The Hell In My Head

The dull pain behind my eyes has been nearly constant for almost six hours now.  Tears want to roll down my cheeks but I cannot seem to summon them, even though I am crying on the inside.  The back of my neck is tight, and  my stomach feels as though it has clutched into a tight little ball .  I feel trapped within myself, and utterly, utterly alone.

I am directionless, floating propelled by a current I am unable to fight, and am too tired to fight if I could.  I'm tired of always fighting.  I'm tired of always fighting.

I am drenched in paranoia. I feel unable to trust anyone; eventually everyone will turn against me if they haven't already.  They talk about me behind closed doors; they snicker at me behind cupped hands; they are setting me up for a fall.  They laugh at me.  They're setting me up.

Family and friends with the best intentions tell me it's OK, try to give me positive affirmations, try to help me see the bright side.  I know they are trying, but they are doing it wrong.  The more they tell me how good I am, the more I know I am not.  I can never be what they see.  I am a fraud.

I'm not looking for "oh it's going to be OK," or "I am here for you," or "let's talk about it." They are well-meaning, but they don't fill the gaping empty hole.  I am trapped inside my my own head, locked in, screaming.  Can't they hear me screaming? Can't you hear me screaming?

The inevitable question I cannot answer: "What's wrong?"  The cruelest question you could ask me. The question itself taunts me; it is asked knowing I cannot answer.  What's wrong? If I knew I could fix it, change it or leave it.

I can never stop fighting, yet I am too tired to fight anymore.  I don't want to feel like this anymore.  I don't want to have to fight this anymore.  Yet, I must.

Somewhere, echoing inside my hurting head, a sliver of a sane voice tells me to hang on; this storm will pass, like all the others have passed. But why must I suffer the storms, again and again?

I am tired of always fighting. I will cry myself to sleep tonight.  The demons have won this battle; the war rages on.

Reporting Live From The Eye Of The Storm

It's been awhile since I have had the need to blog about my battles with my internal demons, but here I sit on a Sunday evening finding myself in the midst of a storm inside my brain that rolled in so fast I did not have time to prepare.  Usually I can see these clouds forming and, while I can't always thwart the incoming attack, at least I am usually able to take the appropriate steps to shelter myself (and those around me) from the worst of the maelstrom.

Perhaps it's wrong to say I didn't see this one coming; a more correct assessment would be to say what I thought was a thunderstorm turned out to be hurricane.  It's been a long, tough, painful week at work.  What folks who do not suffer from the sort of anxieties and depressions many of us battle do not understand is that we also tend to guilt-sponges.  For as long as I can remember, whenever I sensed that people around me were upset or angry, my immediate assumption has always been that I must have done something wrong; that somehow this disturbance in the peace is my fault.  Now, sensible people would see that, if something were indeed their fault, they would be directly approached about it; if no one is telling them they are at fault, sensible folk deduce that they must not be at fault and move on with their lives.  Not so with me.  No, in my warped world, the very fact that I'm not being directly confronted about something only serves to make it clear that I am indeed the problem.  That Social Anxiety Demon who keeps me believing that I am forever at risk of being set up for embarrassment, humiliation, or ridicule, whispers in my ear that everyone must be talking about me behind my back.  Paranoid? Damn right you should be paranoid! They're out to get you! I hate that demon with every ounce of my soul.  That demon holds me back more than any other I battle.

That demon had me convinced this week that I was the cause of the issues that made it a difficult week, but the week seemed to end on a reasonably high enough note.  I was feeling better about things and headed into the weekend ready to begin anew.  Saturday went by uneventfully, as did this morning, but by mid-afternoon, my internal world was in shambles.

I can't tell you when it happened or even how it began.  I realized I was sitting on my sofa in the living room staring blankly out the window with neither the TV nor the stereo on (a rarity indeed!) in silence, wanting to scream, to cry, to beat my fists against the wall.  My head had begun to hurt, as if my skull were being pressurized from inside and likely to blow apart at any moment.  My stomach lurched and I felt physically weak.  Since about 2:00 this afternoon, this is how I have felt.  The physical discomfort is not constant, other than the headache, but the want to just cry and scream in some sort of primal release is very strong.  As I write this I am simultaneously holding back tears yet wanting them to flow.

And the worst part of it all?  I can't tell you why.  I don't know why.  I don't think there is a "why."

Sure, there are things that are wrong in my world, as there are in anyone's.  Yes, I am fighting to regain the sense of security I once had before the economy collapsed and I found myself back to living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to stay above water, but so are many people.  I have a plan for those things, a strategy to rebuild, and it is working, slowly but surely.

Sure, there are the life choices I wish I would have made differently, such as never learning to drive or never marrying and starting my own family, but those situations are what they are, and they are certainly not new issues that just arose in my mind this weekend.

