It’s 9:30AM, and the day has started without me. I’m ok with this. I woke this morning feeling lonely and alone, as I often do, after another long night of dreams that refuse to allow me to get any kind of proper rest. I grudgingly ate breakfast, not because I was hungry or because the cereal tasted particularly good but because my body still requires calories to function. And I really am trying to function. Or at least to not give in to the urge to give up. Because this is one of those days where that little voice in my head is nagging at me that I can’t do this, that it’s all pointless anyway. It’s not, and I keep shooting back at that voice to this effect. But the argument persists. That voice is an asshole, and it doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up.
I haven’t opened the front blinds yet. I’m not ready to let the rest of the world in. So I sit here on the couch, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood around me — the traffic going by on the street, the workmen in the yard installing the new gas lines, the occasional loud voice of the morning drunk on his way from wherever he was to wherever he’s going. I listen and wish I was well enough to be ready to be out there with everyone else.
But I’m not. Not yet. I don’t know when I will be, and I’m impatient for that moment to arrive. I’m tired of the fight, the struggle, the relentless anchor of my mind holding me back. I know I can be better, do better. I know my own potential, and I’m anxious to live up to it. I was reminded at support group last night that it’s ok to give myself permission to not be ok yet. Recovery takes times, especially when you’ve been living in the kind of personal hell I have been for the last several years. I know life can be better. I just want it to be better right now, damn it! Like I said, I’m impatient.
It’s funny. We who struggle with mental illness have to remind those who don’t that, just because you can’t see our disease doesn’t mean we don’t have one. What we sometimes forget is that we frequently have to remind ourselves, too.
So here I sit, me in my little hidey-hole, listening to the world move about around me. I promise I’ll come out and join you here in a bit, but for the moment I need a little space to gather myself up and assemble the fractured pieces of me into something presentable. It’s just going to take a few minutes.
