I have had chest pain for 36 hours. And no Cassandra I am not having a heart attack. I have been unbearably anxious for that long. I feel like someone has their hand inside me, and no David not that way, and is squeezing my heart tight. I have this inescapable urge to run. To just get in the car and flee as fast and as far as I can. I don't even know to where, but to somewhere else, anywhere else.
I am completely unsure what brought this current bout on. I honestly am not overly sure how I'm faking my way through the day. I have these periods of 'normalcy' where the outward signs are subsiding, but internally I'm bursting at the seams. I'm grasping at straws as to why this is occurring. I've been doing a bunch of small things to try and sort of get a life line to anything, anyone. Nothing is really working.
My patience is non-existent. My 40 hours a week is usually really hard on that finite resource and this week it has taken nothing short of a Herculean effort for me not to look at some people and just yell, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!" I feel like asking that while angrily shouting not only would be completely justified, but also would feel really good. Thing is I can't. I have bills to pay.
Instead I swallow it down. My insides are churning. For around 6 months my stomach has been a fucking wreck. I think I might have an ulcer. I get really hungry, but eating hurts. Then I eat and feel a bit better but have to run to the bathroom as the food runs right through me. My stomach is just at a low level ache 75% of the time. It is worst during the Monday through Friday grind. Every time my phone buzzes or I get an e-mail I run the gambit from manic violent anger to crushing melancholy to a desire to crawl beneath my desk fold my form into the fetal position until I literally disappear from the multiverse.
You know it is funny, I don't talk about this that often. You'd think by reading this shit I write or listening to me on a Podcast that it is all I do. I really don't though. I occasionally will express it to Cassandra, because she's my Best Friend, my Wife, and truly the most amazing person I have ever known. However, I am VERY terrified to do so at the same time. I don't want to be my Dad. My Dad's illness weighed on his marriage, it almost crushed my Mom beneath its weight, and eventually it ruined the Love they had and killed him. He wore it all on his sleeve, in his hands, the way he moved, in his words, and on his face. I hide mine. I hoard it like it is my 'Precious'.
The only time I ever really feel like I can just let it out is when I write it. So I write it here, a place very few people read and fewer give a shit about. Don't get me wrong, I'm no sad, I'm not depressed (I think), and I'm not contemplated 'doing something stupid'. I am just anxious. SOOOOoooo anxious. I can't slow down and it makes me feel completely disconnected from everything and everyone.
This is like talking in a disconnected way. I don't have to slow down. I don't have to worry that the joke I'm trying to make won't land and will offend. I don't have to feel hurt when I talk at length and with almost inhuman alacrity regarding the newest book I'm reading and am met with a disinterested one word responses. I don't have to feel like I'm pouring my life's energy into somewhere, something, or someone and am in return find myself in the peripheral of someone else's life, at best.
When I'm anxious I'm angry, SO angry, emotionally unstable, and extremely selfish. I feel like I want to be the center of things, at the very least be the center of my own little world. And the reality is I have worked so hard to not act that way that it throws me completely out of whack. It is this strange odd juxtaposition to find yourself in. Being so full of selfish "LOOK AT ME, PAY ATTENTION TO ME, LOVE ME" energy, but trying to keep yourself in the mindset of not acting like a egocentric twit.
I am bad at this. I'm bad at adulting. I'm bad at being anxious. But I'm trying. That's all I'm good it, and in the end it is the only thing I can do. Eyes forward, one foot in front of the other, relentlessly forward. Anxiously forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment