Such is life, she often said.

It is very hard for me to function sometimes, but I am doing the best that I can.

I also do not understand how I have a bigger audience in Russia for this blog than I do in the United States. I don't even know how I have an audience at all.

It must seem to you, reader, like I focus too much on my anxiety. I wish that weren't the case. I wish I could focus on my life, but I'm not invested in anything except the pure, gripping terror I feel all the time, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for a very specific reason.

I miss the person I used to be.

I miss the person I'm supposed to be.

Drabble.

Oh, anxiety, I am so angry with you. I never thought that could happen, being angry with a concept. You're right up there with love and hatred - you can't be wholly defined universally. You mean a different thing to everyone. 

I mean, you've got your dining chairs and your bean bag chairs and your comfy dad chairs, but a chair is always a chair. No one will ever know if the way that I perceive love is the same as their own perception. 

The same goes with you, anxiety. You're not real. You're not a concrete object, but you are the force that works against me everyday like gravity, which, by the way, is apparently not a downward force, this universe is a lie. 

Maybe I shouldn't be awake reading theories about outer space but maybe I could also learn a few lessons from my perception of anxiety. Let's jumble these two together and make a blog post, yeah?

(What does that even mean? Jesus Christ, Einstein, you're long dead and you still stop me in my tracks. This is why it's a compliment to call someone an "Einstein" but using my last name as an adjective would entail nothing more than a disorganized concoction of about five of the seven deadly sins and also bad jokes. 

Alright. Fuck physics, fuck astronomy, fuck Einstein. Gravity is either a downward force or a distortion of the shape of space-time, or maybe it's neither, and some new smart cookie will come out and say, "No, gravity has been this all along" and everyone will want to buy baby foods with his or her name on it. That doesn't matter. 

But anxiety is more than just a perception. It's like this: love doesn't exist in the concrete and physical sense, but if you ask me if love is real, I'll tell you damn straight. And you'll ask me how I know, and I'll tell you that I can feel it. 

But I can't point it out to you: I can't tell you that love is feeling stubble against your cheek because you might not like facial hair. I can't tell you that love is your boyfriend trying extremely hard to make a pun from "Sleeping Beauty" that will always be redundant because that might not be your sense of humor. 

But is it real? Is it just as real as a bean bag chair? Of course it's real! 

Or time! Time doesn't exist - clocks exist. But yet we have minutes and hours and days and all of those are composed of seconds and we call it all "time" even though we can't really define it or weigh it or poke it with a stick. We are dependent on the confines of time because we need its structure to give our tiny, finite existence meaning in a seemingly infinite universe. We need time to exist, so it does.

But love, time, hatred, all of those things can be just as concrete as that unfashionable bean bag chair. Do people even buy those anymore? They can weigh on your chest just as heavy as anything else. They can suffocate us. 

The same goes with anxiety. I wish it were something that was easy to define. I suppose, put simply, it's fear. But it is more than fear. It is when you take fear and you turn it into a state of being. 

For me, my anxiety often focuses on dying young. But I'm not afraid to die young, no more than anyone else in the world. But my anxiety allowed that small little flicker of awareness of my own mortality to turn into a wildfire. My body basically really, really fucking sucks as a firefighter. My body needs to be fired from the squad.

It is hard to struggle every day with something that doesn't exist. When you cut your arm open, you can see it. You can see the blood coming out of the open wound. With anxiety, it's easier to dismiss. Your body is perfectly fine. No one expects there to be anything wrong with you. Sometimes, people don't even believe you. It is not something that makes your heart stop beating but anxiety can definitely kill you. 

Anxiety might not exist in a physical sense, but if you were to ask me if it is real, I would say damn straight. I know what it is to me, and to me, it is probably the most durable, concrete, hard-as-hell-to-destroy thing I have ever come across.

