everything and nothing

My head is one of those ones that likes to make a huge deal out of nothing.

Through school, this meant a lot of stress and procrastination and panic. At work it means a lot of nervous energy and quiet panic attacks. In my relationship it means that my head tells me to end it every five minutes.

Today was a day where, somehow, I had all three.

I’m currently in the middle of a short university course and am struggling to find motivation and interest. This has led to my absolute terror and imminent panic at the assignment looming next month when I have nothing prepared for it yet. I wish I could say I fixed it and I feel better now, I don’t.

At work today, I lacked the support of my general manager and managing director as neither were available and this led to several things going wrong which I had to deal with alone, guest complaints that got heated that I had to assist with and many moments where I wanted to run away screaming. Several trips to the bathroom were simply to sit on the floor and try and keep myself from crying. The only bright side is that I’m off tomorrow, so I am coping with this.

The final is what tipped my day into the disaster zone. I overreacted repeatedly to some of my boyfriend’s messages and a small argument developed. I had already been fighting the doubt that my head likes to throw at me several times an hour. Today those doubts has increased and I sat for half an hour staring at my wall ready to end the whole thing because I was “going to screw it up anyway”. When I finally got over it, the school and work pressure overwhelmed me and I had a brief panic attack. Seeking help from my partner, I sent him a message and this is where the catty jokes turned an attempt at lightening the mood into a dismissal, on both sides. And I crashed hard.

I had relapsed and then relapsed further. I felt myself slowly losing my mind and I didn’t know what to do about it. It was like I had no control of myself anymore in that moment. I tried to share the doubts and something came up that delayed his response and, again, I panicked. My head has now spent the last hour and a half listing every reason that this relationship is not worth it and that I’m wasting his time while my tear ducts enjoy the turmoil and won’t stop burning my skin with salt.

I’m exhausted and finished and keep staring at my scarred thighs – I want to go to sleep forever now.

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you are someone

On this tiny speck of a planet in a giant universe of existence, you are someone.

I have struggled with an existential crisis of sorts for a long time. Since a young age, I’ve experienced random sudden moments of realisation when I remember that I do exist. I’m sure this is something plenty of people have but that realisation always hits me hard.

Much of my life is spent in a vague blur. I know I exist and that I have a life and that I am someone but, simultaneously, feel like I’m looking in on a television series or skimming through the pages of a book. Often I forget events, lose track of time and entire conversations are thrown out of my head like last week’s bins. Sometimes, I can feel the little beings in my head picking through the conversations and stealing out bits to dispose of, sometimes I try to stop them. Most of the time I let it happen. I feel like I’m distant and disconnected from this life, so those things are unimportant. But then I have a moment of realisation. I remember that I am a real person. I am a twenty-year-old being with a life ahead of me. A life where I need to find a job, a life where I might get married, I’ll move into my own house or share one with someone else, I might have a child (let’s hope not), I might end up in debt or become a millionaire (let’s hope so) and a life where, one day, I will die. Those moments shock me into existing. It’s in the moments of realising my existence that I finally feel myself existing, I feel that I am someone.

Those moments have varied in frequency over the years. When I was young, they came often, they came with a vague sense of resignation and intimidation. As I got older, it was a nauseating anxiety they brought. Now, as an adult with this life imminent and already lapping at my toes, they carry more dread than anything else. I think about the future and what I will become, who I will keep with me, who I will not, where I will go and I can’t find any answers. I struggle with decisions at the best of times, but with a future spread out in front of me of existing, of being someone, of maybe being someone’s and being something that matters, I find no answers. I’m standing, not at a crossroads, but a meeting of many paths and none seem appealing. None call to me or even hint at a light.

Less than three years ago, my only option in my head was the path to the end, an immediate end. Now, that path is the darkest and most difficult one I can see. To be frank, I wish to be at the end of the path already, but I can’t find it in myself to go down it. I want to be dead, but I don’t want to die.

