polluted by pain

Not going to pretend like this is some grandiose manifestation of what I thought I could be, because the truth right now is that I'm in a self-limiting place, one where I can only see the fault lines in my psyche and soul.  Coming out on the other side is no hope at all because I always dip right back into despair.  My depression seems inevitable.  

My mother tells me that people say nothing but kind things about me and love to learn that her daughter is me, like this persona or contortion of a memory in my hometown.  I don't know how to feel about it, whether I should identify with that or brush it off as a projection.  It's sort of maddening to know that I don't see it in myself. 

I feel the rage and sadness and pain on a cellular level.  I feel like bashing someone's teeth in, throwing a canning jar at someone's head.  I feel years of abuse and disgracing my body trying to escape through my pores.  My skin is crawling constantly.  I'm just dying to get out.  

And sometimes I want to just die.  

I'm so sick of landing here as if the weeks of beauty and laughter never exist.  I'm left wondering if I'm just faking it, on my best behavior.  I'm tired of trying to buy in to some spirituality I don't feel from the inside out, putting patches on my broken soul.  I feel like I need the company of other broken people to feel any love at all.  Maybe that's why I don't care about breaking the people around me.  I don't know.  

There is such a profound difference between feeling and knowing.  But right now I can't tell what is what.  There is too much rotting around my heart to know if there's anything pure left on the inside, or if there will be anything left if I scrape those parts off.  I think my fear of that is keeping me from letting go.  The fear of being seen, the fear of not existing or existing in a pure form only to be polluted by pain all over again.  

I can't think my way out of this.  But I don't think there is a way out of it.  I've been telling myself that I can only go through it, but I'm so tired.  Right now I just want to check out, stop thinking, stop dealing.

But then what?  

Maybe if I felt worthy of the beauty that is my children, my life, then I could live up to it.  I just don't know how to wrap my head around the transient nature of change and the fear of having nothing in the end.  I'm always left wondering, what's the point?  

What's the point of loving if I can't ever feel loved??

When things fall apart.

It's gotten pretty bad. 

I took a postpartum depression screening online a few weeks ago, and while I wasn't too surprised, it finally let me say out loud what I've been feeling since I was pregnant.  I am ill.  I have postpartum  depression.  The hardest thing about saying that is the fact that I don't necessarily feel depressed, just extremely agitated, rageful, and anxious.  I've felt depressed before and it didn't feel like this does.  But I definitely feel like I have no control over my emotions, and I've reached a point where I don't want to be a mother.  I love my sweet little child, but I don't want to be his mother anymore.  I want to go home.


The most terrible part is that I can't really breathe.  I have just kept going going going with school and my other many hats that I'm always wearing some hat, some role, and feeling really screwed into being something to somebody all the time.  I don't know what it feels like to relax, to be nothing but my open, honest, joyful self.  Feeling phobia socially, snapping at everything that gets under my skin and dragging it out for fifteen minutes, and especially losing my appetite- none of that is ME.  I've lost a lot of weight.  Everybody tells me that I look great, and I just want to tell them that I feel like shit.


To be honest, to lay it all out, I feel like shit.  My marriage is maxed out, I've had blowouts with my mother, mother-in-law, and best friend, and I've pretty much alienated myself into a corner of distrust and isolation.  I see my midwife today.  I had to wait two weeks to get into the clinic because I couldn't afford to see her right away.  But what price did I pay by waiting?  Greg says that things are going to get better after the first of the year, after Elijah goes to school, after just a few more months.  I don't think I can last that long.


This is the first time in my life that I've even considered getting on some medication.  I feel like an emergency, like a walking time bomb.  If anything hits up against me hard enough, I'll shatter all over the place.  I don't want to wean Elijah, but I've thought about it.  It makes me so sad.  I know sometimes that nursing him really drives me crazy, but I'm not ready to let him go like that.  I don't want to look back at this time and think that I really screwed him out of a good mama.  And that's where I'm stuck.  I'm tired of being his mama.  But I know I can't stop.  And I want to say it's because I love him, but I don't even know how to love myself right now.  I know I love him, but right now, it's next to impossible for me to feel it.


We'll see how today's appointment goes.  I guess I knew these two weeks would be hell.