Day 179: Just where the f*ck have I been?

Imagine this: You wake up one day and you can't move. I should say, you can move, but what's the point. You're body hurts for no reason. Your eyes ache, but the room is dark. You feel a panic attack building rapidly.

At this point your girlfriend leans over and asks if you're okay. You lie. You're fine, you say. She goes to the shower and gets washed. You make her a bagel, and then for some reason you're staring at the counter and you drift off to a different world...

you...

just...

Stop. Lose your mind. Get lost. Your girlfriend finishes her shower. She ask if something is wrong. You lie. You're fine, you say. You hug her. You kiss her. You put on a smile.

She goes to work.

Three days later you request a special night. One where you can just sit at home – preferably in the dark – and ask, again and again, what brought you to this moment.

A day later you have what can only be described as a nervous breakdown, but, you think, to be fair: you were not nervous at all. You were just completely fucking obliterated. You felt completely separated from what makes you a person. You sit. Shake. Cry. And at one point you're faced with the reality of your own fragile state of mind.

It happens like this:

You know damn well that you are on your couch. You are home. You are doing the whole shaking and crying bit. You can taste salt.

But, all the same, you're not on the couch. You can actually see yourself somewhere else. Noe somewhere better, mind you. But something not like this. You're not in the room. You're on a road, a standard country road desolate and nowhere. And you are looking at two paths. Right and left. It occurs to you that right means a complete breakdown wherein you lose the last bit of your sanity. Left means coming back. Feeling bad, possibly. Left means having to own up to the fact that things are hard lately.

You go left.

You cry more.

You spend a week getting over this event.

You cannot blog about your life.

You take 78 days to think of how to start again. You write a chapter to a novel. You visit Phoenix, Ore. for a week and see Portland one night. While in Oregon you have a huge fight with your girlfriend and feel bad for days. You go to Challis, Idaho too. There's a neat hot spring there. No fighting in Challis, though maybe because it happened before Oregon.

There are a few beers. Some laughs. You watch the HBO show Rome, and read a few books. You constantly think of that road you were on weeks before. And then one day you don't. You're past it. You're resolve returns. You feel better.

You breathe again.

Suddenly you don't care if UPS, USPS, the Montana Abolition Coalition, or anyone else wants to hire you. Fuck it. You decide one night that only one thing in your life ever truly made you feel happy: Working at Montana State Hospital.

You ponder this for a long time, keeping in mind that a few weeks before – exhausted, sad, and desperate – you nearly took a plunge into the deep blue ocean of insanity. But didn't You're here. And it's okay. You're okay.

You come to terms with yourself at 23 in a way that you didn't expect to.

You decide, without really consulting anyone, that you want to be a nurse. You sign up for credits at school. You become a student again. You get hired to work part time in the Student Involvement and Leadership Development office at UM. You get hired to work at the Pov part-time as well.

You see things getting better. You feel better.

You start blogging again.

You stop writing in the second person.

So okay. I'm back kids. I'll be seeing you soon. I'm out of town this weekend, but I
ll be back posting regularly next week. Until then....

Laters.

Oh, and P.S.: If this post just didn't make much sense I'm sorry. It's my way of just laying out some of the heavier stuff from my last few months without boring, or seeming whiny.