Breaking point

I’ve somehow managed to descend into full blown mental health crisis. It’s been brewing all week, but today has completely broken me. I am sitting here in floods of tears now Nina has gone to bed, with dark thoughts swirling round and round and this agonising pain inside me. I don’t want to live like this anymore. How is this my life? How did I end up here?

I couldn’t work today. I couldn’t think. I sat and tried. I googled to try and find out what is wrong with me, as if I didn’t know. I did ride my bike at lunchtime, but that was between waves of desperate crying and hopelessness. I am so tired of my body holding so much pain and tension, of my brain being so foggy, of the only time I feel okay being when it is warm and sunny and even then not guaranteed. I am tired of trying so hard to be okay, of how much effort and money and time I put into it and yet still – here I am. I am tired of not sleeping, and of having hours and hours of trauma dreams when I do. I am tired of being alone and not feeling like I belong anywhere. I am tired of the self-loathing which sweeps in whenever I don’t feel good. I am tired of not being able to love myself because I was never loved for who I am.

This pain is not even about K. I’ve barely thought of her today. I mean it is about her, but also about this fucking pit of need and despair and grief that she puts me in touch with. My desperate longing for a Mum is there somewhere, but that gets swept up in shame because she trained me that my needs were bad and shameful, so even needing a Mum makes me bad. I’m consumed by dark thoughts of hopelessness, of despair over things ever actually getting truly better for me. Healing feels so hopeless, a promised land I will never be given the map to reach. It has taken so long to get here, and then I find here really isn’t okay after all. All this work and all these years and I am still here, desperate to cut my skin to take away the ache inside me. I feel agitated and dead inside. I am so tired of battling with the darkness inside me every single day. I know what I need – a break. A break from feeling, a break from trauma, a break from work and solo parenting. A break from pretending. And I can’t have any of these things. This struggle is just mine to continue.

I feel so lost with everything. Lost in therapy. Lost with yoga and meditation. Lost in healing. Lost with my work. Lost in trauma land. Lost in struggles to understand why my body reacts as it does, as if it is some alien thing. I have no sense of where I am headed. It all feels so overwhelming. Work when I am like this is impossible and without work everything will fall apart.  In our email exchange today K reminded me that only 2 weeks ago I was in a very different place. And she said I am holding so much that hopefully just slowing right down and taking each day at a time will provide more ground. I need some ground. I need ground under me and arms around me telling me I am safe and that things will be okay.

For a while I was able to hold hope for myself but that seems to have faded. I’m not even sure healing is possible anymore. Is this just my life? All the things that seem to help ‘normal’ people just seem so complicated and triggering for me. I try to deepen my yoga practice and everything gets stirred up. I go to a yin and sounds workshop and the gongs make the energy buzz in my head and neck till it actually hurts and doesn’t stop. I try massage and end up barely able to move for days. I got triggered in my Creative Kinesiology session because stuff with alters came up and it felt like we had shared too much and we felt over-exposed and so ashamed. And I get triggered by yoga teachers and healers who do not get my adverse neural tension and just bulldoze in with their understandings of the body and won’t listen that mine is super-sensitive and reacts differently. I don’t want it to be like that, but it is. And so I am tired of reaching out and putting in effort to find practices and people to help me on my journey and just falling flat on my face and being in more pain and more tense and more unsettled than I was before.

I sat at a work party for a couple of hours tonight while Nina was swimming and I managed to laugh a bit but inside I was shattered into pieces and just comforting myself with the reassurance that I could cut when I got home. (I haven’t, so far). I want more than this existence and struggle. The hope I had for life after therapy is evaporating because I cannot seem to engage with the things I thought I could and I don’t know where I am headed. I cannot keep going with work and single parenting in this state. I keep doing the things I know I need to do but my energy is so depleted and there is never anyone to care for me, in the here and now, in my home. It is all down to me to not only look after myself but also build a life for Nina and make sure she is nurtured and supported and well-fed and chauffeured around. I love her, but loving her doesn’t seem to leave enough space for learning to love myself. And I wanted K to teach me but she is going away.