Breathless

Lately, I have just not had the words to describe how I feel. I guess that is why I have not been blogging as much. I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Like a shell of myself. Some  days I feel completely wiped out. Too emotionally, physically, and mentally tired to even figure out how I feel, let alone express those feelings. I have no ability to focus, remember, process the events around me. My thoughts are all incomplete.

Other times, I know exactly how I feel and what I want, but the words will not come. I hear them in my head, but they stick in my throat as it tightens around them. I want so badly to shout them out. I want to wield them like daggers, but instead I swallow hard and keep them inside. It is exhausting and I feel the need for constant distraction from my thoughts.

Outwardly, I continually hold back. I am kind to the customer in my store who is being rude to me. I am nonconfrontational to family members who have a VERY different idea of what is best for me. I talk nervously through the awkward silence between my mother and I when she is clearly unhappy with me without telling me what or why she is upset. I wait patiently for the seamstress who has been over booked, only to find out that it is "against company policy" to make my dress as short as I would like. I say nothing when my ex husband offers me $20 toward our daughters school tuition down payment. Each time, the responses in my head become more and more condescending, but they are never uttered out loud.

 Friends who have been loving and supportive, I begin to keep secrets from because I just don't have the energy to explain why I am so depressed. I feel isolated, sad, angry, and tired. My whole body hurts. Headaches and migraines are beginning to become a daily occurrence. All noise seems to cut right through me. My skin seems to be crawling, and I can not sit still for long. I feel it eating away at me. I feel myself avoiding people. Choosing to talk only to a small group of people who I feel completely and totally at ease with.
 
 Even good events and feelings I find myself hiding. I dread each day. I don't want to deal with customers, coworkers, my family, anyone, really.

Meanwhile, life continues, like it or not. There are still a ton of things to get done at my job, a new job to prepare for, a child to care for, pets to take care of, and futures to plan. So I continue in silence. The to do list, the money, the anger, the exhaustion, the pain, the happiness, the excitement, all mixed together. I feel like the cluttered junk closet in an otherwise spotless house. Sure come in, make yourself at home, just don't open THIS door and it will all be fine.