A See-Saw Named Coping

A few years ago, I had a nightmare where I was in a long canoe boat with someone else at the other end, and we were rocking up and down in the rough sea like we were one  see-saw, and then suddenly, as I was high up, the other person vanished, and I came plummeting down, broke the surface of the water and plunged under. The water rushed over my head, the weight of it somehow keeping me from pushing upwards. I still remember really clearly trying to flail my arms but hardly being able to move, my throat beginning to burn, desperately trying to push up towards the surface. I woke up then, with my face pressed so hard into my pillow that I genuinely couldn't breathe, in real life, until I flipped over and lay panting in great lungfuls of air, my chest aching as if I had actually been drowning.

I'm thinking about it now, because that's sort of what I feel like.

I feel like I'm on a see-saw, alternating between riding high and plummeting so low that I'm trapped and helpless, and hardly able even to keep my head above.

One of the most hideous things about being a complete mental fuck-up is that my first priority has always been to hide the fact that anything is the matter from pretty much the rest of the world. So it's like drowning, but not letting anyone see you drown. It's like drowning while everyone around you is breathing and swimming just fine, and you feel like if you ever had the nerve to call out to them for help, they'd laugh at you and say 'Just swim to shore, you idiot.' But even more perversely, it's like drowning yourself, just like there was a part of my brain that was busy transforming my sub-conscious self-suffocation into a drowning dream, instead of kicking in an instinct to change position until I could breathe again.

Drowning is a good simile too, because it's being overwhelmed, swept under, engulfed. I don't know what is terrifying me more at the moment, the course I'm doing unexpectedly well in and will therefore inevitably soon become a failure and a disappointment, or the module in which I'm already a disappointment and have to push up my marks before it just looks like I'm not trying at all. I have to give a presentation tomorrow. I have to give a fucking presentation tomorrow. I don't even have the words to express how much that terrifies me, because I know I'll fuck it up, and I know I'll panic and talk too fast, and it'll be like I know I'm doing it, but I won't be able to stop.

I'm scared I will never shake this feeling of never being good enough.

Enough.

I could write a lengthy post detailing how shitty the past few days have been, and how much I have loathed myself, and how much my mental states have terrified me.

But screw that. That's enough. I'm am so utterly through will all this bollocks.

I am an adult. I am the only one who can sort out my pathetic little life. I am the only one who can implement change. I am the only one who can take back control.

I think I've been hoping for someone to notice, I mean really notice, me- someone who'd break me down to my deepest core and barest bones and then put me back together again. I've been hoping for someone who'd turn my world upside down, make me see everything, especially myself, in a new way. I've been hoping for all the things that I've been craving for years upon years, all the things that only seem to happen to other people.

But the thing is... hope doesn't last forever.

I think I hope for too much. I don't think I should fling myself the other way, into despair. But I do think I need to face the facts.

This is my life. This is the way it is. I can't spend it waiting for things to change, I can't spend it hoping. I need to grow up, to solve my own little problems, to fix my own little broken brain, to just get on with it. I've had enough of being this way.

Just...

Feel so overwhelmed at the moment. I don't know what's going on.

I have so much work but whatever I do never seems nearly good enough.

I can't even with my eating. So so screwy at the moment.

My moods are back and forth like a slinky on a rollercoaster.

How can everything seem so easy one minute and then suddenly become the hardest thing ever?

I don't understand, and I'm scared.

I feel so tiny in this world, like I'll never make a difference, like I'll never really be valued for what I am, least of all by myself, like I'll just be trapped in this petty struggle with myself forever.

Pathetic.