Anxiety is a downward force, if you ask me. Or maybe it's a distortion of the shape of space-time. It may even just be the subject of the sloppy musings of a young woman in the middle of a sleepless night. I'm not intelligent enough to make that call. 

Those persuasive rays

I have to cut this attitude I've developed where I am nothing but a useless burden to everyone I love. I am not who I want to be, and it is not because I have an anxiety disorder. It is because I am letting that anxiety disorder control me.

I deserve to be proud of myself. I deserve to love myself. I deserve to take care of myself. And just because my loved ones can't cure me does not mean that I should not accept their support. No good comes from my isolation.

I'm going to be better. I'm going to be who I want to be and my anxiety will just have to deal with it. I'm so much stronger than I've been lately.

eek.

I am tugging at the collar of my shirt uncomfortably. I am clicking a pen over and over, and I am trying to find hollow, temporary comfort in words that are not my own. I am tired. I am so tired in mind, body, and spirit.

I genuinely do not know how to find the strength to be the person who handles herself with confidence and silliness.That is who people expect me to be because that is the person I used to be. Some days, I manage a shoddy version of it, but most days, I feel as useless as other people should think I am. I used to be charming. I used to be charming and I used to be brave. I used to be so beautiful in so many ways, and I wasted that time as a stupid little teenager trying to find meaning in textbooks and boys who treated me poorly.

I guess that was the way to spend high school, and it's entirely not unique to me. It passed by quickly and nothing remarkable happened. Nothing remarkable has become of me thus far.I have a full-ride scholarship. I'm going to go to college for free because I got grades that made me stand out among over 500 people in total who applied for that same scholarship. I will never, not once in my life, have to worry about paying off student loans. While I recognize that this is entirely remarkable in itself, I cannot find a reason for it anymore. I cannot find a reason for much anymore. Unremarkable I remain.

On nights like this, it is very difficult for me to see myself as anything but this weak frame of a person that has been hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern. I am no longer any of my redeeming qualities. I am not funny, I am not smart. I am not beautiful or bold. Instead, I am afraid. I am terrified, actually, and that is who I am now. That is what my personality has become. I am unlovable, irrational, and I have been twisted into this pitiful version of the beautiful, vibrant person I used to be. I'm a palette of pastels when I used to be tie-dye. (I guess that's okay, though. Tie-dye isn't really in style anymore.)

And it makes me want to throw a fit. I want to stomp through my house and slam my door, and I want to break things out of frustration because dammit it is not okay for me to be like this. It is not okay for me to be who I am now because I want to scream that it isn't who I am supposed to be. But it's taken over my entire personality by making it exhausting to put forth any effort into anything else. This is not the version of me that I like. This is not the version of me that anyone should love, and it makes me angry that people still care about me because, sooner or later, they're going to realize that their efforts are null and void; I have a real problem, and they can't help me. And they won't want to be around me anymore. Why would they? Why should they? I'm not the kind of person right now that forwards anyone in their lives. I've become parasitic. I am needy and sooner or later I'll be unwanted.

Some days, I'm good. Excellent, even. Some days, I get out of bed and I feel okay and I go spend my time with friends or at work and it's great to be alive and everything is okay because I am okay and the world is spinning just like it's supposed to and god it feels so good. But those days are becoming the minority. Every day, I am in a constant battle with myself. Some are easier than others, but somewhere within me, there's always a feeling of this horrific powerlessness over my own mind.

I talk as if my life is over, and I recognize that it's hardly even begun yet. But recognizing is not the same as feeling. I recognize that nothing has changed in my world. Gravity works the way it is supposed to work. I will scoop ice cream again tomorrow. It's unexciting, really. But I, who has always prided herself on the ability to look at the bigger picture, cannot see into a future where I do not feel as hopeless and on the verge of giving up (Giving up on what, exactly? Fuck if I know. I think this is just a phrase people use for effect.).

I really hope that there are better nights ahead of me.

we don't want no drama.

