Each night when I try to fall asleep lately, a sadness overcomes me. It's the kind of sadness that makes my chest hurt. My heart beats rapidly, I want to cry, and have that instant urge to crawl into someone's arms- only there isn't anyone.
There is always a good reason- lately, it's been because I haven't been getting my job for my brother done on time... it's like it's out of my hands, the way working has been for me in the past, and days will slide by and it's like time has gone by fast forwarded by 50 times. My days and nights have been backwards, and each night I will vow to set things right the next day- get up at 7 am, run those 6 miles that were such a good friend of mine last summer, then work a 10 hour day four days in a row plus one extra ten hour day just to show the universe that I am not a complete waste of a human being, and so i can feel like I am worthy of employment by my brother, who works so hard all the time, and seems to have been born with all the ambition, drive, and discipline that I was born with none of.
Each night as the clock ticked past 4, then 5 am I knew that the next day would be the same as the last: wake up, realize another 3/4 of a work day are already over, panic internally, and vow, immediately, "it won't be the same tomorrow."
And since getting so sick in January, my body has changed. My weight is the same as always, but I lost ten pounds from that illness and then put it back on, only I'm pretty sure it's in a different form this time. My muscles have atrophied. My body looks terrible. I'm terrified I'm sliding down the slippery slope back to where I was the winter before Lee and I broke up... a depressed, lonely, desperate near-suicidal recluse.
On top of those two things is the subtle pressure of my cousin's wedding in three weeks. I need about a thousand dollars to go to it, and I've already said that I would and my dad has gotten me hotel rooms for the nights I'll be there. Every day that goes by where I am fucking up my work schedule is one more day closer I am to absolute panic/even worse, beg parents for money mode.
And of course there is my incredible value placed on my body. I'm seeing my favorite family members- and I haven't seen any of them since I was 15. I don't need to be perfect but I need to not look like this. I need to not be in this state. And the pressure, the time running out to somehow relax, is growing and suffocating me.
I just turned off the lights, tired before 4 am for once, but the second my head hit the pillow, the sadness and anxiety came again. This is not the way it always is for me, but I've gone through periods of this in the past. It's terror, plain and simple. Not knowing why I can't seem to change the things that are causing the panic causes the panic. It's a total lack of control, and each day I vow to try, and realize that no matter how hard I try, it's out of my hands. And yet- there is no trust, no faith, and so I keep trying, and the cycle that builds on itself to the point of breakdown continues heading for that inevitable drop.
Luckily for me though, I've hit that bottom before. The only thing I know is hitting bottom, dropping all the way down to 10 before climbing slowly past 9, 8, 7 til I get back up to having peace in my life, most of the time, til the next thing happens to make up the continuous ups and downs of my life.
The thing I've realized about this is that hitting bottom is easy. Bottom is a great place to be; there is nowhere to go but up. There is peace at the bottom, same as there is peace at the top. The only difference is that your world looks a little different: at the top maybe you have money or the right job or the right girlfriend or whatever, and at the bottom maybe you have nothing. Maybe in that way, the bottom is even better- no, the bottom is definitely better. Maybe what I see as the top is really the bottom. Maybe having nothing to lose is the best way to live life.
But still... I don't want to hit bottom, or... maybe I want to hit bottom without actually losing everything in my life, which is really tricky. When everything has gone to shit in life it is easy to say "I give up. Whatever happens to me happens to me. I've got nothing left to lose and thus... nothing left to fear."
The anxiety is the thing that is the hardest to overcome. Anxiety is just very simply pure, immediate fear. I swore last summer- hell, I swore three years ago when I moved out of Lee's and my apartment with nothing to my name that I would never make decisions out of fear again. Since then I have tried so damn hard to figure out what fear is- and there was a time, last summer, when I knew what it was, and could see right through it. That was the closest I have ever been to God, or tapping into the Collective Unconscious, or just seeing beyond this flat, level five-foot-three gaze of mine.
