Writing is an eternal offering

Author’s Note: This was written in June and unfinished…

With these words i offer you a sliver of the skin of my fingertips, a taste of the inside of my cheeky mouth, and a pulse of blood from the pump of my strongest and most fragile muscle.

I write in the hopes that with every word i offer, i feed the beast of creativity that is sprawled dormant in my soul. It waits. It asks me, what will you feed me with today? What emotion will you offer me? What happiness? What pain?

I have written and rewritten this post many times in the past few months and it becomes harder each time. I find myself writing lines into the backs of my eyelids, only to find that my REM sleep has etch-a-sketch erased them in the rattling of the night.

Today i offer the gift of shame to my creative beast. It is an item i had been serving it daily in the hopes that if i pass it along to my creative beast, the beast can consume it and I will emerge without. But i find that more oft than not, the beast becomes swallowed by the perceived shame i have fed myself and i am the one left sprawled in its depths.

The feeling of shame is something that i find myself spiraling down the most. The nights when i feel that I have failed my own expectations as a person. As a daughter, as a student, as an example, as a writer, as a cousin, as a friend. There are times when i feel my shortcomings overwhelm me. I feel like i cannot swim out of them and that the riptide it creates is the deepest and most cold pit i could ever drown myself in. During these profound despairs, i try my hardest to push through them, for depression is a constant ever-present fight. I think that in my deepest moments of introspection, i can be the most cruel to myself and in those moments of cruelty and self inflicted shame, i cannot always find my way out alone. In these moments, i have tried to find help from my friends, from my parents, recently, from my therapist. With these people i confide my deepest thoughts and pray that this doesn’t make me appear as broken as i sometimes feel in these moments.

The truth is, i am a very happy person. In my heart and soul. I am elated by the smallest things and I find laughter in the simplest things. But sometimes, the small bits of darkness, the ones Mufasa warned Simba of, come through and I find myself crashing in the breaking point of the ocean in my mind. A lion cub amidst the wildebeests. In the past months, this has been my struggle.

I am a person with anxiety and depression. Sometimes, it terrifies me. Sometimes i feel so low that there is no possible way out. Sometimes, i worry myself so much that i feel like i cannot breathe and the plastic bag of my worries crawls over my head until I’m gasping for breath.

In the past few months, I have struggled with staring straight into my rear view and driving full speed to figure out what brought me from the events of the past year and how they folded over into this one. In that aimlessness of driving, i feel like i have been crashing my mental car into every median and wall in my mental turnpike and out i stumble to assess my emotional damage.

I think the hardest bits of the past 18 months was how rapidly i changed. To continue my mental car metaphor, I was speeding down the fast lane and with every obstacle or speed bump i drove through, i kept plowing through, hoping that maybe when i got to where i was aimlessly driving to, i would have time to assess the damage it caused. Well in the process i busted my mental tires and my axle threw me out of alignment. Does that even make sense? I need to learn how to write in the day time. Whatever. The point is, i was so focused on just making it through today. Just making it through this week. Just making it through this month and this event and this moment and this appointment that when all of those things were over and i had moments of normalcy of mundane life, of working and commuting and everything else… i didnt know what to do anymore. I didnt know how to function without the chaos i had been forcing myself to live in. And when i felt like i had arrived in my now flaming mental car to the mental rest stop in my lifelong mental turnpike, i found myself stumbling out of the driver’s side door to see that i had not really known where i was going for all of that time. I was on autopilot and in the haze of trying to figure out. How do i get an apartment how do i afford this apartment how to i make sure my roommate likes me how do i live alone now that she’s gone how do i confront the rental company that’s scamming me how do i live with out the best friend I’ve ever had how do i start dating after ending the only relationship I’ve ever been in how do i keep track of my finances how to i keep ahead of this job how do i make a police report when someone vandalizes my apartment how do i handle myself after… how do i find a new apartment when this company is holding my money hostage how do i find a new pcp how do i find a new apartment even though i feel like I’m so sick i cannot move how do i keep going to work even though i think my body is crashing how do i move back home how do i go back to commuting every day how do i deal with the fact that I’m not getting better how do i deal with the shame I’m avoiding how do i…