This was originally about depression, but it is everything I've been trying to say but lacked the elegance.

"Anxiety is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.


"Anxiety is humiliating.


"If you’ve never had anxiety, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of an anxiety disorder over an averagely turbulent normal life.

"It's not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If anxiety has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.


"Anxiety is humiliating.


"No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.

"Anxiety is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a person with an anxiety disorder may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their anxiety. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”

Be okay be okay be okay today

I'm trying really hard to trust you by ignoring the constant voice in the back of my head telling me to be fine for you. You're the first person who I don't feel like I have to do that for. It's a foreign feeling, and I'm afraid that in becoming too reliant on it.

I'm immensely sorry you have to know who I really am. 

I always put myself in your place. If you were going through what I am right now, if you were battling something I could not possibly fix or understand, I would feel powerless. It would be irrational, but I would feel like I was not doing my job. 

God, I hope that's not how you feel. No one's ever been as good as you are to me. I hope you never think that you do not make me happy. If I found out my problems were making you feel like you were any less than the perfect person you are, it would genuinely break my heart.

(But I hope you'd be honest with me, if it was too much. My heart can take another hit.)

This is a struggle for me. If you were anyone else, you'd never know about this. I'd put on my brave face and be silly because that's who I know how to be. But I don't want to lie to you, and at the same time, I don't want to be too much for you. I would hate myself if who I am ever drove you away. I couldn't stand it. I could probably handle losing you eventually, if I really had to, for almost any reason except for this one.

I just need to go to bed. I'm sick of the conscious world. I feel like the Doctor Who depiction of Vincent Van Gogh, for Christ's sake. I'm a dramatic mess.

Too bad I don't have the ability to paint. Man I'd be so rich these days.

I am using comic relief to paint an end picture of hopefulness because dammit someday I will be okay. I have to be. I have to be for me and for you.

This has been one of the hardest weekends I've ever had. I'm tired of my life, and I wish I were alone so that I could cry.

I just wanted to enjoy my weekend. That's all I wanted to do. Was it too much to ask for 48 hours of peace? 

Apparently so. I hate myself. I was having so much fun and now I'm in a living room trying to make myself breathe easily. 

Please. God, Allah, anyone... just make it stop. 

When you have nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

To be young and loved and feel it in our bones

Even when I detest all things about me down to the very way that my synapses fire, even when my worries sting jagged and raw in the middle of the night, even when I'm so very taken by my own helplessness that I can't even look you in the eyes... still, you love me.

You know. You know without knowing, as I sleep curled up around a pillow in your bed even though you're not tired, that sleeping next to you was the first peaceful sleep I've had in weeks. And so, you let me sleep, you cover me with a blanket, and you wrap your arms around me until I wake up.

Today is when I knew. I suppose I've known since that first time I kissed you in me somewhere, but today felt like I'd never really looked at you before now. Today as you said, "Goodnight sweetie," as I was drifting off, I realized that what you did for me today isn't what boyfriends do. It's what you do for the person you want to be with for the rest of your life. 

I told you that I was sorry for who I was. And you were adamant. "Don't you ever say that. Not to me. You can be sorry that you have an anxiety disorder, but never apologize for being who you are. If you weren't who you are, I would have no one to love." 

When you said that to me, perfectly punctuated with kisses, like it was straight from a movie, I cried. I couldn't help it. That paragraph of words meant more to me than anything has in my entire life. I cried, but not out of fear or sorrow. I cried because it's the only thing to do when I am me and you are you. 

I love you, I love you, I love you. These are the only words I ever want to say.

I've gotten to an incredibly dangerous place. I don't want to go to college.  I don't want to spend time with my family. I don't want to be loved by anyone. I don't want to go near anyone or anything  because I don't deserve it, and I don't deserve it because in my own mind I am dying and I'm only going to complicate it all, only going to cause them pain.