I had a night about a year ago when I realized that I had to let go. I didn't come upon it on my own- out of sheer lack of anything else I could think of, I started to read the 12-steps book I bought when I went through my introspective stage just after breaking up with Lee. I hadn't touched it in the two years since then, but that night I started to read, and realized that I already believed the first two steps: that my life had become totally unmanageable, and that I believed in a higher power. The two seperately were what I'd had to work with, and it wasn't until I saw, until someone spelled out on a page for me that it was okay to believe that a higher power could restore my life to sanity, that it clicked into place for me that that was what I needed: FAITH. For some reason I had just needed to read, by someone else's hand, that having faith would change my life. It was as if seeing it printed in a book made it true.
And that night I guess I came to the end of my rope. I knew that what I had been doing for my entire life wasn't working. All the plans I had made for how I would turn things around just never became anything more than "my plans." I had no power. My will meant nothing. It was impotent. And that made it worse, and made me struggle harder. Over and over. And that night, reading those words in the book, I just gave up, once and for all. I accepted that whatever would happen to me would happen to me and that for once, I would just have faith that whatever happened was right. I just decided to believe that something, a power greater than me of some kind, was ordering things in the universe and that whatever my part in it, be it joy or pain or death or whatever, was right.
That was a relatively easy thing to do at that point. I mean, I didn't have another choice. But I knew I had to think about what that actually meant: it meant maybe leaving Chicago and moving back in with my mom and stepfather. It meant maybe being out of control with eating and putting on 50 pounds, if that is what is right. It meant maybe losing the person I was in love with at the time. And I just told myself that I believed in a greater good. I believed in a benevolent God (I do). And I told myself that if those things had to happen for my life to go in the right direction that I would just have to have faith and go and choose to try to be happy in the meantime.
I'm starting to repeat myself at this point. We all know what happened to me. I didn't have to move back in with my mom (even though I now stay here probably 5 nights a week- weird, the thought of living here used to repel me to the point of anxiety)... my job situations sorted themselves out like magic... I didn't gain 50 pounds and in fact things god much better with me physically after that... and I did lose that love. He wasn't right for me then, if ever, and the situation wasn't either. It felt horrible at the time. But I see that he, then, that way, wasn't right even though I wanted it so much to be. I'm glad it wasn't, because I'm so grateful for the things that have happened in the meantime. I would have been living for him, instead of doing all the things I've been doing work-wise here, and meeting all the people I've met. For all I know, had that worked, I could be moving right now, or sometime in the near future. That's not what I wanted.
Anyway.
Tonight I realized that once again, I'm at that point. If I want to have peace, I need to let go. I need to let go of this wedding. Maybe it isn't right for me to go; as much as I am dying to see all my cousins and family and go on a fun vacation and see my dad and party.. maybe that isn't what's right for me right now. Maybe I need that money for something else that I haven't even seen coming in April. Maybe my being there would ruin something. hell- maybe the wedding will get called off. Who knows. But I need to let go of my attachment to going to this wedding and only do it if it isn't going to make me panic inside for the next three weeks.
And I love my job. I love so many things about this situation: the freedom to do it whenever I want and plan my own schedule, the amount my brother is paying me to do a job I think is fun anyway, the fact that I still can say that I am 24 years old and have never spent a day of my life in a cube or being berated by some asshole boss or having to put up with some crappy coworker's shit. But maybe this isn't the right job for me; maybe that is why I'm panicking. Maybe that is why I am so unable to do it at times and I can't figure out why. Maybe I'm meant for something different than this, maybe something else is the only thing that will really fulfill me, and the only way I can find that out is by this job changing or ending.
And again: my body. Maybe it's not supposed to be any different than it is. Maybe I'm not supposed to be more beautiful than this, or better than this. Maybe it would change me somehow. Maybe it would invite something bad into my life. I have to believe. It's the only thing that lets me have peace.
© beotch at
3:18 a.m.
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