Instead, I present you with my current mental status:
Fuck. This. Shit.
Delicate/Demanding
About
I'm Annie. I'm funny, smart, amazing, and I'm also mentally ill. I have been diagnosed, misdiagnosed, poked, prodded, and swallowed more pills than I can count in pursuit of normalcy -- whatever that is.Delicate/Demanding is something I created one night on a whim, a space I made to let me complain, pontificate, and occasionally laugh about being completely 'round the bend.
I am strong and fragile, funny and dull, kind and cruel. Whitman put it best when he wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." I break more often than I would like, but I always pick up the pieces, reassemble myself in a new way, and move on.
I'm on twitter and flickr. I can be reached by email, pony express, and smoke signal.
Life feels like the morning after all year long
When I was in kindergarten, I used to cry about having to wake up and go to school. Half asleep, I would bite and kick my parents as they tried to wake me. Once awake, I started crying. I cried through breakfast and all the way to the bus stop — where I threw up my breakfast from crying so hard. When I woke up, I felt overwhelmed and couldn’t bear the thought of having to face the day. As I got older, I became better at imitating decent human behavior. No biting or kicking or sobbing — at least most of the time.
Nothing has changed since I was five, though. I still find waking up to be like staring into a black hole. I’ve never been a morning person, no little birds helping me bathe and braid my hair. Each morning, I wake up with a giant bucket sitting on my chest. It’s filled with the nightmares I just had and the things I have to do during the day and the empty spaces I have to fill and the people I have to talk to and the thought of all the anxiety I will face. Even when I manage to shake it off and have a good day after fully coming to, darkness comes again and I resist going to sleep because the sunshine makes me miserable.
So there’s that.
Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in.
Can’t sleep. My whole body itches. The cats are trilling and the door is bump bump bumping because it’s windy outside — every time I hear the door rattle, I want to scream. The little cat played in his litter box for half an hour and stirred up a cloud of litter dust that’s exacerbating my headache.
I want to rip my own skin off and stomp on it while I howl. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had moments where all the sensory input completely overpowers any rational thought and I see red. Inexplicable, irrational rage boils in my gut and rips through me like something out of Alien. It doesn’t happen as much now that I’m older, and I’ve learned to control it, but when I was a child, the strangest things could set me off: the dog barking and bunchy socks, or flickering Christmas lights and slightly too-small pajamas. It gets worse when I’m exhausted or just waking up.
And I am tired. I am so tired. I’ve slept just over six hours in the past thirty-six hours — no more than an hour and a half at a time — and I feel like I’m unraveling. It’s incredible what sleep (or lack thereof) does to me. Ryan, he can pull a few nights of five or six hours without much problem. If I get less than eight hours (preferably nine to ten), I become useless. Panic attacks, headaches, confusion, panic attacks, and a general feeling that Everything Will Be Wrong Forever. Honestly, I avoid driving at all costs unless I’ve had eight hours of sleep because my cognitive function drops to zero and city driving overwhelms me a bit on the best of days.
