Loony Bin

This past week has been hard.

I keep having these visions in my mind of people in black and white movies where the protagonist (ironically) flips the EFF out and loses her mind and has a nervous breakdown and either has to go to the loony bin or remains distant and damaged the rest of her life.

I have this really tight feeling in my chest about 80% of the time where I envision my heart being the texture of a hard boiled egg and I imagine it being wrapped up real tightly in fishing line, and if someone pulls one end of the line, the whole thing is going to disintegrate into a hundred million pieces. So I’m trying not to exhale too hard.

I don’t know what the deal is. I guess it’s everything. I’m pretty sure I’m at my breaking point now. I don’t see where I can feel any worse than I do in this very second. I feel like I have no clarity at all, like I’m sort of existing and hoping and praying that God will just deliver me, and I don’t even know what it means when I’m praying it, but it’s all I can say. “Deliver me. Please, please deliver me.”

I see someone I know almost everywhere I go in this God forsaken, degenerate town, and for whatever reason, it makes me feel nauseated, like the social anxiety is so overwhelming that I sometimes start shaking in my core. I’m so much more introverted than I want to be. Something about that crippling shyness from childhood has never left me, and sometimes it resurfaces with such an overwhelming power, I don’t know how to contain it. I’ve spent my life saying that it won’t win, and I’ve spent years being loud and the center of attention and the first person to jump up to the microphone because my motivation is a terrifying fear of other people.

Mitch Hedberg wore sun glasses and often closed his eyes because his stage fright was so bad that he’d puke before he did stand up. My coping mechanism is to pretend to be more secure than I am, and more outgoing than I am, and friendlier than I am, and I try to fake myself out and make myself think that THIS person is me, but it isn’t.

Memphis is getting to me, and I can tell. Maybe it’s like being in the desert without water and all of a sudden you start losing it and seeing things and hearing voices.

I’m telling you. This has been one of the worst weeks I’ve had in a very long time.

I keep looking for solutions, searching for clarity, trying to find peace, and I can’t.

You know, I started this Blog in ‘08 to write about my adventures in Los Angeles; then for a while, I wrote for audience entertainment. Right now I’m writing as some sort of primitive survival tactic, I think. Maybe I write down how I feel in a subconscious attempt to find solutions or at least to feel a little more normalized, if such a feeling exists.

I had this huge meltdown last night. I bet I cried nonstop for two hours. It’s like all of the rejection letters from fruitless job hunting and the wild goose chases of trying to decide which grad school programs to apply to and all of the desperate, faceless people in this town living vicarious through someone else got to me all at once, and I had to leave a party because I was so overwhelmed and depressed and anxious and I felt like the floor fell out from underneath me. I walked to the car feeling like my head wasn’t on my body, like every sound I heard echoed, and I felt so disconnected and isolated that the walk to the car felt like it took months.

I keep closing my eyes and remembering one distinct moment of peace in my life, when I was in the Cayman Islands in 2006 and I was in a hammock on the beach and I fell asleep despite the noise. I have to sleep with big orange hunting earplugs in my ears every night just to help me to get a couple of hours of mediocre sleep. But during that time, I heard the ocean and the trees and the sound of peace, and I slept deeply and peacefully. I remember being in a relationship during that time with an underachiever old guy who was putting immense pressure on me to get married, and it was way too much pressure for a 21 year old kid. I remember when I broke it off with him, I saw that moment in the hammock in my mind, when I felt human, and I knew that somehow in the silence of that moment I found the strength to keep moving forward.

Winston Churchill said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.” I admire him for that. I admire the fighter. And I’m so dang tired and burned out these days that I don’t know if I’m a fighter at all. I used to sort of think I was. I was just in my bed for over an hour trying to sleep, but despite the big orange earplugs, my thoughts were so loud that I couldn’t even close my eyes, and I wasn’t sure what to do, because I couldn’t think of a single person that I could call to remind me that I’m not actually insane, I’m just going through a dead zone where I don’t have reception, and pretty soon I’ll get my service back. Pretty soon. It’s a bad feeling when you know that there are so many people in your life that love you and would die for you, but when you’re racking your brain trying to think of them, there’s nothing but static.

So. When I can’t nap, I write, and when I can’t write, I work, and when there’s no work, I’m tormented.