The world is not fucking fair. Why is this happening to me? I feel like I'm bargaining with someone and all this blog is anymore is one big pity party. But it's so much deeper than that. This blog is the worst of me.

I don't even like the best of me anymore. Not tonight, anyway.

I've never had a panic attack like this before. I don't know what to do except blog about it because I can't talk to anyone because how the hell do I take someone I care about and drag them into this? Besides, you're the only one awake and how could I do this to you again?

I've never had a panic attack before but this must be what they feel like. I'm trying to talk myself down from it.

I just want my mom but she's not here.

I want to throw up. I can't stop shaking. I have never felt this before. My normal abstract sense of fear has been replaced by pure, centralized terror. I have never been more afraid in my life.

I have never hated myself or my life more than I do right now. This is too much for me. I cannot handle this. I cannot fucking handle this.

I keep almost throwing up and my throat burns and my head hurts and fuck what I would give to be anyone, absolutely anyone but myself right now. I hate myself. I am the worst possible outcome for a human being. I have the whole world out in front of me but I can't even leave my own mind to bask in it.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck this, fuck all of this.

I don't even have anything to say right now except that I am so sick of this. Life has no point to me anymore. My life is defined by one worry to the next.

Lately, you know what it's been? Two main things, really: a brain tumor and esophageal cancer. 

Tonight is not a good night tomorrow will not be a good night it will never be a good fucking night and I give up completely on everything life has to offer me because I can't enjoy any of it. 

Fuck this entire world. Fuck my life. Fuck all of it. 

ansiedad, desvelos.

Siempre, todas las noches.

It is eight.

And I am trying to make the best of a bad situation.

I want to curl up into a ball and cry until this fucking presence is gone from me.

Sometimes I feel like I would rather live a year in peace from this and die before my life even begins than live like this until I'm old. I know that's what I'm afraid of, but Jesus Christ, I'm so sick of living in fear. It's literally driving me insane. 

I feel like I am about to shatter into pieces. I feel like I keep shattering into pieces, over and over again, and I keep sweeping myself up and trying to put myself back together but I'm ugly now. Everything inside of me is so ugly. And I'm getting tired and I'm getting lazy because I can't keep this up. The pieces break more every time but I can only do it so much before I am pulverized and beyond repair.

There are times these days where I wish I wasn't even alive anymore. I don't want to kill myself by any means, but I don't know why some creator, or whatever original cells even bothered to keep on dividing because my DNA is riddled with nonsense. I am riddled with nonsense. Congratulations, deoxyribonucleic acid, your cytosine and guanine and adenine and thymine have added up to be this bullshit of a person right here.

I feel like Jonas in The Giver. I didn't ask to have this stuff in my thoughts. I don't want to think this way. I just want to be blissful and ignorant and Jesus Christ I just want to be happy. I can't handle it anymore. Every single one of these episodes drags me closer and closer to desperation and madness. 

I fucking hate this. 

My mom and I are in a big fight right now because of how late I slept today. I know I could have set an alarm and woken up earlier, I guess, but I didn't mean to sleep as late as I did.

And I guess that's not an excuse but she doesn't realize that I didn't mean to sleep as late as I did because I didn't mean to stay up as late as I did. I wanted to go to bed hours before I actually fell asleep. We all know why I stay up late here.

And I know, if I don't tell you, then it's not going to mean anything to you. You're just going to think I'm lazy. And maybe I am.

But I've also just got a lot more going on than you realize. I just can't tell you how bad it's gotten. I just can't.

Here I was, the stage set for some sort of mental breakdown tonight. The sobbing, the tears, locked in my bedroom alone trying to listen in hopes my parents wouldn't wake up, it all felt a bit too angsty teenager for me. But I couldn't stop. I couldn't get a hold of myself.

And then you texted me. I don't know if you did so because you knew I needed something or if it was just some damn good timing, but you are a warm blanket and a cup of coffee in the backseat of my ride away from whatever snapping point I've reached this summer.