This is why the realisation carries so much dread now, three years ago my easy answer to the realisation was to simply kill myself. Now, as I’ve got older this has become less and less easy. With my new list of responsibilities, deadlines and understanding of the repercussions of such an action, it’s no longer the “easy way out”. Instead, it is the only option I know I can no longer consider.

So what, I ask myself, can I look for instead. In those moments of terrifying understanding of my own mortality and realisation of my existence, how can I answer the demands that my head makes? How can I ask it to keep those things it believes are unnecessary in this novel it believes it’s in? How can I ask it to function like an existing organ?

While I doubt I am the only person who feels this way, I know that each of us will feel it differently. I think that I’m hoping that, by sharing my own feelings, fears and beliefs, I can perhaps find people of a similar mind who may be able to weigh in on the topic. I know others experience their own forms of “existential crisis” and I need to know that I’m not the only one who can find it debilitating. I need to ask if anyone else finds themselves crying over the fact that they are simultaneously alive and soon to be dead. I stare at my ceiling, cry into my pillowcase and search for answers under my blankets. I keep hoping the universe is going to throw solutions and suggestions at me if I look hard enough or if I beg loudly enough or if I cry heart-wrenchingly enough and try to rip the answers out of my very body.

I feel lost on this search for something ethereal and unclear, I can feel myself losing to the beings in my head who refuse to acknowledge life. The beings that seem to have accepted suicide and still see it as the answer, already see me as a dying (essentially dead) creature. Those beings battle with me and dig through my memories and remove those conversations and thoughts and reminders to turn me against my own self and I worry that I won’t know how to stop them when they come close to succeeding. I fear that they will one day succeed and turn me against myself entirely.

I fear my existence and my death, I wish for both and dread experiencing either. I don’t quite know if this is going to mean anything to anyone, but I felt there must be someone in the world who may sort of understand this. Someone else in the world who fights with their own mind, who feels themselves losing things and wishing for another life, another death, another something that makes sense. I fear that this whole post made no sense and that you are sitting here finishing this paragraph and chalking this up to another psycho blogger. So, ignoring the fear, I’m throwing some thoughts out to the void of existence and hoping that something will get thrown back.

I’m ready to catch (fair warning, I have terrible hand-eye coordination).

Lovely days to the lovely people, good luck with your existences.

R x

Disappearing Act: Part One

The first step to disappearing is thinking it through.

It’s acknowledging and understanding your reasons. Identifying what it is you’re running from. Realising the consequences of disappearing.

This is a difficult step. It makes you face what exactly it is that’s leaving you feeling trapped and in need of escape. It’s acknowledging that something in your life is wrong and shouldn’t be there. This step is as far as some people get.

This step is the one that psychs people out. They realise that those things they’re trying to run away from can be solved…or pretend that they can to avoid the disappearance entirely. The other component that chases people away is the admin of it all. To disappear entirely is a lot of work. It means losing touch with everyone and stalking off alone for as long as you may require. While some people pull a temporary disappearing act, some vanish forever.

Often, I’ve wished for the effortless disappearance. To become as ethereal and as slight as smoke, to fade away into mist and slip between the cracks, never noticed and never seen again. I hope to become so tiny that no one even sees me when I walk in a room and no one noticed when I walk out. I dream of absolute insignificance. But the moment I feel it, I drown.

A disappearing act is not a ‘run away’. Not for me. I run away when I’m scared or overwhelmed. I disappear when I am finished.

A disappearing act is all that sits on my mind too much of the time now.

Though I, myself, have never passed Step One, I fear it won’t be much longer until I vanish completely.

love? ugh.

So, today is the day I drag us all to the other end of the spectrum. My last post was messy sadness and a lost mind, this post is wild happiness and a mind finding a route.

As mentioned, I feel I am in a place of vague smoke and uncertainty. I don’t entirely know what I’m going to do with my life and I’m not really okay with it but I have started to find ways to figure out what to do.

The main cause of this search for direction is a particular person: my boyfriend. I have mentioned him before and this post is a little bit centred around him more than the actual plans ahead (I’ll leave those for another time) which means that some things could get sappy.

