Heavy

Remember that Kool and the Gang song, where he said, 'She's as heavy as a chevy'? I never really got that. I mean, a lady that's as heavy as a chevy is certainly not someone I want to be fucking. How is that sexy?

Heavy is the way I'm feeling right now. So much to process. I've been struggling my whole life with vague feelings of inadequacy, emptiness, fear of being alone...feeling sad and depressed. Another medication-club pal of mine used to call the black feeling 'the return of the shadow'. I always likened it to sitting on the edge of a well. One that has no bottom you can see or feel, it's just darkness. I don't plunge into it, but I flirt with the idea...I mope around the mouth of it, feel its dampness and sometimes even toy with thoughts of slipping down inside. Like I said, I've never actually fallen...my mental state has never taken me down a road quite that black, but I'm constantly aware of its presence, it's possibility.

I've been trying for years to figure out what's wrong with me. Prozac was an easy fix for a while, and I got a lot out of curling up on a leather recliner with a box of tissues once a week and working through a lifes worth of shit with a professional. Still do. In fact, without knowing I have that hour a week to go and be safe and not give a shit if I sound bratty or entitled or crazy as a shithouse rat, it's a wonderfully comforting feeling.

I don't know what healthy even really looks like. I wasn't reared in it. My home wasn't like other people's homes. I knew that much the first time I went to a friend's house for a playdate and her dad actually took an interest in her day at school, talked to her mother in the kitchen without berating her. There wasn't that antiseptic frozen kind of feeling, like the weird sense you get when something's about to explode? Your nostrils get numb and your heart races and your fight or flight instincts kick in. I never had very good fight instincts, but my flight is quite intact.

Growing up in a home with a mentally ill person sculpts who you are as you grow older. Besides having to worry about your own genetic crappy predispositions toward depression, anxiety, rage, you also get to live, as a child, inside a sort of ticking timebomb. There's never really a feeling of safety, of warmth and home. When you graduate from high school and run as far as you can and have to come and visit on weekends, you have nightmares before the trip. You dream that people are trying to kill you and your family. You don't really want to bring anyone home. It's just generally not safe. You spend years trying to break the mold that created you...prove that you're going to do it differently. You embrace other fucked-up people, even seek them out, shunning the stable ones in favor of people who get it. Whose life stories are way more horrifying than yours ever could be, because...somehow...that makes you seem more whole. It could be worse, you think. I could be like HER.

So this is the point I am at right now...a precipice, if you will...at the risk of sounding like a total dumbass, I am sort of at a crossroads, a turning point. Things are illuminated. The sneaking black coil that has been laying at the base of my brain for so many years, making regular things harder than they ever should have to be, is finally showing itself and it is strangely a relief. I've begun to accept that no, actually, I'm not just 'a fucked up girl'. I come by it honestly and unintentionally and if I am going to ever get any better...if I can get to a point where my day to day life is a happy and healthy and stable place to be, then fuck. I need to really jump in feet first.