How It Feels

Like dozens of receptors in the brain are all shooting off at the same time.  However, none of them feel significant enough to warrant tending to.  Or rather, there's no energy or way to prioritize which direction to turn so I sit as still as I can and try to make sure no one notices the arguments occurring in my head.  Like I'm about to explode into a puddle of tears that I can't turn off.  A common one for me is palpable desire to crawl into my shirt and escape until I can wake up myself again.

Then knowing that I should know better and ashamed that I don't, but yet I still have to put on a face so that no one else catches my disease.  It's like those "fake it 'til you make it" people say, but feeling more and more like an imposter and less like whoever you used to be.  Like giving up and quitting is the only solution because the simplest of tasks feel like mountains and you don't even own the right equipment.  Like someone entered into your body and you don't know who you are anymore.

It's like being distracted from all reality and trying desperately to fit in so that no one will detect any sense of irregularity.  The only thing you can do is reach desperately for what was "normal" or what was automatic just yesterday.  You don't feel equipped for regular life, let alone difficult decisions or complicated problems.  You want to postpone everything until you're "you" again, whoever that was.

Those people who say they had to take a "mental health day."  Do they even know how this feels?  Do they even know what this is like?  Surely some of them do, but I think it's overused, abused even.

And then remembering that my medicine is on a shelf somewhere because an automated voice system doesn't recognize my voice of desperation.  And I don't know how to share this reality without sounding over-exaggerated so I focus most of my energy on creating accurate descriptions to share.  To say that it's mentally exhausting is either a drastic understatement or somehow the perfect way to describe it.

How can anyone live like this?  I need community.  I don't need solace, for it is not comforting.  I don't need pillowed clichés, they sound like counterarguments in conversation that's nowhere near a debate.  I need someone holding me, nursing me to health.  Solitary confinement is a death sentence.  It's assisted suicide.  This world has cracked before, but this time it's like someone is pulling it apart at the seams.  The small strands that are holding us together are getting smaller everyday.

I needed to share this though it took considerable energy to even get here.  To sit here.  To type here.  I needed to get this out of my head, off of my chest, and into the ether.  Now, maybe, restful sleep will come, if only for a few hours.  Now, perhaps, one strand of the receptors has been disconnected (connected?).  Maybe now I'm one small step closer to getting to be back on track wherever that was when I got here.  Maybe now I'm just a little bit more of myself and less of whoever it is that has been inhabiting me since my mind fell out of my head this morning.  Still, help.  I'm still not still, everything is spinning, even if I'm a little bit more of me than at the start of this literary cognitive diagnosis.