panic attacks and assumptions

I am still so angry. I am so violent internally, I am amazed it doesn't come boiling out, rapid fire.

I feel sick to my stomach. I am so sick of where I am, who I am, what I do. It feels like something trying to peel its way out from the inside. It wants to come ripping out, but it'll settle for less if there's nothing else.

I made the assumption the other day that this man I'm interested in was single. He and his girlfriend have a lot of history, they are quite chaotic in their relationship, but they have a kid together. I made the assumption, assuming that when he used the past tense, he meant they were done. I wanted that to be the case. I wanted that to be the truth, so I let that be the temporary truth, to allow myself to do something I've been denying myself for a long time. I should have known better. I do know better... But it happened; I can't take it back. I don't necessarily want to take it back, but now I'm confused, anxious, unsettled, a bit disgusted by myself. It's hard to sit still in my own skin, but who else's skin am I supposed to inhabit, if not my own?

What makes the situation more uncomfortable, unpleasant, disturbing for me... At least I was able to communicate to this man that I'm weird, I'm uncomfortable in close situations like this, I'm probably going to freak out a little. I was honest about my own strangeness. He asked me if I wanted him to leave his girlfriend and I could be his girlfriend instead. I told him that I didn't want to influence or affect his relationship with her, that if things could work out with her, then they should focus on that. I told him I'm fucking crazy. I told him that I liked his girlfriend; I do.

It's just, FUCK. What the FUCK is wrong with me? I despise being the 'other woman', or whatever the fuck this makes me. I despise those whores that get involved with people who are already taken, and what do I do? The exact thing...

It's just, he told me I was beautiful, that I was sexy, that he liked me, a lot. We were talking and we get along. He knew how to touch me, and if there is a god it knows I've been craving to be touched, to be pushed around and pulled and wanted, if there is a god it knows I have been craving so badly to be wanted... And he wanted me, he told me he's wanted me since we met, and I feel the same way, and it just escalated and I knew better, damn it, I KNEW BETTER...

What makes it even worse is that one of my best friends is his best friend; that's how we met. I don't know how my friend feels about this, or if this is going to affect anything; I don't even know if he really cares. I know he, my friend, has enough shit going on in his own life, but I'm not sure... I feel like he's a little pissed at me. Maybe that's just my own perspective, the reflection of my own feelings. I feel like he should be disgusted or pissed at me.

Why did I do this? I did not need more bullshit or drama in my life. There's more than enough. Damn it. Just, damn it.

I'm a fucking idiot.

I just want to disappear. These are not safe feelings. I do stupid things when the depression is sneaking back into my life. I do stupid things when I drink too much moonshine, and that isn't an excuse, it's a fact, I lose the part of me that prohibits selfishness of this caliber. I'm a mess. A fucking mess, and this is going to only get worse, get more complicated.

He wants to see me, again, he wants me. How can I go back to what was before? How can I say, maybe we're better as just friends, this is too complicated, I'm not this brave...

How do I fix this? How can I fix this, when it's always been broken?

Please, there may not be that many of you, if any, readers... but please, don't just read about my life and then say nothing. I feel bad, I feel worse when there's no response, there's no words, there's no retort. Tell me what shit I am, or give me some advice. How do I stop hating myself? How do I get out of this? How do I be brave enough to fucking survive what's coming? I'm not brave, I'm not smart, I'm not beautiful, I'm not anything but shit, at this point. These cycles come and they go, and it's coming back around again, I don't know what to fucking do, I need help, I need you to tell me something, anything, I don't know, just give me something.

What makes all this even more ridiculous and outrageous is that I'm constantly triggered to self-harm, I want to destroy myself, and I guess this is just one more way that I've done it in the past. But why, why, did I have to pick this moment, this person, this situation, to fuck up again? Why did I do this? WHY AM I DOING THIS? I feel like I'm splitting into pieces. I'm not dying, but the world is shaking and crumbling around me, and when it finally collapses, it's going to hurt a hell lot more than it does now. And I am so scared, so scared.

