No Man's Land

I don't know how much of it is pharmacologically negotiable. It's not like an SSRI is going to change everything wrong with my life right now.

It's a bandaid when what I need is radical change.

But maybe the bandaid would give me the strength to make those changes?

I try to be the very best version of myself.

I think a lot of my life is ruled by my anxiety. I'm worried about not feeling authentic. I worry about losing love. I worry that my close contact with others will destroy more than is built in its wake.

I worry about the decisions I make and if they're selfish. I worry that I'm not making hard decisions at all and if that's selfish.

I worry about loneliness. I worry that my bids for connection cause loneliness in others. I worry that isolation will kill me but that maybe I deserve it based on what relationships with me have done to others in the past.

I worry about being forgotten as much as I worry about how I'll be remembered. I wonder if a safe life is more worthwhile than one that has its risks. I wonder if choosing safety is a risk in and of itself.

I spend entirely too much time inside my head. My friend Mic told me today that she only wants to create art. I thought of what drives me. What is my passion? What is my purpose? What do I like to do more than anything else?

And my first thought was thinking. The one thing I do the most and spend the most time doing. I spent my academic life on thinking. I majored in thinking. I go on long walks to think. I go to coffee shops to think. I go to concerts to feel and then spend the day after thinking about how it felt.

Rumination is my love and rumination is my misery.

I don't think that thinking is living. But I spend my life doing it anyway.

I'm having the slowest breakdown and I think by May this might be the worst I've ever been. It's like: I'm glad I have the maturity to not fall to absolute pieces in my life and that I'm able to maintain my job.

But internally I am losing all focus on why I'm still here. I cannot handle the internalization of these emotions but I don't feel like I have a choice anymore.

It's not that I think I'm unable to get better. I even think that I have, gradually, over many years. It's that I know the starting point from which I'm coming is so far underground that I don't think I've even surfaced yet.

Writing this is hard because no matter how I try to process it, it feels like just feeling bad about myself for the ways I hurt others. But I do feel bad about myself. I don't want to be alone. I want to be a good partner. I've been trying to be for years. I just can't tolerate being alive, seeking companionship and romance, and coming up wanting in the eyes of people I love. It's devastating.

But I don't want to be alone. I'm so scared that that's what's left for me in all of this. So then it's like... Maybe I should die. Maybe the only way out of pain is to cease it. I understand the suicidal tendencies of others the deeper into my life I get and the way I keep disappointing myself and everyone else I love.