Happy Birthday To Me

I can't believe I'm turning 19 tomorrow. It feels weird. It feels like I shouldn't be turning 19 yet. Plus the fact that I'm so unhappy right now makes it feel like "How could I be having a birthday? I'm SO unhappy. I should be happy if my birthday is tomorrow."

It breaks my heart that my birthday is tomorrow and I'm so unhappy and so strongly not wanting to be alive. This isn't where I thought I'd be by this age. This isn't what I'd imagined. This isn't what I'd always hope for. I had so many hopes and dreams and it's all just gone. It's all so heartbreaking and disappointing and unexpected that I don't even know how to really cope with it. I'm the type of person that I always see things coming. I plan, I'm intuitive, I'm observant, I brace myself for what I foresee coming in life, and I never miss stuff. I'm almost always able to anticipate life. But I never planned for this. I never saw this coming. Obviously me first getting sick was a blind side but I always felt that by this age, by college I would surely be better by then. Right? I had to be. That'd be unimaginable to be sick for over 4 years. But the unimaginable happened, so here I am, and I'm at a complete loss for what to do or think. 

Where am I supposed to go from here? 

4 years ago, I was sleeping in a room that wasn't mine, in a bed that wasn't mine, in sheets that weren't mine, in a mind and body that didn't feel like mine either. 

4 years later, nothing has changed. I'm back to sleeping in the same room and bed and sheets that have never been or felt like mine. My body and mind feel foreign again. I feel lost, deeply unhappy, and suicidal once again. I want to disappear and I find myself wishing I'd never existed. I lose hours staring blankly at the same old curtains that I used to stair at that, and every night I watch the clock that still is broken and motionless, as if it will suddenly miraculously tick for the first time in years. It never moves, and yet every night I find myself watching it and waiting for a miracle that I know isn't coming. 

I realized tonight that just like the clock on the wall that one day just suddenly stopped ticking and froze in time, I did the same. My life stopped abruptly, and 4 years later I'm literally in the exact same place. Literally! 

So much has gone on in the last 4 years too! I've had plenty of very high points and obviously lots of lows, but the fact that all this time later I'm LITERALLY in the exact same place absolutely kills me. 

I may as well have just been doing nothing all this time because I'm in the same goddamn place anyway. It completely invalidates everything I've done for the last 4 years. 

Coming to realize all of that has done a few things to me. 

1. I'm suicidal, and the fact that I'm back to being this bad breaks my heart. 

2. I'm pissed as FUCK. I was going to say hell, but sorry not sorry "hell" just ain't cutting it today. This is a fuck moment okay. I. Am. Pissed. Off. As. Fuckkkk!

3. I had a total panic attack/mental breakdown this week. Haven't had one of those in a long time, so as you can probably guess I'm both mad and sad about that. 

4. I feel lost. 

5. I feel confused. 

6. I have no drive left. I've come 360 right back to where I started and way too literally am in the exact same place as 4 years ago, and I just feel done. I don't want to do this anymore, and honestly I'm starting to not see the point of trying anymore. Why fucking try if after 4 years of constant hard work I've gotten absolutely no where? 

You try and answer that.

Gone on, try. 

Imagine being in my place and 4 years of excruciating pain and constant trial and error and failure and picking yourself back up and trying again and again and again...4 YEARS!...4 years of your entire life revolving around you trying your absolute hardest to get better, and then you're in the same goddamn place. 

Now you imagine how you'd feel. 

I bet you can't blame me for wanting to give up. 

So, I guess we should talk about why I don't give up. Why in the 4 years of constant hardship have I not given up? My family. I'd be dead without them. I would gladly be dead as of mmmm probably 4 years ago had I not had my family. Just the pure fact that I can't put them through losing me because I know how much it would hurt them, that keeps me alive. Continuing to try despite my constant failures... that ones harder. I found out I actually can't physically give up. It goes against everything I am. Which pisses me off. It'd be easier to give up but I'm just so stubborn and I can't. A lot of the time I wish I could give up. 

Have I really made no progress in 4 years? 

No

Am I EXACTLY in the same place as 4 years ago?

Yes haha. Literally. Same exact place. 