I'm gonna be okay today and its because of you. I'll be a goner if you ever leave.

infierno está hecho a mano

Yo no creo en un Dios, pero si Dios quisiera castigarme, mis miedos serían un método muy efectivo.

I hate myself more than I ever have, and it has nothing to do with appearance. I hate my arrogance. I hate my pride.

I thought I was smart. I thought I was intelligent enough - me, a worthless teenager- to outwit an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. I thought reason would be therapeutic and rationality would be medicinal. I thought I was smart enough to trick myself into being a normal person.

But I am so insignificant. And this, above any standardized test or all that ridiculous money my college education is worth, proves that I am a stupid, foolish woman.  I need help and I have needed help my whole life. 

I know my fears are stupid, but that does not mean they don't paralyze me. They do so completely irrationally, and I'm aware of that, but that only adds frustration. It does not subtract fear.

And here I am, eighteen years old, having what people with mental illnesses seem to call "one of my bad days" and I realized that my "bad days" have just become "days." 

And this only happen because I was too stupid, too much of a pompous little shit with my GPA and my pseudo-philosophy and imagined insight into the human soul. That weird I've-got-the-world-figured-out attitude that every kid gets in high school when they get fancy new words like "superfluous" and cars and a sliver of independence was what made me think I was apparently the exception to the entire world, I guess.

And instead of making life bearable for myself, I continued to pride myself on the obstinance I had cleverly mislabeled as "self-reliance" until I became the crumbled mess I am today, younger and more scared and more clueless than I've ever been, very close to the edge of emotional stability.

Everything about this was very preventable. Even though I've spent over a decade with this problem, the months that are to come frighten me more than anything ever has, mostly because I'm afraid of the person this anxiety is turning me into.

I just want to be a strong person again. I just want to be brave. I just want my happiness to be pure. 

anxiety is a dirty word.

My anxiety makes me hate being alive.

I don't mean that in a suicidal way. I love my life. I love what happens in it, and I love the people in it. I love my job, my family, and my friends. I love my town and my home. I love my pets. I love everyone's pets, actually. I want all of these things to continue for as long as they can.

But it does. It makes me hate sometimes the actual act of living carried out over days and weeks and months and years. Maybe living isn't the best way to put it. I hate my conscious mind. I hate what my conscious mind does to me. Basically my mind is a TARDIS and my anxiety is the Master who hijacks it and turns it into a paradox machine. There totally aren't any flaws in that analogy, right? 

I just needed a little comic relief from this, because I am having a lot of trouble stabilizing myself lately.

When I am by myself, be it in my best friend's basement after she's fallen asleep or staring at the blank white box of this blog before I fill it with words, I am not okay. And people try. They really do. They tell me I'm fine and they listen to me, but they shrug off my fears and continue on with their lives. But I want to shake them and say, "Don't you see? Don't you understand that there could be something wrong with me, that I could be dying? That  I could never get married? Never have a daughter and braid her hair? Never go to a bar for a legal drink? Never travel out of the country? Don't you realize that one pain in my head could be the first sign of something that could take everything that I ever planned for myself and throw it out the window just because of a bad gene or because one goddamn cell in my body formed the wrong way? Don't you see how close to dying we all could be?"

But that's not fair. They should never think the way that I do. I would never want anyone I care about to have these feelings because genuinely feeling like you are going to die is far worse than any time I have ever claimed to be depressed or upset or angry or stressed or anything I have ever imagined. It is the most painful thing I have ever felt in my entire life. And I'm not stupid. I know I'll die someday. I just want to die having accomplished the things I always dreamed of. But now, I'm afraid to have dreams at all. I'm afraid of becoming a would-have-been. 