Basically, as mentioned, I’ve had a shit couple of weeks and my head has been waging war against me for about as long as I can remember but it really rallied all of its forces over the last three months. The biggest change in my life three months ago was the fact that this is when we started dating (“properly”).  Over this time I have become more and more comfortable with him to the point that he has become my new ‘safe space’. This has meant that the trust I’ve built is a wonderful (and very scary) feeling but also that, because this is one of my first real safe spaces, I cry a lot.

I don’t like dealing with my problems, a problem he likes to remind me of, and this means that I often have a build up of emotion and panic and futility which often decides to expel itself in that safe space, ie: I have a full on panic attack and can’t stop crying for about ten minutes at least once every visit.

Love is living with tear-soaked stories and gasping wet t-shirts and holding back to let her breathe.

One of these such instances led to me having a full meltdown about my future. I felt useless and aimless and lost in that moment and he asked  me “What do you want to do?” At which point I realised that I didn’t know. At twenty years old I realised that I had no idea what I was interested in in life and all of my plans had crumbled to the ground and I didn’t know what to do.

And so, he found the sense, he suggested things to keep me busy that allowed me to earn some money at the same time and have started to actually feel some form of purpose. I have sent through an actual application for something that seems like I could really enjoy and also give me some purpose that I don’t hate.

Love is helping each other with the menial things but also offering advice for the big stuff.

The actual application process only happened yesterday though, after a weekend that I needed. This last week has been a complete disaster. I spent most of the week slowly dying from the flu while simultaneously struggling through one of my most dramatic crashes of all time. This meant that by the time Thursday came around, the day I always see him at work, I was a numb mess and when he left felt ready to cry for no reason. Luckily he reminded of the option to actually make plans together that weekend, which we did.

By the time Friday evening finally came, I was in pieces. I was overanalysing everything and exhausted beyond belief and was on the brink of locking myself in my bathroom with my bad habits. And then suddenly he was in front of me and looked as tired as I did and hugged me in that way and smiled at me and I sort of felt myself grabbing at pieces and holding it together for a bit longer.

The weekend didn’t seem to be anything special. We were in bed within two hours of him arriving and asleep half an hour later. Uneventful until my wonderful uterus decided to try and kill me at two o’clock in the morning. I woke up my poor tired boyfriend with my constant shuffling and sitting up and wanted to cry when he asked me what was wrong. Needless to say, it was a long night for me.

Love is back rubs and tight hugs when she has cramps.

The next day followed with the “uneventful” activities and we spent most of the day developing characters for an RP game he’s been looking into. And while it seemed that this was “nothing”, it felt like a big something in its nothingness. It took up most of the day and kept us busy together and beside each other but not interacting consistently. It was comfortable.

Love is doing nothing together.

Watching him leave was the only downfall of the entire visit (as always) and it broke my heart a little bit to watch his car drive away (as always) and when I got home I felt motivated (briefly).

I had had a nightmare that restless night from which I awoke in tears (later discussion) but which was a plot with which I can work. I don’t usually dream vividly and when I have night terrors, they’re usually vague feelings that stay with me rather than actual events. This story stuck (every dramatic and heart-breaking detail – well mostly, my memory is not what it once was) and for the first time in a long time, I have a plot. I have characters falling from my fingertips – granted, they are vague and insubstantial mostly but this is more than I have had in a long time and something that is hugely exciting.

Within moments of beginning my plans, I hit a snag and collapsed. As always, he was there to lift me again. It may not have been physically but through our phones, he offered support until I found my feet and managed to fill out my application, I looked into industry and professions and even made progress in it. I found a short course to suit me and constructed my newest to-do list. I felt actual motivation and managed to get down a character onto paper, a character with whom I am completely besotted. A character who may one day actually appear on here.