Am I EXACTLY the same?

Helllll no. 

A foot less of hair, probably an inch taller, 4-5 years older, I have a boyfriend, I have a child (he's a puppy haha), I actually have some friends (4 years ago at this time I had none. Literally. I had zero friends. Just my family.), I have a high school diploma and a valedictorian medal to show for all my hard academic work, I have a guitar that I love with all of my heart, I have scars all over my back that I didn't have 4 years ago that will forever remind me of everything I've been through... 

So much has happened. So much has changed. I've changed immensely. I don't feel like the same person at all. 4 years ago I didn't used to cry. 3 years ago I didn't used to cry. Hell just one year ago I barely cried. But now, in the last 6 months I've cried so much. That is a product of me pushing myself to deal with a lot of things I've suppressed and avoided for years. I pushed myself to grow and embracing that I needed to cry over things from my past was a big part of that. I communicate sooooo much better by now. I'm much more in tuned with my body. I'm a really good writer by now. I have a YouTube page and I sing in videos and I have 2 blogs that I love to write for. I'm more open and so much less afraid. I'm more confident in who I am. I'm proud of who I am. I'm a survivor. It's just what I do. I survive. 

Currently.... I'm quite literally struggling to survive. I'm having allergic reactions to everything and all foods. Sooooo my body doesn't exactly want me to be alive and my mind is starting to believe that too. It's extremely hard to keep living when your body and mind both stop wanting you to. But I'm still here so I guess that's something to be proud of. 

I still have a lot of things to show for all the things I've done in the last 4 years, but the fact that I'm literally in the same place and I know that mentally (depression/anxiety wise) this is where I was at 4 years ago, it's so hard on me. I never stop trying my absolute hardest and yet I'm always just stuck. Right now, I'm helplessly backsliding and it's just killing me. All of 2016 I spent desperately clawing to try and make progress and I only just kept backsliding more and more. Now a new year has started and nothing changed. I'm still desperately trying to hold on and all I can feel is myself and everything just slipping farther and farther away. 

So... 4 years later here I am writing, just like how I always do. 

I'm in the same room and the same bed and the same sheets that all aren't mine. I'm stuck in a body that hasn't felt like mine for years, and a mind that is back to feeling frighteningly foreign. I stared at the same old curtains that I used to stare at 4 years ago, and now I'm staring at the clock... The clock that hasn't moved in 4 years. Still shining, hung perfectly, and infinitely motionless, and now I can't seem to decide if the clock that's forever frozen in time is either starring down at me or watching over me. 

At the beginning of this I felt like the sudden random turn of bad luck events that brought to me to be sleeping in this room again was the universe hating me. I felt like this was some kind of seriously sick joke, that all this time later while I'm going through hell in life right now and it's just fucked up for me to have to sleep in here. I was not amused. But now I'm just looking up at the clock wondering if maybe I took it wrong. Maybe the universe doesn't just hate me. Maybe there's some kind of hidden meaning I'm supposed to understand from this. 

I know it can't just be random that I'm sleeping in this room again for the first time in 4 years, and it can't just be a coincidence that health wise and mentally I'm doing just as bad now as I was then. It can't be. The universe can't hate me that much. Can it? 

I hope not. 

I feel like I'm supposed to understand something from this. It has to mean something... 

I know tomorrow is going to be hard and sad day for me, to do nothing and feel so depressed on my birthday. It's going to gut me. I know I'm bound to cry tomorrow. Hell, just thinking about my birthday being tomorrow and knowing I feel nothing but sadness makes me want to cry now. It's gonna be a rough day. But it just is what it is. This is my life. Sadly. I just have to make the most of it. 

The biggest difference between now and 4 years ago is tonight I'm going to fall asleep with my puppy and I'll wake up to his cute little face and that look of unconditional love. That's priceless.

"How do you get through it?"

"How do you get through it?"

My therapist asked me this question the other day when I saw her, and honestly, I still don't have a solid answer for it. I get asked often, "How do you do it?", and a lot of times I don't really know how to answer that because I ask myself that same question a lot too. 

How do I do it?

