Melting

A heatwave is hitting the country this week. We are slaves to the sun. Scurrying from it like mice from the human who enters the kitchen for a midnight snack.

Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's hormonal. Whatever it is, I've not been quite right the last couple of days.

Today I broke especially hard. The trigger conversation was relatively significant, so I don't feel quite like I've popped-off at something undeserving like I can do, but the level of my reaction shows I've been burying this oncoming storm for a little while.

I've been struggling to find extra work for some time now, and each rejection - or day gone past that I do not succeed in being able to bring some extra money in to alleviate my partner's finances - weighs heavily on me. I'm full of guilt. A little tightly woven ball of shame.

A couple of days ago I trawled through job opportunities and open positions and applied to everything I thought I had a shot at until I was drained. Then all the energy I had left for was to curl into a ball and wait until my partner got home. Then she had the tiring job of piecing me together again.

I tell myself that I'm letting her down, that I'm being selfish and lazy. On my good days I've proven that I can function to a tee, so why can't I drag myself out of the haze when I, when we, really need it?

Right now I have a list of phrases, that have slowly been becoming more prominent, circling my head. Their content is made slightly comic when placed with the background noise my brain is also providing.

I have recently noticed that I always have a song in my head. Always. Whether I'm aware of it or not.

"Put On A Happy Face" from 'Bye Bye Birdie' is the tune my mind has latched onto tonight, prompted by a resurfacing memory entailing a highschool  teacher launching into a revue of the song, in an attempt to cheer me up in homeclass. It didn't really work, but it did illicit an in-grin for a flittering moment at her approach.

The darker part of my brain is repeating the black mantra. I hear it a lot on down days.

I'm hopeless. I'm useless. I'm worthless. 

Now, put the two bits of 'audio' together. Quite something isn't it?
Sometimes the sheer irony that my low mental health states can manifest in are enough to make me laugh out loud. I must have yet a third stairwell of the mind somewhere that houses a smirking clown at a record player.

He cues up an LP and yells down the corridor: "You think that's crazy? Listen to this!"
And we both laugh.


To lightly touch on the subject again of needing cheering up in highschool: I have only recently admitted to myself that this is something I've struggled with for over 10 years.
I vividly remember someone using the term 'depressed/depression' and I was very fervent in brushing it off. The stigma. The pointed stigma stick jabs at me with every syllable.

Everyone has fucking depression. I'm just one more fucking loser whose life is seeming unnecessarily shit when it's not and we're all of us too goddam nuts to realise it. People with depression struggle with stupid things that aren't hard and now I'm forced to see that I'm fucking one of them after all.

Years I denied that possibility. A whole decade on and off. Even very recently I would bite your head off if you even hinted I had depression-anxiety, not anxiety, social anxiety, or PMDD.
Right now, I don't know what I am. Or if I care about the label so much. It could just be that this is one of the drops, the troughs, of the PMDD... or that could just be the wishful thinking of the stigma talking again. Who knows? All I know is I hurt, and I'm hurting the people around me.

Tonight to escape the warmth of the house we went to the beach and sat as the sun handed over his shift to the moon. We sat, my partner and I. Not quite communicating, but talking in a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of way.

Then something gave and sometime later saw us intertwined in a huddle on the dark, cool sand, moonlight on our backs, and me sobbing from my stomach into her.

My self esteem is down, and that in itself is highly uncharacteristic, but all these layers bear down on top of that. This shame, this guilt, this fucking frustration.
I'm a weird mix of being so angry and frustrated I want to punch the wall, but so unmotivated and lethargic that I don't see the point of doing so. It keeps me acting normal, which is a plus, but drains me to no end.

I hate playing on the fence. My good days tease me with a taste of what it would be like to be fully functional and having a grasp on my emotions and thoughts. To be chief of my state.
The days that this is taken from me, it's like I've been robbed. I could cope so much better with the unnecessary despair if that were all that I knew, if I were not taunted by the memories of what I could be, what I could do, when the veil was lifted.

Sometimes I'm a tiny bit jealous of those who crash. The ones who fully give up and let the spiral take them. But it's not in my nature to go down so easily, even if I could.
I remember lamenting in my highschool journal that I felt like one day I was going to snap in class and hit someone, or simply storm out of the lesson, or maybe even just shut down entirely... but the thought of the aftermath (not the punishment, but the questions, the probing, the trying to ascertain what was going on inside me) just seemed too much bother, too daunting.

What an odd motivation to keep yourself in check.
Not because you should, but simply because you're lucid enough to just not want to deal with all the explaining. Like a cop letting an assailant go simply from dread of all the resulting paperwork if they arrested them.

I have too much of a grasp left to let it go entirely. I can't just snap and go catatonic and live in a padded cell happily never after.
And so I'm stuck in this kind of limbo. This feeling of imminent breaking looming over me at times, and the small regular meltdowns that take the edge off the pressure cooker inside my mind.

It's pressure cooker days that are the gambles, and usually when I try to keep to myself. I have too much guilt as it is, without lashing out at someone (else) that I care about, or embarrass myself by having a complete crying fit at a party or dinner out.
So, I send in my apologies, and nurse the injured bird of my mind, and watch and wait to see which side of the edge I teeter to.

It's tiring, being mindful of just how mind-full you are.