It’s baaaaaaaack!

One day I’m sure slap bracelets will come back into fashion. It’s inevitable. Eye piercing neon and tapered jeans (now known as ‘skinny’ jeans) have already shown up again and slap bracelets are one of those accessories that takes almost no marketing to catch the eye of some new <insert teen idol via YouTube name here>. In fact, I might just start producing these myself and make millions. Which will likely help pay for my therapy. That’s right, unlike slap bracelets, depression has made a come back. It’s not a brand new invention and nothing is gonna grab hold of me tighly-er than this. Is this funny yet? *tap* *tap* Is this thing on?

I’ve been spiraling down under the strain for a while now and had I stopped to notice, I might have seen it coming. Mostly because I know what depression looks like having made it’s acquaintance a few times now. It’s big and ugly and shaped like demons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly because it *is* the demons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Especially those Gentlemen guys from that Hush episode. Yikes. That’s one episode I have to watch during the day time, amirite?.

I feel raw, tender, like I’m untethered. I’ve been desperately trying to make connections to people happen and all it’s done is lose me at least one friend and hurt my bestie, not to mention myself. I feel all of these things, but I can’t feel people right now and I don’t know if they can feel me (get your mind out of the gutter sohelpme). Ziplock has nothing on me when it comes to keeping things sealed. It’s like living under water. The sights and sounds are coming from a distance and nothing is coming through clearly. Maybe it’s overly simplistic and uncouth to say, but I feel like I’m crazy. Can’t think straight, can’t make a decision without fearing it will come back to haunt me, can’t sleep, can’t feel safe – can’t feel normal.

It reminds me of my first time in college all over again where, after the stress of working and going to school (both full time), I collapsed under the weight and spent my senior year a neurotic emotional mass that could barely sleep and almost literally crawled across the degree finish line. Mostly, I was afraid. All the time. Of everything. Sometimes I’d just lay in my room listening to everything moving around me, the walls creaking, and I was so paralyzed by fear of whatever unknown thing there could possibly be that I simply curl into a tight ball in the middle of an air mattress reminding myself to breathe through the terror until I fell asleep. I had panic attacks multiple times a week where I’d leave class and huddle in a bathroom feeling terrified and queasy. I would sometimes call my boyfriend in the middle of the night, completely freaked out, and he’d talk me down some until I finally just let him go back to sleep. I can safely say it was pretty bad. I don’t know how I dug out since, at the time, I didn’t even know I was depressed and anxious. Maybe it’s not that bad right now, but being in school again and having a lot of extra stress come out of the wood work, it’s hard not get all misty-eyed and nostalgic about it.

I woke up on graduation day in my tiny room in my off-campus box of an apartment surrounded by print outs and disks on an air mattress because I didn’t have a bed (I couldn’t afford one). Aside from a couple of old Zip disks (may they be dusty in peace), I grabbed a garbage bag and stuffed everything inside. Extra copies of my thesis, research copies, all of it. All of it had to go. I marched it out and dumped it. I would have burned it, but I didn’t have a metal barrel to stuff it in and I wasn’t supposed to make fires in my apartment. Not that it would have mattered or that the smoke detectors even worked in that crap hole, but it’s the spirit of the thing, ya know? I probably destroyed most all of the somewhat careful work I’d done on my thesis and whatever other classes I was taking, but I really didn’t give a damn. I just needed it to be over.

I survived traumas growing up and I’ve never really dealt with them. I didn’t feel like I could ask for help. I’ve spent decades trying to figure myself out and live normally. Actual decades. As in I’ve lived just over three of them and two+ of them have been spent partially trying to get over my experiences. I’ve mostly tried to just accept and move on, but moving on is not a strong suit of mine. Actual demons still sometimes show up, usually at holidays, and plant themselves on living room couches waiting to feed. I’m always, always waiting for them to show up. Even though I’m grown, and I could likely beat the shit out of them, I still can’t overcome my all out terror of them. It’s like part of me is perennially 10 years old and trying to hide. Unlike Buffy, I can’t kill these monsters.

The question might be ‘what the hell is wrong with you get some fucking help already oh my god’ and that’s not so much a question as one of those emphatic type statements that gets mistaken for a question on the internet. Well, I am getting some fucking help (finally) thank you very much. Sure it’s at least a couple of decades late, but better late than never right? In this particular case, I’m more inclined to agree than I might have been before. Before I got hip to the counseling my dealing ability consisted of a rough approximation of that t-shirt everybody and the president’s dog wears about staying calm and lying back to think on England. It was also about as useful as an empty slogan on a t-shirt. I know in the long run that the counseling will help, that maybe I can finally get back to being a person and not what feels like a worn out shell who doesn’t trust her ability to decide what to have for lunch (I had coco chicken from the Mediterranean cart; it was pretty good really) and who has no idea who she is and doesn’t know what she’s meant to be anymore. But I know it means I have to remember. I have to go over not just the more recent things, but the old things. The ancient, why can’t the past just disappear into a hole and never come out again, things I don’t want to remember. Which is kind of ironic I guess, for someone with a history degree. Here’s hoping with fingers crossed that this helps. Also, I should probably stop listening to Breathe by Sia. Because even though the lyrics feel like a perfect encapsulation of everything, it so doesn’t fucking help when you listen to depressing music. While being depressed.