My life is a combination of a lot of things that are all very delicately balanced. My life is like one big, very elaborate balancing act. -- Like one of those acrobats who piles up 20 round cylinder things and then stands on the top while juggling an armful of fragile plates. It's all so delicate. If one thing goes wrong, then my entire life and the whole balancing act turns into a domino effect. If just one thing gets out of balance, it all comes crashing down. 

This year for me has been a terrible loop of the domino effect ruining my intricate balancing acts. Every time I start building myself back up, something tips me off and then I'm back to square one. It's just been a seemingly endless loop of that! This year has been my "Groundhog Day." You know, that one Bill Murray movie where his character "is focred to live the same Feb. 2 over and over again until he gains some karmic -- and comic -- insight into his life." That's how google just summarized the movie and definitely "comic insight" is accurate to my life. But now I'm sitting here wondering what the hell kind of "karmic insight" I deserve. If karma is the reason for my years of suffering, well then I must've been one hell of a person in my past life. I'm shaking my head haha. 

Regardless of the mysterious reasons behind me being in this situation, this year really has been the same thing over and over again. I've had bad years before too, to say the least, but the things that went wrong before were always different. Having this year be filled with the same things repeatedly going wrong over and over again, I'm not actually sure which of the two scenarios is more frustrating. 

Both. 

Definitely both. 

That's my final answer. 

Before leaving home to go see my therapist, my mom took one look at me as soon as I walked in the room, and she got this look on her face. It's a look I've seen countless times over the last four years. It's her look of, "You're not okay today. Today's a bad day." 

I'd said nothing. I'd done nothing different than any other morning. I was dressed in real clothes, which is actually unusual for me. Usually being dressed means it's an okay day. But that wasn't the case. 

After four years of practically being inseparable, my mom and I are very connected. We have a lot of unspoken communication by now. Without a single word being said, we both knew it wasn't a good day, in any sense. 

I got my food as always and sat at the kitchen counter, both things I would do on an average day, but my mom was still giving me "the look." I could feel her watch me from the second I walked in the room, the whole time I got food, and then as I sat down to start eating. 

"You have the darkest aura that you've had in a long time." She said. 

I only just pursed my lips in response as if to silently say, "It just is what is today."

I don't feel overly depressed. I've been much worse countless times before. I don't feel overly sad or mad. In fact, I don't feel much of anything other than just being deeply tired...in every way. 

I don't feel like I'm mentally in that bad of a place right now, but I can feel how dark of an energy I'm putting out. It seems to be worse every day too. I feel heavy. I feel weighed down. I felt like the weather that day. I woke up to dark cloudy skies and rain, and that felt fitting. As the sky grew darker and the rain continued to steadily fall, I felt the same. What once was sunshine turned into occasional fog. In time, around me, fog started to thicken into clouds. Then the clouds gradually covered the sky and blocked out the light. The clouds thickened and darkened, getting heavier and heavier until finally, it forced the rain to fall. The clouds are continuing to darken as the storm keeps rolling in, and the rain seems to penetrate deeper with every drop. 

I'm deep in a storm that I can't get out of. What used to be pretty rain, softened the ground too much and now I'm sinking. Once I start sinking, I get stuck, and once I get stuck, I know I won't be escaping "the storm" anytime soon. 

I don't feel like I'm mentally in that bad of a place right now, but I know that the dark energy around me is just a sign for what's to come. I've been through enough depressions to know how this goes. Sometimes the dark energy precedes the depressed mental state. In other words, my personal little dark cloud that follows me around everywhere sometimes appears and grows darker before I start really feeling it.

I know no one could read that and still believe that I'm not deeply depressed, but I'm really not. I feel more so stuck within my situation rather than depressed by my thoughts. Which I will gladly take this over having my mind eat away at itself. That type of depression is much worse. 

Don't get me wrong, I am depressed, and I am on the edge of being stuck in that type of depression too. But I'm still managing to keep my balancing act going and I haven't completely fallen yet. I'm trying my best to not slip into that type of depression, but I have a feeling I won't be able to avoid it too much longer. I feel like it's inevitable. Plus, with the way my life has been going, I'm sure something else will go wrong and I will end up in that place...again.