Help me.

there are bangs

When I say I'm self-harming again, I really should explain. I was never a cutter, really. I tried it, didn't really get many kicks from it, whatever. I burned myself every now and then, too, but it wasn't really my style. I've always been a picker. Pick and pick and pick away at it, like I'm trying to dig out of my skin whatever's trying to claw it's way out from the inside.

The proper name is dermatillomania. Compulsive skin picking. A form of OCD. Mine is severe, though there are times I forget this little fact. It started when I was twelve. I am now twenty-five. I was doing better. I really was. Then, just like every other... fucking... time, I got triggered.

Stress. It's a funny fucker, isn't it?

Summer is always a bad time of year for me. I've struggled through many summers in long sleeves, ninety/hundred degree weather, 100% humidity, and lying through my teeth, "Oh, I'm fine, really, no, that isn't sweat coming through every pore of my body, I'm fine, really..." Hiding, because shame is a bitter, angry, horrid pill to swallow.

I've done therapy. In and out, off and on. I've had so-called "professionals" try to push and pull and manipulate me into various treatments or mentalities, all to no avail. Usually, it just pissed me off, and I left. Noooo, you don't get to tell me I'm a perfectionist with obvious self-loathing and self-esteem issues, nooo, I TOLD YOU THAT THE FIRST DAY! Noooo, you don't get to tell me I have "anger issues" that I need resolve, noooo, FUCK YOU...

It's a vicious cycle of screwing myself over, time and again.

I think I need to go back to therapy, is what I'm getting at.

I hadn't touched laxatives in a very long time. I used to take them quite often, and when I stopped, I didn't have a bowel movement for two weeks. I was so constipated, I was vomiting after every meal, simply because my body would not, could not, keep the food down. There was no room. That's how bad it was.

Earlier this evening, I took my first two laxatives in over a year.

I've also taken some diet pills the past few days. My mind is seriously considering pulling out the "big guns", the anti-depressants and other medications I squirreled away when I quit them cold turkey, years ago.  (Side note: I quit them cold turkey because, 1: pharmaceuticals were my last resort back then, I was seriously making a plan and setting a date for killing myself, 2: I started feeling better after awhile, and 3: the realization hit me that my 'good doctor' psychiatrist was really a drug-peddling FUCK running an addictive fraudulent scam out of his office.) The meds are still good, to some extent. Though it is definitely not recommended to treat yourself... with old medications you were prescribed at a very dark, hellish time of your life. BUT oh... well... ya know, I feel it coming on, and I don't want that blind tunnel vision of that wicked depression monster, it's hideous, and I just know that if I start self-medicating NOOOOOOW... I should be fine. I'll be fine! Right? Right!

...Riiiiiiight...

But really, now, these crazy, energized spastic days I'm having??? It's crazy. The energy is frenetic, relentless, and the insomnia is getting to me, and I want to sleep, and I DO NOT WANT TO EAT, and I can feel the itch to self-destruct just writhing and crawling beneath my skin and it's causing me to do badthings and I don't want to do badthings but maybe I do because maybe this is the only way I really know to cope, and FUCK FUCK FUCK.

I think I need therapy. Or to go find the local mental institution and tell them I've lost my fucking marbles and the skies are laced with color like a marbled cake batter, and I can hear the hum of the everything, and see energy floating around things and people and nothing and the shadows are coming back and sometimes they whisper, and at night, oh god at night, the eyes are looking in the windows, and they're watching me and I know it's silly, I know it's stupid but there are clawed hands underneath the bed and I know I KNOW that these are not real but to me, to me, in those seconds of terror that grip strong and fast my heart and chill me to the bone marrow, that curdles my blood, I KNOW there's something there, and it's coming, it's waiting, its mouth is yawning wide and open bigger than is normal and there are teeth and they are for gnawing and ripping meat and the tongue that dances behind those teeth wants pretty red rivers to flow from my pores...

And there are bumps and bangs in the night and they ARE real, these are not imagined, and there should be no bumps and bangs, I am alone, I am alone in a big house with no one for miles in any direction, and I am alone, and there should be no bumps...