This motivation and lifted mood carried me through today. It was a long Sunday, with a host of complaints and various refunds that had to be arranged and apologies issued and an endless list of things going wrong. It was a day from absolute Hell with various members of management in terrible moods and a receptionist giving me attitude relentlessly, and somehow my mood has held. My Mum and I (we work together) were emotionally exhausted by the end of the day but my strangely positive mood helped her to get through it all. We may have spent ten minutes laughing manically over the fact that I did not know what an electric frying pan was and she may have pretend cried over how terrible her parenting has obviously been (it’s not that bad most of the time) so we both realise that this could be a front which could drop soon, but my good mood refuses to dissipate.

I know that this is because of my mouse who wasn’t in quite as good a mood as me (poor lamb spent the last day violently ill) but was somehow keeping me going through every complaint and glare and apology and exhausting question. Somehow, even now, my productivity is levels above its usual exhaustion. While I know it can’t hold out forever, I am simply enjoying the wonderful feeling of contentment this really wonderful person has somehow managed to drill into me in the space of fewer than twenty-four hours.

Like I said, it was going to be sappy, I’m not as good as saying these things to him but I hope, in reading this, he can sort of see my point of view and understand everything he does for me.

So, my lovely little mouse: thank you, as always.

 

I tried to put some love and yellow vibes into the below link for everybody. Please enjoy.

the little girl and the mouse

Love is comfortable and content.

a couple of words

nuisance

trapped

useless

aimless

This honestly feels like a shitpost generator right now and probably will remain so – I’m sorry. Basically: life is shit. That’s sort of the realisation I’ve come to over the last two months. No matter what you do or how you push or how much you hope and cry and try, everything will fall apart in the end. My head has never been a fun place and over the last few months, big things have happened to it – things that I expected to inspire me and lift me and turn my life into what I imagine a sunflower field feels like. It hasn’t.

Instead, I overthink and feel ridiculous and fall apart and constantly question every single thing I do.

I was promoted, I fell in love, I found a path and then lost it (repeatedly), I found old friendships that I thought I had lost, I reconnected with family members I hadn’t seen in years, I grew up and I started seeing life for what it is. In seeing it, I decided that I don’t want it. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life questioning if I’m doing something for myself or for the person I love, I don’t want to feel like I don’t know what direction I’m going in and I don’t want to worry about things like feeling needed. I always thought that a relationship would solve my insecurity related issues. I thought that a job would make me feel needed. I thought that finishing high school would give me freedom. I finished high school almost exactly eighteen months ago, and I have never felt more trapped. Not a single thing in life is actually ensnaring me, but my mind feels like all of it is.

It twists the good things in my life. It tells me that my friends don’t need me anymore and only keep me around out of pity. It tells me that I am a constant nuisance to my boyfriend and that he would be better off with anyone else in the world but me. It tells me that my mum would be able to get by more easily in life without me. It tells me that my grandmothers would prefer a granddaughter who was capable of calling once in a while and putting an effort into involving herself in their lives. It tells me that someone else would be better at my job and that I should just pass it on to someone else who wouldn;t screw up. It tells me repeatedly that I am nowhere near thin and that I will never be thin no matter what I do and that I’ll always be a mess because of the scars on my thighs.

My head is slowly torturing me, slowly pushing me further and further to the edge in the hopes that sometime soon, I will slip off the edge and take it with me. Recently, I’ve been wishing for it to finally just do so.

I sit through my manager asking how we can get the hotel occupancy up and think about all the things I should be doing to raise it and panicking because I can’t think of anything else. I sit through phone calls with guests who are certain and decisive and demanding and wish I could be like them and simultaneously loathe their existence. I stare at a laptop screen with no words on it and wish for anything to come. I wish that I could be the writer that I always wished to be, or even the doctor or vet or journalist or artist I had vaguely hoped for. I wish to mean something, to exist somewhere else and deserve the wonderful things that I am given but can’t do anything with.

The thing that makes life the most shit is that it really isn’t shit at all – we just don’t know how to see that.

This wasn’t what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about aimlessness or falling in love or dreams and hopes or tell stories about the little girl and her mouse but all I managed was more mopey disasters.

