in toxic friendships all the time.  It’s one of my few talents.

I miss singing.  I'm actually good at it.  I miss having the confidence to sing in front of other people.  I miss not having anxiety claw its way up my throat when people look at me.  I miss being able to sing at the top of my lungs, full of joy and passion and not be embarrassed that someone might notice me.

I keep imagining this future with a husband and kids and a house and endless days of sunshine and laughter, and I don’t know how to get there.  It makes my chest physically ache with loneliness.  Sometimes at night, most nights actually, I have to take deep breaths and pull my blankets tight so the loneliness doesn’t start crushing my chest.  Sometimes, the loneliness crushes me anyway.  Sometimes I cry into my pillow until my body is so worn down from shaking and silently crying that sleep finally sucks me in and I wake up with sore joints and red eyes and a raw throat.  Sometimes things are very, very bad at night.

I feel, lately, like connecting with people is too much effort.  I don’t even have real conversations with my best friend anymore because I feel so exhausted from trying to figure out what to say to him.  It's not his fault.  He's the best person I know, and still I feel like I’m a burden if I’m not all rainbows and sunshine and smiles.  I don’t want to bring him down, so I don’t talk to him much through the day.  I feel so tired, all the time, from the effort of simply existing that I just don’t have much energy for anything else.  I kind of hate myself for being that way.  I want to tell someone.  Anyone.  But I don’t want to bring them down or bother them.  I guess that’s why I tell you, faceless Internet readers and loyal friends; it makes me feel better for a little while.

I remember what it was like before my aunt died, and it was a different life.  I remember being happy and thinking all the time that I was so blessed to be who I am and have the friends I had and the family I have.  And I still feel blessed, but now it’s more like I feel blessed that the things I love haven’t been taken away.  It’s a more sad feeling of “blessed” than it used to be.  I remember being fearless and bright and open before she died. And I remember being an absolute zombie after.  And now, I feel like I’m stuck in no man’s land between those two places and I’m not quite sure what to do or where to go or who to be.  It scares me sometimes how comfortable I am in my brokenheartedness.  It scares me that I don’t really want to get out of this dark place enough to fight for the light.  But I do want the light.  I want a future and happiness and a life and a family…it’s complicated I guess.  I wish it was simpler.  Maybe then I would know what to do.

I hate that all of these honest things are so morose.  There are good things too; good, honest, real things about me, but they don’t scare me like these do.  I’m not ashamed of the good things or the goofy things.  I’m not afraid to share my good truths.  My love for glitter, my hopeless romanticism, my belief that Bigfoot might be real; none of that is buried deep inside me where no one can see.  I wear those truths proudly on my sleeves.  But the hard ones, the dark ones, the scary ones, those are the ones I had to get out my system.  Those are the ones that burn me up from the inside out.  Those are the ones I wish someone would look past the smiles and the obnoxious laugh to see.  Those are the parts of me I’m afraid to share with people.  Those are my scars.  Those are my confessions.

The Truth

You think you want the truth until you hear it.

Until people tell you how you broke them.

Until the ones you love don't love you back.

Until the wrong person is in love with you.

Until you find out why they left you.

Until you hear what they said when you were gone.

Until the truth comes out and you can't take it back.

You think you want clarity, but what if it's not enough?  What if the truth you want isn't the truth you get?  What if you made up a version of the truth in your head only to discover it isn't real?

What if the truth is a disappointment?
What if it's something you can't live up to?
What if the truth hurts everyone more than just keeping it in?

The truth you think you want is that every beautiful person you're in love with is in love with you too.  That the rest of the world thinks you're irreplaceable and magnificent.  That you're the smartest, kindest, most genuine human to exist.  That you're irresistibly wonderful.  And you are.  To someone.  But what if the truth is that you're all the right things to the wrong person?  What good is the truth then?

Waste Of Time

"She was a waste of time"

That's what I read in a two year old group text back in December.  Only, it said my name instead of "she."

I woke up the morning of my graduation party to a feeble attempt at repairing a broken friendship by restarting a group chat.  They didn't even bother to start a new one.  They opened the old one and ripped open that wound and I woke up to the words "she was a waste of time" written about me two years ago.
And no one disagreed.  No one fought for me.  No one reprimanded him.

I was doing really well in those two years.  I went from having panic attacks once a week to a softer, more gentle version of anxiety.  I still wanted to throw up when I got out of the car, but I didn't cry myself to sleep anymore.  I didn't shake.  I didn't gasp for air.  For two years, I was healing.  I was lonely, but I found someone important who was dealing with anxiety too and somehow, I think we helped each other feel better every day.
And then I woke up and saw that I "was a waste of time" to people I had loved.

It has been almost three months since I read that message and while I'm driving my brain will say "you're a waste of time."
I'll be laughing with my best friends, and in the back of my mind I hear "you're a waste of time."
I'll be dancing in my room to loud music and out of no where I hear "you're a waste of time."

I feel like I'm supposed to tell you that deep down, I know I'm not a waste of time, but I can't.  I think I know on some internal level, somewhere in me that the anxiety hasn't settled, somewhere I know that I'm not.  But wherever that place is, it's not strong enough.  So random times during my day the voice of that person I left behind whispers "you are a waste of time" and I retreat.

That's what you get when you are friends with people who don't respect your traumas.  That's what happens when you befriend people who are more interested in making you sick than making you better.

This is hard for me to write.  It's hard for me to tell you all that someone out there broke into my psyche and tore me apart with two year old words.  But this is the only way I know how to heal.
A few years ago, when I stopped being friends with those people, it was self preservation.  So is this.  Cutting off the poison and then writing about how it burned is the only way I know how to heal.  My hope, is that maybe one day, after this, I'll discover that place inside of me that truly believes I'm not a waste of time.  Maybe I'll find that part of myself and know how to bring it out.  Until then, all I know to do is tell you how it hurts and pray that it soon stops.