Brain worms

I am not good at this anymore. I haven’t been for a long time. I stopped writing, and it became harder to start again and again. I did this before Open Diary went away; barely wrote, wouldn’t log in, would start and stop and not save or save drafts I never went back to.

I started the same pattern all over again. Part of it is there is just too much spinning in my head to pick a focus to write. Too much stress, too much guilt, too much fear, too much self-loathing. Because that is what it always comes down to – how much I really just hate myself. That is just so damn complete, the only thing I am sure of – and then there is the number of people who actually care about me, who actually love me and see value in me. They see what I cannot, and that starts the spiral down further because I feel like a consistent disappointment to the people around me.

I am such a freaking hypocrite; my students tell me this all the time and I am the voice telling them they have value, that they are important, that I love them as they are for who they are. I tell them I know how it feels to be that low and lost, and that while it may be hard to hear at that moment for feeling lost and alone, they are still important and needed and valued and loved. That it may not be believable, they are important to me.

And there is such guilt in that. I can love them and others so completely and unselfishly and expect nothing in return, and turn around and still be in the same darkness, feeling lost and alone.

To actually have people care about me when I can’t do that for myself makes it worse.


I have “clinical anxiety” and “clinical depression,” which simply means my brain is hard-wired to destroy me. Not only am I at the bottom of a pit in my mind most of the time, I get the lovely little friend telling me all the ways that everything is my fault. I can drown out the voices that say end it, I got good at that, but I am so tired of every day being a struggle to just BE.

My mind never stops spinning and picking out things that make me feel like shit. Every mistake, real or perceived, replayed daily in the back of my mind. Even worse at night when I try to sleep – it never stops, the thoughts that just spiral out of control.

The most constant refrain is basically “Well, you fracked up that.” It is damn near debilitating. “You destroyed that friendship. You didn’t do enough. It’s all your fault.” Even when things are good, my brain goes out of the way to find SOMETHING to destroy me over. I have seen lots of comics like that, the person starts to fall asleep and the brain independently goes “Hey, remember that THING? Yeah, the thing that you screwed up that was so important? Yup, time to focus on that until the sun comes up.”

At least with the anxiety, I know where my lines and limits are, what I can and can’t do. I know what will cause debilitating panic attacks and do my best to function in my life in such a way that I can continue on. But then things happen, I get forced into situations where people don’t know me and they either ask or try to force me to do things beyond what I can mentally handle.

That is going to happen tomorrow evening at a late meeting. I know it’s coming, I can’t get out of it, and I won’t be okay because then I have to come home and try to sleep so I get up freaking early Wednesday to drive nearly 300 miles to go participate in a board training/planning meeting for 3 days, where I will also be asked to go beyond my mental limits. The anxiety of knowing this is coming is making me physically sick, has all day. And I will be in situations where I cannot professionally explain that my clinical anxiety is going to keep me from doing X.


I don’t talk about mental health a lot in my life. My dad has no clue. I’ve tried to talk to my brother, but he is worse off than I am. And I try to talk to my mother, but she blows me off. I tried this past week when we were on a mini vacation just the two of us, and she interrupted me trying to explain how my mind goes in these anxiety spirals to say “Oh, so you’re just bored.” No. No mom, you completely missed the point… I should write more on that later, but the brain worms are headed elsewhere at the moment.

I do talk with my boyfriend, but only to a limit; the fear of him waking up one day and leaving is very real. In fact, I thought that was something that was going to happen about two weeks ago. He has a fake facebook where he posts stories as this fictional character. It is private and only a few people follow it. Well, two weeks ago he wrote a “letter” to “Dear Jane Internet” – now, this is pretty much my actual name, and the day he posted it I wasn’t wearing my contacts and didn’t fully read that first line. I read “Dear Jane” and then read the rest because my brain went “Why’d he write you a letter on here??”

I was shaking so bad that I couldn’t stand up. It was a letter about breaking up, about being betrayed, about no longer loving the same as in the past, that everything was over. I can’t even describe the panic, the physical reaction. As I was hyperventilating, I went back to the beginning. For the first time, I let my logical brain take over first and read it, and reread the damn thing while crying – which kept me from calling or emailing him.

And then I got it – as an “’80s hacker” and early adopter of the internet in his childhood, he has seen it change – that was what he was writing about. When I was done crying it was quite an amazing piece. I might post it here… It really is good when it is not scaring the shit out of me.

But the panic of those first thoughts, the fear that he will one day realize I am not worth loving, it so very real. And that has been fucking me up for two weeks at this point.


I need to sleep so tomorrow I can pack and prepare for meetings and professional things that I have to do. I have to figure out how to deal with the anxiety so that I can do the things I need to do so that perhaps I can sleep. At this point, I would also like to actually get some real rest. Sleep and rest are not the same thing, and at this point in time, I know that last time I really got any rest was May 3, 2015, so there is that.

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