I’m sorry.

crash and burn

There comes a point at which a drop is not quite enough. I reached this point today and have surpassed my drop and reached the Crash and Burn level.

This is a very indulgent, depressed post essentially talking about myself being sad. I’m sorry in advance, but this is just depressing word vomit.

I’ve recently received a ‘promotion’ of sorts which gives me new responsibilities and has meant a larger workload and longer hours. Mostly it has meant having to deal with a lot of issues from the people who work ‘under’ me (sort of).

I have four receptionists I work with and each of them pose their own issues. The first one is unreliable and is currently off on sick leave for two weeks. The second and third are both inexperienced and lack common sense. One has too much attitude and the other doesn’t think. The last is my main problem at the moment. My new position is temporary (until I leave for the UK) and this fourth receptionist is pushing to take my job. Which would be fine if she didn’t have an attitude problem, struggle with authority, suffer from mood swings that even guests notice and leads to her being rude to guests and not care enough to bother try learning anything.

Tonight, after a run of thirteen days of nine to eleven hour shifts without break, this fourth receptionist gave me attitude, asked me stupid questions that she easily could have answered and then had the audacity to ignore our general manager and act as though she knew better than the rest of us.

I know she had an issue with me because I’m nine years younger than her with less than half as much experience in hospitality as her AND have the job she wants, but this is because I am actually better than her at what I do. And while I may not love my job sometimes and plan on moving industry as soon as I can, I take pride in the fact that I am actually quite fucking good at my job considering I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen and was trained by one of the best general managers in the industry who also happened to be the woman who raised me and put me in a hotel kitchen when I was six days old.

So basically, I lost my shit mentally. I was exhausted, annoyed, then got yelled at once I got home because I mentioned work, had to deal with phonecalls from the hotel after finishing a ten and a half hour shift about stupid things that a receptionist trying for a promotional n to management should be able to handle herself after I’ve spent the last two weeks steadily dropping. I fucked myself up enough to have enjoyed four days in a row of cutting myself and a second day of leaning over my toilet bowl with my fingers down my throat and I came very close to actually just slashing my wrists and neck until I bled out. Practicality and sense stopped me because the honest truth is that there instead anyone trained enough to take over from me at work and blood stains probably aren’t fun to get out of porcelain.

Here’s to hoping practicality keeps me from it every time.

Goodnight lovely people x

separation

“separation” – noun, the action or state of moving or being moved apart

I have been accused of running away before, and have addressed it myself as well. I have been told I am avoiding something before and acknowledged it ungrudgingly. I do run away and I do avoid. I zig and zag through the minefield in the hopes that I don’t have to actually deal with any of my issues.

I don’t really see it as running away or avoiding, which is why I don’t see it as unhealthy. Instead, I consider it separating myself in order to prevent the repercussions of whatever difficult thing I have to attempt to tackle. I am a small person and do not have the strength to tackle half the things I need to so, instead, I separate myself from the game entirely and leave the sports to other people.

This doesn’t always work well for me. Sometimes, in moments of panic, I separate so far that my head seems to wander somewhere else entirely and I lose time, lose experiences, lose my very self. The other issue which comes from this is that I often have to attach myself to something strongly in order to separate from my own internal issues and that thing is becoming my job, which is already stressful and draining before trying to immerse myself in it until I’m drowning and don’t know how to talk or think about anything else anymore.

It’s got to the point where people around me are noticing that I can no longer talk about anything but how work is going and how the people I work with are or what happened while I was with a guest and I can feel it starting to annoy people. It annoys the people I work with because they manage to separate themselves from work and it annoys the people I don’t work with because they can’t actually follow the stories most of the time and are beginning to find “exciting hotel stories’ dull.

While I do it, my mind and body is draining entirely to exhaustion and I believe I may have finally passed the point of panic and fear and reached the calming peace of depressed numbness. Strangely enough, and unhealthily so, I am welcoming that feeling back.

I can feel myself splitting further and further away from myself and while I am hoping to soon not be able to feel myself anymore, I am also beginning to fear what I will become when I finally do manage the complete split.