So what is it? Why is it? Why do I feel like this, and why does it happen so often?  Especially when it hadn't happened for such a long stretch?

To be clear, this is not a panic attack I am experiencing.  I know those very well, unfortunately.  No, this is a depression attack, and I am smack dab in the middle of it.  Funny, though, that the "rational" part of my brain realizes this much, and is allowing me to communicate it through writing.  I just want it to stop - I want this episode to stop, and want this all to stop happening ever again.  I want to be a normal, regular person.  I just wish I were normal.

I will get through this. I always do.  Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger,  right?

Enough rambling.

At The Moment

I'm smack in the middle of one hell of a dark period.  This one rolled in over the weekend unannounced, triggered by the stupidest little thing, but then these episodes are rarely triggered by anything of substance.  (I remember one day several years back when, out with a group of friends, someone commented that I seemed like I was in a particularly good mood.  The woman I was with at the time warned, only half-facetiously, "Don't worry, his mood will change.  Suddenly, and without warning, but it WILL change.  Enjoy it while you can.")

It's funny how I can always recognize when my OCD or anxiety demons are up to their tricks, but the depression demon can be so slick as to set up shop and get to work well in advance of my internal alarm system notifying me.  It's like a smoke detector that is extremely poorly placed, so that by the time it goes off half the house is engulfed in flame already.  Still haven't figured out where to put that damn detector.

This is a particularly rough one.  I got up yesterday morning in a fairly decent frame of mind, but somewhere along about lunchtime, I realized things weren't right.  I didn't recognize what was happening yet, but something was off.  And I was suddenly damn tired - not just sleepy, but the kind of tired where moving your limbs is a chore, and where sitting up straight seems like far more effort than it's worth. I napped. Most of the afternoon and evening. Ate some dinner, but more because I knew I should eat something than because I was hungry.  "Dinner" was really a bologna and cheese sandwich.  Rarely left the couch. At no point during the day did I open the blinds, much less leave the house.  Just sat there, lumplike, alternately sleeping and staring at the TV.  Today has been more of the same.  Honestly, I couldn't tell you where today went.  I was "up" around 7:00-ish, but again the day has been spent napping on and off.  No appetite. No motivation.

My head is uncomfortable. It's not a headache in the traditional sense - it's not pain.  I feel as though I cannot unfurrow my brow, and my own voice is screaming in my brain as if it were trying desperately to jump out of my head, flinging itself like a tantrum-throwing child against the inside of my skull in vain efforts to crash through that wall of bone to freedom.  I want to cry, but there are no tears to cry.  Resultantly, my eyes burn and feel heavy in their sockets.  My teeth are gritted and my neck is tense.  Hell, every muscle in my body is tensed as if I were preparing to have to physically defend myself from something.  My stomach feels strange - not nauseous, not nervous, but somewhere in between, similar to the way it feels when experiencing a surge of adrenalin, but not exactly the same.  The adrenalin surge fades with time; this has  been a day and a half now.

Does any of that make sense?  I know these sensations very well.  They are not symptoms of illness - well, at least not of physical illness like a flu bug or having eaten something that might have been a few days past its use-by date.  The thoughts that accompany them, fueled undoubtedly by my ever-present Internal Greek Chorus of OCD and SA, are both sad and angry, usually.  This time, they are more angry than sad.  It's a loud, visceral anger, overpowering at times yet unfocused.  I couldn't tell you who or what I am angry with, I am just angry.  Feel like I could lash out like a cornered animal at anyone who came too close.

And therein lies another great conundrum:  I wish I had someone I could tell all this to, someone who would listen and understand and tell me its OK and help me get through this.  At the same time, I don't want anyone around me when I'm like this, because I know I will be nasty towards them - a cutting, sarcastic, verbal nastiness.  It is, I think, a large part of the reason I remain single: it takes a very strong, thick-skinned woman to be with me during these times.  Believe me, I have scared off more than a few over the years when things got "too intense," to use the phrase I have heard more than a few times.

And before you suggest, yes, I do have a therapist - have had for years.  But that's a very different type of interaction.  An important one, one I value immensely, and one that I recommend highly to anyone who fights demons similar to mine.  I would never have come as far as I have without my therapist's help.  As I say, though, that's a different interaction.

I'm going to stop here.  I may not be making a whole hell of a lot of sense, but blogging these things helps me to sort out the jumble of thoughts that clog my beautifully broken brain.  I don't write these types of posts looking for sympathy or to cry "oh woe is me," nor do I write them really for anyone's benefit but my own.  Maybe there are some of you out there reading who get it, maybe there aren't.  Hell, maybe no one reads this.  But it helps me, and that what matters.  At the moment, anyway.