The rain pours down as the sky turns late-afternoon winter dark. The fire place warms the living room. It should be comfortable, but my body is not. By body hasn't been comfortable for years, at least not since my grandfather died. I feel the throb of life in the belly and it frightens me. Life frightens me. Death frightens me too, or at least the transition. So where am I? Stuck in a horrible place.
It's the fourth time in my life that I turn to drugs to solve the dilemma. This time its a cocktail of Serenada (anti-depressor), Clonex (anti-anxiety) and coffee (two cups a day)! I just started in small increments - they other times it was straight into the full dose. I feel like shit in the morning until I resort to half a Clonex. I don't know if it's the wrong drug for me or if I'm in a really really bad place.
It sits as a dark nervousness in my right belly. It's the terror of the outside world. It's the fear of something going wrong inside me.
How does one live life knowing that it might end with something going wrong inside you? How does one accept that the end is unknown and live life without the fear creeping into daily life and jumping into panic ever time the body sends out a signal of something different.
How does one believe anything?
Because life lived to the fullest makes death meaningless?
How does one build confidence in life?
What makes life meaningful?
I don't know anything. All I know is that I don't want to die. Or I don't want to die today. And the reality is that maybe I will die today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe some time really soon. And if I don't see the point of it, if I think that life is mostly shitty lived for almost two decades with anxiety and two previous decades surviving a dysfunctional family, if there is no joy, what does it really matter? Because I want a lot of joy before I die. I don't want to be alone. And yet my life created so much loneliness out of so much fear and awkwardness and wanting so much to be loved. I don't want to be alone and yet I make sure that I am. And so I live in the black hole of uncertainty fearful of death and yet expecting it to come soon, frighteningly soon.
I don't have a solution. I struggled for over 7 years without drugs. And the last 6 months, with all the pressures of life, I feel. From the moment I had uncontrollable fear in that hotel room in Austin, my nerves have spiraled down until I've had enough, want a break from it all. I don't even know if the drugs are going to work.
And how am I going to really get out of this before I actually do die? How will I accept that my body got me this far so I should let it be, let it make the noises that it makes without being frightened of the noises or the sensations. How am I going to do it?
Tell me, how? Papa, tell me how. Tell me so that I can at least enjoy this time before it ends.
