Friday, February 26, 2010

hello...nurse?

The wind is howling around the house - darkly; wild and angry. It sounds frigid, and makes me feel even more isolated than I already am - tucked away in an empty houe, hiding from the world. I feel utterly alone, but I have felt that way for some time now. More than anything these days, I need someone I can curl up against and just cry and be held. There's no one in the world that could do that right now; not and have it make a damn bit of difference.

I can't tell which emotions are real anymore; everything is either so sharp it hurts or so numb I barely register it. The only thing that registers as real is despair - endless...

I had a few brief hours of useful "up" time today... I actually created something. Well, several somethings...two pairs of earrings, a necklace and a bracelet. While I was working on them, I felt almost peaceful. Almost, but not quite.

I am spinning...an empty shell being picked up and hurled down by angry waves and fierce undertow due to a storm raging offshore. I need to go to the ocean, I'm just afraid to do it alone...not because I fear the possibility of following through, rather because unless I can ascertain a way to avoid catastrophic consequences with regard to my estate, I feel a duty to stick around.

Morbid, I suppose...

And people keep trying to encourage me and tell me to wait until the meds start helping, but no one wants to hear the truth. No one wants to let me say that I honestly don't believe any of this will do the smallest amount of good.

I hate them for it. For caring, for thinking everything will be all better in the future. If this has progressively gotten worse rather than better for the last 16 years, how can they stand there and try to tell me it will get better?

Idiots. Hypocrites. Fools. Sadists, really... but then while they've all said they've "been there," somehow miraculously they all got better and feel free to Pollyanna at me as if I am a child to be placated and distracted. Sure, they've been there...they've been fighting this for over half their lives...

Except they haven't. Not a single one of them. They've all been depressed at some point and assume there's enough of a similarity there that they can relate.

What do you do when you're up and still miserable...? You plan, feverishly. You argue and push and destroy everything you possibly can.

I just want it to stop. It's getting worse, not better, and I just want to be granted an early dismissal due to illness like when I was little and got ill at school and the nurse would call my mother to take me home. Except...I want it for life. Where's the nurse, maybe she'll write a note for me and let me go home.

2 comments:

The Girl From Back Then said...

It downgrades your struggle when people gloss over the humiliating lows and crippling nature of how this feels. The length and width and thickness of this illness. Telling you it'll get better when that certainty is not theirs to give - as much as they might mean well. It makes you constantly resentful that there are all these unsaid expectations that you have to be or do or say. When all you can be is what you can give at that time, in whatever capacity.

I wish I could thaw it out for you. Maybe I don't know exactly how you feel because I'm not you, but I really feel like I feel something not so far removed from that.

Elizabeth said...

That's...exactly it. I tire of the hopeful and cheerful comments from people who can't and don't know whether things will improve. The expectation that this will be healed in a few weeks' time; that I'll bounce back and be "normal." I've never been normal; I just hid it better than I'm capable of now. The expectation that if I just work at things, they will improve. As if I haven't attempted to do so for the last half of my life.

It robs me of my ability to desire any contact with them. When I hear, "You sound better today!" in a tone that is laden with the hope that I've turned some sort of magical corner. Or when I take a step to at least trying to understand how other people cope with this, and I'm told, "That would be useful." Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't, but I'm not certain that comprehension necessarily begets "recovery."

And it's not...recovery, or healing, as much as they wish it to be. It's...intrinsic to my nature and to the person I am, and I simply float...looking for ways to stave it off a little longer, due to the pressures placed on me by all of them.

Frustrating...