Monday, May 21, 2007

Holiday Monday

I am sitting in a lovely park on a sunny holiday Monday of the May long weekend. There are families all over the place, enjoy quality family time. I feel extremely numb about their experience. I am on a hill overlooking a half a dozen sets of parents and young children who are staring at the pond, leaning over the water to feed the swans. I am unsure of how I feel about it. I feel as though I am sitting in a bubble. Am I the one who is not normal, or are they just deluding themselves?
I really feel that I have no concept of what is real anymore. It’s not that I have a mental disease like schizophrenia or anything that really inhibits my ability to distinguish reality. Depression really just leaves you so emotionally vulnerable and confused. Most of the time I feel that I am either pretending so intensely to be a part of this ‘normal’ world or I am so overwhelmed and unable to control my own mood to the point that I find it necessary to isolate myself from the world because I am unable to blend. Vacillating between these two poles leaves me completely unable to answer my own questions. What is the real state that I want? Where is the middle ground? How can I possibly find a middle ground of reality? Because if I am going to do so, I would he to hypothesize first that I could find a middle ground between my varying far flung ends of the spectrum. This hypothesis then assumes that this middle ground, the universal reality that I am trying to find, can be determined by my extremes. If reality is determined by my extremes, then it is arbitrarily determined. If that is the case, then what is the point in trying to determine the middle ground? Why not just continue to try and survive in this tumultuous and bizarre existence that I am already suffering? At least here, I know the enemy and I can recognize the ups and downs. I am known here and I know where here is. I may not be able to control it, I may feel as though I am being scraped along a gravel road of emotion sometimes, and that trying to stand up and dust myself off is futile. But then other times I am so number by the experience that it seems not to matter that I am slowly being ripped to pieces. It seems as though trying to hold myself up and keep myself protected is a silly thing to do. I know that this isn’t true, even as I say this. I do want to be better. I don’t want to feel so out of control of myself or my moods and thoughts. Most of the time, however, it seems like the really crazy idea is trying to fight the truth. If I didn’t make myself this way…If this is something that I can recognize in myself and yet not be able to turn off, like diabetes…If this is something that I can gradually manipulate slightly in order to continue to push my way through society and yet never fully calm down…If these things that I have been old are true….If I am inherently unable to change my own universe, then what is the point in attempting to do so? I want to forget adhering to rules of society and to “fit in” as it were. I want to be able to live in each moment. Not having to regard whether it is a moment that makes me want to throw my head back and scream a bloodcurdling, cathartic scream in the middle of a park full of families or a moment where I want to close my eyes and imagine how sweet it would be not to be alive.
I do realize how all this must sound. I can imagine the different sentiments of people reading this. Any young women who has suffered through depression, mood/personality disorders or anxiety disorders will be reading this and feeling a certain amount of understanding. Anyone else reading this will be thinking that I am a tide of negative emotions. That’s the craziest part of being ‘crazy’. I am not upset right now. I actually find pretty energetic and optimistic today. This is just an accurate perception of how my thoughts travel. I have been told more than a few times in the past few months since I was admitted to the hospital that I show no outward indication at any time of what is going on inside of me. One person even went so far as to suggest I am Oscar worthy in performance. I am a good faker. Just like anyone with a mood disorder and many people with mental illness. We can pretend enough to not set off too severe a warning bell in those around us. There is enough indication given that when something drastic occurs, like me having a complete breakdown and being admitted to the centre for addiction and mental health, people remember details of past events which seemed out of place at the time. Though never did they think that it was so severe. We have all trained ourselves to look away from the unpleasant. And we all play along so well. I may have been unable to always completely hide my ups and downs, but I did my part by concealing enough to allow others to look away without guilt. So that we could all continue our lives under the guise of ‘normalcy’. Everything is always fine. This is the way that we all continue to function when things go to hell. I wish that everyone could wear signs or shirts that said something real about themselves. They could say different things on different days, but they would be true. Passively, these shirts could fight our need to all be fine. My shirt would say, “I have been admitted to a mental institution” or “I had a mental breakdown”. I have a deep-rooted need to tell people that I am unbalanced because I hate the idea that people think I have it easy because I am pretty and thin and young. Nothing bad happens to you if you are thin and blond, right? That’s what I keep getting told. Each time it makes me want to stab the person in the eyes with broken glass. Really, we don’t know anything about anyone. Not even the people we think we know best. Some of my favourite reactions were “but you’re super Laura! You have such an amazing life and you always have it together!”… “ok, so what’s really wrong? No, seriously what could possibly be wrong with you?”… “you are the one who holds everything together? How could you be upset?”.
It makes me sad how little anyone really knows me. I feel as though there is not one person who has ever known me. I have faked it for so long and built my own protective prison. And yet, people will walk by, look up at me in my tower cell, and be envious of it. Which makes me so sad for reality, for the ‘real’ world. You look at me and you see a pretty, thin, 25 year old blond woman. You don’t actually see anything real.
Is it any wonder that I feel as though I don’t really exist most of the time? That I am wandering around trying to get a grasp on reality as you all see it? You don’t see me as actually existing. You see my aesthetics as being in existence, enough for you to segregate me for it. But since my shell is only that, it is not really me but the shell that carries me around…I am left with feeling like a shell that walks around. A vessel that cannot properly contain or control or even define what is on the inside.

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