My stomach is in knots again. This time because my daughter threatened to kill herself and I called an ambulance. I am hopeful they will keep her at least 72 hours.

I am going back into counselling because these feelings over the past while have been related to her life choices and I had to make a choice. Mine and my son’s mental and physical health or hers. Not an easy choice.

I told her she couldn’t live at home anymore so she threatened suicide. She had been living with a boyfriend at one point and then on her own but got evicted because of her life choices. So she was home again but out drinking and doing drugs and recently started selling. I can’t have that lifestyle in my home. She has mental health issues and has needed help for a long time but has refused to get any.

I feel as though she has been keeping us hostage with her emotional issues and using emotional blackmail. I am not saying she is a really bad person but this type of behaviour comes 2nd nature to her as well as using emotional manipulation. She may even not truly realize she is doing it. I don’t think she is totally ignorant of what she is doing but I don’t think she is being malevolent about it either.

I don’t want her to hurt herself but I don’t want her hurting us either by traumatizing us with her behaviour. And that is how I am feeling. I already have PTSD, I can’t add more fuel to the fire.

So here I am feeling my skin crawl again and hoping I made the right choice. She will not be allowed to come back. She won’t help herself if she does.

She will simply burn us all down.

This girl is on fire.

Well it feels like there is a nausea inducing electrical current going through my veins at any rate. Is it the continual low quality sleep, the daughter drama? Is it like a volcano and I am simply due for a ‘big one’?

How do people in war torn and third world countries do it, or people facing a terminal illness? My life is a dream compared to theirs and yet I feel like crying out in despair and throwing up from the constant state of anxiety.

Is it the chemicals in my brain making me feel this way? Is it those imbalances that can possibly make me feel like this without having such a horrific life? Am I pathetic and weak for having these feelings and allowing them to fill me up?

Am I anything?

Everything around me right now feels so unreal like I am just sitting here in an immersive yet fake and scripted show.

Dear Night, Dear Moon, Dear Stars Above, Dear Emptiness of Space…

Wow, 7 years since my last post. 7 years of swallowing crazy and trying to burn it away with my stomach acid.

Okay, maybe a little dramatic. Yes, I often get a sensation of queasiness and burning in my stomach from not being able to express how I truly feel, not without risking my career. And no, I am not crazy but I FEEL. I can’t even put into words what that sentence truly means but I bet others who are bipolar and crush it down as well as I do understand exactly what I mean.

I am not unique or alone in any of the feelings I have. There are so many others out there but I have no connection to them. No way of commiserating and trying to share coping strategies. No local groups for bipolar people like there is with AA or NA.

Tonight I feel so anxious like things are crawling under my skin. These emotions are crawling and feel tangible like leeches.

I can usually compartmentalize and box up these feelings and put myself in another frame of reference but not tonight. Usually I do it so well that it hardly seeps through at work except when I get a little unacceptably… perhaps even unprofessionally… hyper. The anxiety comes out in weird ways like practical jokes (only the kind that the recipient would find funny), or spending money I don’t have and giving away whatever it is I have spent it on, kicking my legs randomly, or throwing up in the rare occasion.

The struggle to hide it and seem normal is so exhausting.

Exhausting, exhausting, exhausting… and yet I have to be constantly busy to keep my mind off it or it would seep out in more obvious ways.

I guess I will try sleeping again.

signing off…

Shadow

I see myself.

The pain strikes… and I see myself from behind.

Standing in a desert, in a white silk dress, lean like I was in high school (Yeah, even when I am alone in my head I have self-esteem issues).

I see myself looking out over the dusty, dirty, dry landscape. The sound I hear is the rushing wind, like the air all around me is being sucked away and soon I will be left in a vacuum of silence.

The silence never comes. The wind just keeps rushing past me giving me goose bumps and I stand there barefoot on the hot desert sand waiting.

What am I waiting for?

The pain is so intense I don’t even moan or hiss in air like I usually do. All I can do is cry silently and pray for it to pass.

Who am I praying to?

Soon my eyes ache and the light is too bright and the room spins around me. Lightning strikes my back and pierces my heart, the pain intensifies. It steals my breath and steals my tears.

He tries to comfort me, he strokes my skin, but I am far away from here, lost in the desert.

The wind keeps rushing… it stops.

It isn’t a vacuum of silence. It is a vacuum of emotion. As my stomach churns and I wait to see if I am going to throw up this time, I feel emotionally blunt inside. Like novocaine for the soul.

Only it doesn’t take the pain away. It just takes away the caring.

It’s the only way I know how to get through the pain.