Maeby Today

I carry these monsters inside of myself, and they douse me in darkness on days when all I want to do is see the light. Every attempt to reach forward is a struggle. Contacting people to drag myself out of this place is so difficult when you are pressed with irrational fears of being unwanted or a burden. You have to physically shove these fears away. You have to fight. There comes a point where you feel like no one knows you at all, because they only know the part of you that you can show them: the happy, laughing, joking facade that is your weapon against the pain you carry inside.

Does this all seem just a little dramatic to you? Reading this, did you sort of inwardly roll your eyes and maybe make the snap judgement that I am an attention seeker?

It’s kind of funny to know very intimately what lengths I go to in order to shy away from attention, and then to have people tell me that I am an attention-seeker when in reality what I am seeking is help. I need help. I am incapable of making connections. I am incapable of confiding in people. When I finally reach the point where I have to speak to someone about an issue I’m struggling with, it’s in my nature to immediately downplay my feelings and laugh it off to them. This gives them the go-ahead to also brush it off, and thus nothing is ever even remotely discussed.

My emotions are distorted. I willfully live in ignorance about things that I know are going to hurt me. I ignore that my dad is extremely sick. It’s to a point that I avoid him if I don’t get the sense that he’s having a day where he’s himself. And it hurts me. I’m sure it hurts him. It makes me feel like a child. It makes me feel like I’m wasting precious time that can’t be retrieved. I’m not equipped to handle this. Whatever other people have that gives them the ability to maturely face these things in life, I lack it. Instead of sadness, I feel anger. I am so angry. I’m angry all the time.

In a broader sense, I suffer the same sense of disconnection with matters. People get so emotional about loss of life due to natural disaster or terrorism and when I watch these things, I feel… nothing. I am deplete. In the grand sense, I am unfeeling and unempathetic. I honestly think that I just don’t have the energy. Feeling something of grief for them would force me to cast aside my ignorance of the situations in the world, which would then allow for me to fester feelings of paranoia, which prey upon me constantly as it is. I shut off. I shut you off. I shut you all off.

In contrast, I feel an overwhelming empathy toward the smaller stories. The kid that got bullied and, when he finally fought back, was the one who was punished while his bullies cried their crocodile tears and skipped off unscathed. The struggling mom who was scorned by a stranger at the grocery store for not having enough money to buy milk. These stories fill me with so much fury and emotion that I can’t hardly stand it. And I shut down. 

So, either way, I shut down. I shut off. I am not here. I disassociate. I disconnect. I don’t know how to incorporate myself into the lives of others. I don’t know how to be a friend or a sister or a daughter, because I am so guarded truly 100% of the time. I am living in absolute terror of people knowing me. I wake up in the midst of panic attacks and see dark shadows hanging over me, pressing down on me, strangling me. I sit alone and I try to psych myself into thinking that this isn’t me, and that if I just force myself to think differently then I will magically be different. I live with crippling paranoia which extends itself to such thoughts as: If I do take medicine, people will still not know me because it will be a false me. I don’t want to be loved for a me that isn’t truly me. 

Today, I found out something really scary which may very well change my life. At this stage, it’s premature to think about it that way. Nothing is yet definitive about the situation. But my mind is such that it jumps to the worst case scenario and that is what has led me to write this. What if time is running out and I haven’t even begun to live? What has even been my purpose here? How can fix myself? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to turn. I have closed all the doors and now they’re too heavy for me to open on my own. 

I want to feel like a real person. If you’re reading this and you know me in reality, I need you to understand that you are probably one that gets the sarcastic, witty, bantering version. I am many-dimensional. My other dimensions are not as fun. I’m sorry if this seems over-dramatic, I’m sorry if it skews your perceptions of who you thought I was. I hope you’ll reach toward me instead of recoiling, though.