Irony is following up a post wishing for a moment or a day of quiet from the gods with one about how I can’t hear them now over the roar of anxiety that’s finally taken over after months of fighting to keep it in check. I know they’re here, but the depression and panic have taken over because I feel as though my life is completely falling into shambles and I’m terrified. And the only thing I can do right now is write. And what I’m going to write and share isn’t a cry for pity or reassurance or help. It’s just the facts of what I’m dealing with, simple reporting on what’s going on in my head. I’m sure I’ll get through this, because I have to, because there’s no other choice. But this past month has been bad for me, and it’s taking an exorbitant toll. I have nowhere else to go, no one to reach out to at this hour, so I write.

How many times have I mentioned my PTSD? How often have I written about the horrifying depths of depression and paranoia and misery of the accompanying anxiety? The feeling that I’m being played and manipulated by everyone? The feeling that I’m a failure and a fraud who 100% deserves the disdain and disgust directed at me? That I’m barely tolerated by the people around me? I’m struggling, so hard, and today I broke and I fell apart. Publicly. At work. My worst nightmare. I try so hard to be cheerful and silly and chill, just roll my eyes and snark at the frustrations that abound, but today I fucking fell completely apart, and hours later, I might actually be feeling worse and more frightened than I did when I fled the office. More paranoid, more convinced that everything is going to be taken away from me, everything and everyone.

I write and I publish the things I do because honesty is of the highest importance to me, and by writing, I force myself to be honest, to clarify the whirlwind in my head and ease the roar into coherent thoughts. It helps me to almost remove myself from the equation and hand the task over to a narrator, hoping that semi-detached voice will help put things into perspective or tease something useful from another angle. It’s the easiest, most effective way for me to pull truth out and look for a way to weather the storm. Maybe it’s the core of being a Lokian; tricksters are known for deception, but the point of their deception is to lay the truth bare and force everyone to confront it.

My deception? I’m cheerful, and silly, and happy go lucky. The truth: I’m falling apart, and I’m scared, and I’m lonely.

I’m an only child. I’m very close with my mom and my stepdad, but they’re all I have. My father tried to kill me and my mom, my childhood was lived in a constant state of fear, and all these years later I’m still dealing with the fallout. My mom’s side of the family seems to have disowned us for reasons we don’t know, so it’s just us. I try to be strong for her, I really do, because I know she worries. She regrets not getting us away from my father sooner, even though she’d tried to when she was pregnant with me. She tried to shield me and protect me as best as she could, and she did an unbelievably phenomenal job considering the circumstances and the extreme isolation he kept us in. But no matter how much progress I think I’m making, I find myself sliding right back down into the abyss from time to time. So I write. I need to get these horrible thoughts and memories out of my mind, so I write.

This time, there are actual factors that are dragging me back down. My health is still poor, I’m still dealing with severe pain in my abdomen even though it’s been over a year since my appendix perforated and drained into my guts. I’m still unable to return to my profession, and while I like the job I have in the meantime, I’m making a fraction of what I did before. I’m not making enough to support myself. I’m behind on my mortgage, my gas service was shut off last month and I haven’t been able to get it restored yet, so I’ve been without hot water since April. I’m worried I won’t be able to afford to go to ECT. I’m scared, but I don’t know what to do. I live alone. All of my friends are married or in committed relationships with their own families, and with my PTSD, there’s no way I can invite a stranger to live with me to share the financial burden. I’m alone most of the time when I’m not at work. Alone to stress and worry and curl up and cry when the abdominal pain spikes.

It’s a horrible thing to say, but one reason I’m struggling now is because I no longer have the comfort that comes with contemplating suicide. My whole life, I’ve tried to be as unlike my father as possible, and when he killed himself last year, I swore that I’d never follow in his footsteps. So now, now that I’m curled up on the bedroom floor, fighting through everything, I don’t even have the option to comfort myself with the fantasy of death. That son of a bitch took that away, too. So I feel trapped, committed to a lonely life that I’m not sure I can – or want – to handle anymore.

I know the gods are here. I know they’re trying to help me fight this, reminding me that depression lies, and I have worth, and I deserve to exist, I have much to do and experience and contribute yet, I’ll get through this, I’m not alone. I feel them. But I can’t hear them. I’m so trapped in my own hideous memories and fears and replays of every failure punctuated with the feeling of razor blades in my abdomen, that I can’t hear them. I can’t reach out to the friends I love, who love me, because it’s late and I don’t want to be a burden and I can’t stop crying long enough to speak anyway. So I write. I write to try to pull coherent words out of the mess and try to make sense of it.

I’m trying to think of Iceland. I’m trying to recapture how I felt when I was in Reykjavik and wandering the south coast. I need to pull through this so I can go back there. I want to move there, but I’m struggling so much financially that I can’t even take a hot shower, much less relocate somewhere else. And honestly? Nothing would change. I’d still be broken, physically and emotionally. It won’t heal my abdominal organs. It won’t heal my PTSD. It won’t make me feel like less of a failure.

I don’t know what to do. So I write. I force myself to be blunt and honest, and I have to be honest, because I’m eventually going to hit “publish” on this, and I’m going to be held accountable for what I write. I hold myself accountable for everything I do, even when it’s failure and humiliation. We are our deeds, even when those deeds are breaking down into tears in front of your boss and coworkers before running out the door. I’ve not been in my finest form these last several weeks. Guess it had to come to a head sometime, somewhere.

I don’t think I ask for much. I just want to make enough to support myself, since I’m going at it alone, and I want to be able to eat normally without feeling like I’ve swallowed a bag of rusty nails, without having my belly painfully swell out to more than double its normal size just because I had a small snack. I want a hot shower, and maybe someone to watch a movie with. I just want to feel like I’m doing okay at life. But, it seems that I am asking too much. And so all I can do is write.