"happiness is a choice"

I feel so helpless when people tell me happiness is a choice. I didn’t choose to be this sad. This sadness renders me useless. I shut down I can’t think straight, I can’t do anything other than waiting for it to pass. But it never really does. I feel so helpless when they ask me to stop overthinking. I desperately don’t want to overthink but I don’t know how to stop. I can’t control it. I feel so helpless when they don’t take it seriously when I say that I’m feeling anxious. There’s like this heavy weight on my chest and I can’t breathe. I feel hungry but I can’t eat. It’s a constant feeling of discomfort that I’m not capable of putting into words. I feel so helpless because I try to tell them how I feel but they don’t try to understand.

2/12/2020

The past month has been so difficult. I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom. I barely survived as those raging storms seem so endless, sometimes I don’t even know whether it’s still going on. It’s hard enough accepting who you are and embracing it when you feel like the world rejects everything about you. Everyone knows that battle. everyone has fought it at some point. But it’s harder when it’s you vs. yourself, in an internal battle that’s all in your head, you want so desperately to control. You try to control something that’s been controlling you for as long as you remember.

Most of the time I feel like I have lost all control over my own life, but I am doing the very best I can – and often times my best is barely enough to get me through the day. My anxiety is like a never-ending game of Jenga building up inside of me; each trigger like a block moving to the top, destabilizing me from the inside out.

 

and then there’s this guilt. which drips off of me with every outburst brought on from the nervousness that festers in my bones. it follows each and every breakdown because I am “lucky,” because I have everything because there is no reason to be anxious or depressed because I “should” be happy. and then there are these tears, the hot and furious ones that come on despite protest, the silent streams that crawl down my chin and neck coating my cheeks without me realizing it.

 

there is nothing “wrong”. there is no explanation you will find satisfying for why my panic attacks come on like waves in a storm that the swift swing from happy to devastatingly sad is as jarring and unsettling to me is as it is to you.

 

I fight every day against the darkness so that it does not come to define me. But some days, I lose that battle.