Perhaps I needed a reminder that mental illness can be paralytic.
I forgot what the weight feels like. Emotions have mass. I can bench press a lot, but I’m not invincible. After that 5-day fast, I suppose all of my systems went offline. They came online today. I was not numb to any of it. It got worse after I wrote about it in my previous entry.
When you throw somebody into a body of water that doesn’t know how to swim, they will try and control the water. They will try to lift themselves up with the water, but that is not how it works. They will drown. When you know how to swim, you surrender to the water. You float and become one with it. I felt like I was drowning today. I was trying to control my emotions. I needed to make space for them. Which I did, but not by choice. Not directly my choice.
The brain is a problem solver. When I feel bad, it wants me to do something that feels good. Cue the dopamine loops that I am sick of getting sucked into. [Access Denied] I put barriers up a few days ago. No more phone crack. I was left to suffer in silence. The way I have been talking about for most of the year. A little suffering is good for the soul. I need to be good with me, at the end of the day. I didn’t have any of my vices. It was just me, and everything I was hiding from. Here is the real resilience I need to build.
I could not move under the weight of it. But that happened after I got home. I went with my mother for an emergency shopping excursion to find her some couches. Unfortunately, I had to let her down and tell her that I wasn’t going to visit her after that, which was the plan. I know she is lonely over there. I will see her tomorrow after I take her mother grocery shopping. I am helping her with a few things at her new place. In case we are not up to speed, my mother and her man broke up. She is a heavyweight champion when it comes to bench pressing emotions. She doesn’t show pain or fear, but I know when it is there. I’m half Scorpio. Even at my worst, I show up for my family. I never clocked that.
I am going to treat everything today as data. All my scars were open today. I can do some internal archaeology on myself. Some geography while I’m at it. Survey this new landscape. While I have this privilege.
We all get to be young, not all of us get to be old. I just learned that someone I went to high school with passed away. I wish his family well. I had to look for him in our yearbook; I couldn’t remember his face when I was given the news. I didn’t know him. I didn’t say a word in high school. I was a ghost. Looking through that book made me feel some type of way. Maybe my inner teenager really is stepping up to the plate here.
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