An Introduction, Minus the BS

Some things I am going to tell you about me: I am a woman. I am a woman of color. I was raised in a two parent household. I have lived as a sexual abuse survivor since I was twelve. I have lived with depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD since I was a teenager. I have lived as a mother since I was 18. I have lived with parent loss since I was 21. I have lived with an invisible chronic illness since I was 24. I have lived as an empath for as long as I can remember. 

I have lived.

And there are good days and bad days and in between days. I have learned to ride the waves of depression and grief as best as I possibly can. I have learned that challenging things don’t stop happening in our lives at some magical point, we just become better experienced at living through these challenges. 

I have learned.

But I am crying now, as I write this, because today is a day I am falling apart.

It has been building for weeks. I could feel it inside me from its inception, but it had no familiar name. I dismissed it as my usual fluctuation of highs and lows. But I knew it was different. Or maybe it's the same, and I've just been in denial.

Either way, I've been walking around for several days with the urge to cry for no reason. Sometimes I appease it, others, I swallow it hard and move on to something else. I have all these things on my plate; things that, for a "normal" person might be a busy yet doable list of tasks, but for me, is a sentence to further insanity. 

I cannot handle it.

I implode.

Then I explode.

Last night, I got up calmly from my laptop where I had been attempting to work on putting together a fundraiser for a national event I'm competing at in March. I went into my bedroom, shut the door, got under my covers, and before my head touched my pillow, the sobs spilled out of me without permission. It was violent and scary and I couldn't do anything to stop it. I was so affected by this unnamed feeling that I hyperventilated and threw up. And as all of us mothers know, after carrying two children to term, that also meant an underwear change.

I was and am terrified. What is going on with me? What is wrong with me? I must be a deeply dysfunctional human being.

My husband came in to the bedroom to check on me and found me sobbing on the bathroom floor. He occupied the kids, helped me clean up, and carried me to bed. He sat with me until I had calmed enough that I wasn't bursting into uncontrollable tears every two minutes. 

"I can't breathe through my nose anymore. I don't know what this is. I cannot name it and I don't know how to get it out of me." I wailed. Naming things is very important to me.

And despite further statements of my inadequacy and my sympathies for him for having married such a full blown lunatic, he sat with me, and reminded me, that having a hard time does not equate to any of these things; that I am not every bad thought I can muster, even though it feels that way in this moment.

And it does feel that way in this moment. It really does.

I have thought about starting this blog for many months now. But I cannot start this blog because not "doing it the right way" causes me such worry.

I have several now abandoned blogs. Some of the posts I've transferred here and leave them unpublished, hidden from my own critical eyes. I have a website that I barely maintain, half a dozen unfinished manuscripts, a legitimate knowledge of financial services and a state certified insurance license that hasn't had an ounce of business written under it yet. 

Recently, I won the opportunity to represent a beautiful poetry community at an awesome event where there will be hundreds of amazing women like me, communing and sharing their truths, but at the end of any given day, if you asked me for a real answer, I would tell you I don't belong there. I'm an outsider. I do not have any place or value in these communities.

So I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking at my to-do list, making notes on how to put it all together, and I CAN'T DO IT. None of it makes sense.

Yesterday I posted on facebook about doing something empowering in the face of my illness. Moments later I collapsed. 

Do you know how many books I could have finished with all the words I've written on facebook?

That tidbit has already been the source of multiple days of feeling worthless.

So many people share with me how much my honesty has impacted their lives for the better. I know there are many of us living with our own combination of challenges every day. We are a very secretive society. We don’t talk about these things. We didn't really talk about them in my house either. I mean, they were mentioned, but not the way we should have, and up until recently, I even viewed my upbringing as very open and communicative. My father had a degree in psychology for goodness sake.

But the truth is, we skimmed. That’s what we do though, we skim. When you post something on facebook, you skim. When I post something on facebook, I skim. We all skim.

I do not tell you how some days I don’t get out of bed till late in the afternoon, how some weeks I don’t shower for days at a time, how I don’t always brush my teeth. I don’t tell you about the laundry piling up on my bedroom floor or the dishes unwashed in the sink. I don’t tell you about the waste baskets in my bathroom spilling over. I don’t tell you how I panic over making and receiving phone calls, that my inbox goes completely abandoned for unacceptable amounts of time because I cannot do something so simple as responding to an email. I don’t tell you how I had a meltdown over pancakes the other night. And before that it was something equally minuscule. I don’t tell you how I lose my temper and lash out at the people I love most. I don’t tell you how I isolate. I don’t tell you how I don’t talk about it or write about it. I don’t tell you just how good I am at swallowing the truth. I imagine I make the ugly sound pretty romanticized. It’s what I do. I’m a writer…on the good days, that is.

Today, I am nothing.

Today, I can do nothing.

Today, there is nothing.

And you can’t tell me shit.

There is no moral here.

But I guess I finally started this blog.