See? Do you see...?

Seething.

I am so angry all the time. It's drowning while you're so desperate for a drink, you would kill for it. I'm so afraid of myself. I know this isn't healthy. I don't know how to stop it. I am so goddamn angry... all... the time. I want violence. I want to taste blood. I want to feel crushing bone, I want to see that same fear in someone else's eyes.

Shit has been ridiculously chaotic in my life, lately. I'm getting back into college, again, taking online classes and preparing for some continuing ed courses that look to be interesting. I missed the last date to begin curriculum courses, but I'm not allowing myself to worry too much about that. There's enough going on. That's rather low on the priorities scale.

My aunt died a month or so ago. My father nearly died about two weeks ago now, and is still in the hospital. My mother is with him. I am at their house, doing what I can to assure my mother that there's nothing to worry about here. I know it helps them out, and it helps me, because at least this way I feel like I'm doing something to help.

There's enough to do here, but I've been feeling the familiar cruelty of depression rising. I'm fighting, as best as I can. Though, I can also see myself, and I know that there are some things I am doing that are almost triggering the slide back down into hell. I try to stop myself, but sometimes there's no way to prepare for the sudden blast of self-loathing that comes from nowhere. That's part of the anger. The anxiety is amping up. I've been more and more self-destructive. Not with drugs, I've actually cut back tremendously (thankfully) on that, and the alcohol, for the moment. I've been self-harming again, and my OCD is pitching forward like a tug boat caught in a hurricane. Today, I purged on purpose for the first time in a month. I think it's really been that long. I was doing better. Then reality hit, and I've been losing ground again.

I've also been steadily moving out of the house I've been renting for the past six months. Breaking the lease, bad girl. But this house sucks. My roommates are... whatever. There's been so much chaos and drama and stupid bullshit associated with this house, I am past over it, and the person I moved in to supposedly 'become better friends' with. I want nothing to do with it, or her, anymore. I barely even sleep there. She doesn't sleep there at all. She abandoned that house, and our friendship, months ago, to go get high with her piece-of-shit sociopath boyfriend.

Despite the bulimia, the self-harm, the semi-suicidal thoughts, the rise and fall of some version of mania when I'm sober, I'm still fat. Still too much. It wasn't really bothering me too badly there for a minute, as if I had somehow found a way to have a body that maybe wasn't perfect, and still have confidence, too. Or at least, the ability to walk around without wanting to saw my own flesh off with an exacto knife. I could say that, but I think that's a lie, too. I think what really happened is that I stopped looking in the mirror after a certain point. I would get dressed, make sure I didn't look like a hideous blob, and if I at least managed to look somewhat decent, then I left it at that. But the wincing at my reflection hasn't really stopped. Maybe it never will. I hope so, though.

I think I was nearly recovered, really. Something had happened to my brain when I did mescaline at a festival. I had been purging multiple times almost every day, and then that experience happened, and it was like the bulimia was just... gone. Not gone, but disconnected. I remember at one point of my trip, the entire universe was chanting 'purge, puke, purge, puke, puke, puke', and it was like it was unraveling my very DNA. I watched myself unravel to the very structure of my essence, and then reconstructed. In the process of this, answers were thrown at me, for why I do all the things I do. And it made no sense! It only made sense to stop, to move on, to let go. And letting go is terrifying... but once I came back to reality... It was as if I could breathe fresh air, again, without the gnawing, biting, hateful spewing to haunt me. Too bad it didn't stay disconnected. I think, really, since all this shit hit the metaphorical fan, that I was almost waiting for a reason to give in. To give up. To stop caring about my own well-being and health. (Wait, I never really 'cared'... Or, I cared, but I didn't do anything actively to show I cared...) It was like I was just waiting to be triggered. I think I may have known to an extent, but I kept it buried, like I was really so ignorant. But the more I think about it, the more I'm afraid I'm right.

I was waiting to relapse.

And that may very well be why I am seething inside.