6 years ago...

That Woman:

With clenched fists and one hand holding my other arm to my breasts. I rock back and forth, and side to side, feeling the random beat within my chest. Sweat gathers on my upper lip. My breathing is shallow and fast. My eyes are closed to real time. Thoughts prick my restless soul, as they prowl around under my eyelids. Sketchy reminders of what I’ve locked away, behind the boarded-up windows to my soul. The old, yet familiarity of exhausting despair. I just can't think in complete sentences anymore.

It's as if there is a fire unleashing out of my head. Thoughts escape and ooze out from my pores, like thick black tar, relentlessly continuing to slide and smear any part of my body that I touch. I leave deep, red lined marks on the places I feel sudden urges to scrape away.

My entire body feels ever so tight like a snakes’ skin, readying to shed its dry itchy scales. All I can do is pull away and twist in the dry canvas of old skin. This hurts but I don't care. I need it to hurt to keep me alive and propel me back to the reality I must endure. I claw, scratch and scrape my way out of the uncomfortable feelings that exist inside of me. This is me in the fury of panic and anxiety.

But this time is well beyond anxiety now. It’s bordering on insanity. My internal heat gauge is off the charts. Searing fire, engraves behind my eyelids, taunting words of giving up to suicide. A sensation of burning from the inside out, makes me almost taste the painful acrid smoke, rising slowly from my dense smoldering skull. I feel so tired, so very damn tired… from holding everything in, as not to implode into a miserable disarray of a hot, holy mess.

I reach for my friends, my pills, to help me calm down from my inner tantrum. I begin to bend and unwind the false reality around me, as traces of my dear friend, the Xanax is kicking in. It soothes my inflexible joints. Imperatively ridged from the awkwardness in trying to let go. My friend helps me draw from the banks of memories from years of therapy, that it’s okay to not be able to control the world or people outside of me.

Tapering down now, I will be allowed the empowering cognizance that I do have control over something: How I choose to react.

Relief wipes off the demonic hopelessness from just moments ago, where I had scratched and smeared the anxiety all throughout my body. Still a bit apprehensive, knowing I will encounter and be held captive to the demons of despair all over again. For it is a part of me, this ugly that I try not to judge.

It takes patience, coupled with self- awareness and self-compassion, to hone in on which aspect of myself, needs the balmy ointment of self-love. As I carefully do this with the help of my therapist and God, I can feel myself healing from within.