I don't understand how anyone likes being human. Being a species intelligent enough to form religion to cope with death and create a moral code, to make machines fly in the sky, to explore other planets and smash atoms together to form elements that  don't even exist in nature... being human has not protected me from having a mind that knows better than to turn on itself like this. I look around and I think about dying. I don't understand how people are so fucking lucky that they can have a persistent headache or a pain in their chest and not worry about it. (Unless it's necessary to worry, but everyone else is so good at knowing when it is necessary to worry.) Everyone focuses on the future because they feel like they have one. 

And here I am, and I want to indulge in those thoughts too. I do. I could be at an exciting time in my life because the whole world could be ahead of me. I want to think about the degree I may pursue and my future career. I want to think about being a wife and a mother someday and the stupid things I want to do with my family and where I want to get older and what vacations we will take and what kind of house will I buy. But I can't. Every time I do, I start getting achingly sad and scared because I can't shake the feeling that I will die from something before any of that happens. All I want is to look forward to the bright future I have ahead of me, and instead, any real thought I put into it nearly ends in tears because I don't want to die. I just want to have a happy life but all I can imagine is dying before any of it happens. These hypothetical situations, ones that probably won't even actually take place, are the most heartbreaking things that have ever happened to me. 

Yet I carry on. I go through the motions. I graduated high school. I'm going to college with a full-ride for the next four years. But I can't even find any point to it anymore. Degrees are for people with a future. Degrees are for people who grow old. I don't know how much longer I can handle thoughts like this because they are tearing at every single good thing I have in my life. Even you. And I absolutely refuse to let it affect you. 

And at night, oh god, at night. It's bad at night. I can't even close my eyes to go to sleep without trying to calm myself down. Why? Because I'm absolutely terrified of dying in my sleep. Why on earth is this even an issue? For one - if I have something so wrong with me that I could die in my sleep, not going to sleep isn't going to magically make me live a long life. Also - people don't just die in their sleep for no reason. But this is what I do at night. This is where my mind goes, every night now, without  fail, and I am beyond the point of rationalizing with myself. I'm beyond the point of help, I fear.

And all of that, all of that is just with myself. I see death everywhere. It absolutely amazes me I've gone years without losing anyone that I love. All I think about anymore is how many people die in car accidents in a given year or how many people are victims of rape and murder and all of these horrible things that could happen that I can't prevent. I worry when it rains and I know people who are driving. I worry when my friends or parents or boyfriend goes out of town. I worry incessantly, and it is none of these people's faults that they have lives and want to do things and actually live like functional human beings and it is not fair for me to worry like this and make them feel sorry for me or for things that they shouldn't. It's absolutely ridiculous of me to feel any of this. I am genuinely angry with myself for it. 

I don't know how I am able to keep myself together. I don't know how I'm going to wait until August 8 to go to a counseling appointment. I never should have let myself go this far without talking to someone. My biggest regret in high school is not sacrificing my pride to talk to a therapist sooner. I could have gotten a handle on this before it got this out of control. Back then, it used to be an annoyance. It used to bother me sometimes at night, and I would go through spells, but it would fade and I could make it day to day. But I'm struggling here and I need help from someone and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do until then.

Despite any external forces, I'm terrified that this might be the worst summer I've ever had.

Miedo y muerte

Pienso en la muerte sin cesar. Pienso en enfermedades fatales y me preocupa que yo no pueda controlarlas. Esta noche, tengo miedo de morir en mi sueño. 

Este estilo de vida no es saludable, no es sano. Me daña  mentalmente, y me acuesto por la noche, despierta, y me preocupo hasta yo lloro de una mezcla de frustracíon, miedo, y agotamiento.

Si algo pasara a mí, necesitas saber esto: eres el amor de mi vida, y yo habría te casado. 

jodida mierda como esto corre por mi mente todo el tiempo. Es una manera nauseabunda de vivir, y para mí es dificil seguir adelante. Para mi es dificil, tal vez imposible, vivir una vida normal y feliz.

tú has encontrado un lío de una mujer con quien pasar una vida.