Words.

Such a strange thought to think, as I am driving my car. I almost didn’t believe myself. But I feel like there is an emptiness inside of me that just has nothing more to say. I feel empty of words. I have been feeling this way for awhile now. Maybe it’s normalcy. Maybe it’s just the calm. Whatever it is, it’s powerful and weak at the same time. It’s made me come to this conclusion…

I don’t want to write anymore.

My life.

I feel like I forgot how to write. But more so it feels like there is alot of darkness that’s trying to pull me down. The past few days I think it’s been successful because all I can think about is staying in bed. I know some people just may look at this as being lazy, but for me staying in bed is so much different than that.

It’s the safest place. It protects me. From my thoughts. From any bad decisions. Actually from any decisions all together.

I need to remind myself that I am still learning how to function effectively as a human being. But when I think about that I feel like it’s just a cop out. Like I should toughen up and just be ready for the world. Like I should ignore the dark thoughts that try to take me over. Like I should get over the idea of often just giving up – because it’s so much easier.

There is a darkness inside of me and when everything is quiet and calm – it tries to force it’s way in.

I keep having odd moments when I’ll be talking and I just don’t recognize my own voice anymore. This is going beyond the usual feelings of being someone else because that is just visual. Now it’s affecting my hearing. I don’t know if this is just my way of healing and actually becoming myself or if something is happening that shouldn’t be.

Some days I feel so excited about my life and the current path I am on. Then there is others where everything just seems so backwards and almost inside out. How can I live without the chaos that has fueled almost my entire life. Am I choosing this career path because I’m a chaos junkie, or am I choosing it because I can actually add value to the profession of social work?

There is alot of questions that are running through my mind and that tricky self doubt really wants to take me down. But I won’t let it.

Because this is my life, and I’m the only person that can make it or break it.

At ease.

When I don’t write I feel like I’m just avoiding myself. There is these dark corners that I find myself peering around, just waiting for a fleeting thought to escape me. Waiting for it to disappear because once it does that, I no longer have anything to write about.

But I’m in the bath right now. The water is almost cold and I started to daze off with my phone in my hand. I am too lazy to wash my hair but that’s the whole reason why I ran the bath in the first place. I feel like I can stay connected, I can study for my midterm tomorrow, I can multitask when I am in the bath. I can’t do the same when I am in the shower.

I understood yesterday why caffeine is dangerous to me. Because I had a cup of coffee each day for the few days prior and it was as if nothing happened. Until it did.

When I had some coffee yesterday morning I found myself pacing, and it was like I was high again. That feeling of hollowness and everything goes ting. I was shaking, but not enough to see it because it was on the inside. But the vibrations were so strong that I couldn’t bear the feeling of being in my own body. I felt like I was close to dying. I know that might sound crazy.

But when I woke up the first time in the morning, in the very early hours I told myself I was already manic. That I didn’t need to turn on my daylight lamp or even have caffeine but something inside me rebelled. I skipped the green tea and went straight for the coffee and still I am paying for it.

Because I really was starting to question whether I actually am bipolar, I sometimes think I am normal and other times I just feel like I’m reeling. Like I’m feeling so many things that don’t make sense, and then they grow and they ebb as they flow.

I’m so tired but something in my mind told me that I needed a release and so here we are now, I think I did it.

I feel at ease.

Ride the wave.

The last entry I wrote I was spiraling. Moments after, I spent the morning broken, breaking and bawling my eyes out. It felt like the entire world had fallen on my chest and was trying to collapse my lungs. I was drowning. And then after a friend rescued me through Facebook messenger, I picked up the pieces of myself off the floor and cleaned the house.

I went to work early and I decided to walk to the coffee shop and grab some caffeine because I was so exhausted from crying. I decided to call my daughter again, to sing her happy birthday on her voicemail, when suddenly I was caught by surprise. She answered the phone.

I was so excited that even though I wanted to stop talking and interrupting her – I felt like I couldn’t. Because I had no idea even what to say. So that turned into babble. I can’t count the times I interuppted her mid sentence. I need to learn to not do that. But I was kind of in shock. I went from the darkest of days to the brightest of light and it felt like the sunshine just tore through a big dark cloud in the sky.

It was perfect, and I think since then I have just been riding that wave. Or at least trying to.

Things have been moving so fast, and so slow at the same time. My life is no longer just my life, and no longer only my story to share.

I cannot speak about anything I am experiencing in my practicum because it would be a breach of ethics. So I am quiet about what I experience. But I have moments where I wonder if I will ever be a professional. Then I also have moments where I already feel like a professional.

I feel so exhausted from the moment I wake until the moment I sleep. Like my eyes are constantly half closed. Everything is normal. Until it’s not.

I didn’t feel the pressure of school until this week when maybe I finally realized how fast everything was happening. Or maybe it was when I had two early midterms already and got B+ on both of them. This is a problem for me, I didn’t even want to write about it because my last semester I had A’s. I feel ashamed. But only about one of the marks because the first one was from stats, and that’s pretty good for someone who’s scared of math. But in the back of my mind I keep thinking to myself that maybe my medication change did this. Maybe I need to go back on Wellbutrin even with the side effects. Something is different. I felt like I failed.

So I need to stop being so hard on myself, but I’m finding it difficult. I am finding myself stuck in my head and mostly unable to find my footing for the past month and a half and I could pretend to not know why – but that would be a lie.

I have only been to a handful of recovery meetings and I try to make it to big book study on Wednesdays but sometimes I feel like the world is spinning so fast and there just isn’t enough time. How can I balance all that is happening while the same time fitting recovery into my life? This all feels so complicated. This is the first time in my life that I have balanced so many different things and maybe that’s just a learning curve for me.

Maybe I’m rightfully exhausted. I feel like I need to catch another wave.

Wired and tired.

I slept in, because I feel wired and tired at the same time. It’s one of those days where I feel excited and happy because it’s my daughter’s 16th birthday – but those feelings are so weird and misdirected because I have to internalize them. She is not here, and I am not there.

I called her a few nights ago to wish her a happy birthday because I don’t want to bother her by calling her tonight because surely she will be celebrating her birthday. But I think I will try, just before work. Not because I know she will answer – but because I want to be able to sing happy birthday to her – over the answering machine.

Feelings are not facts. This is not mine statement, it’s something I learned last week and I need to stick with it. Because sometimes I relive things like they are happening all over again. I get caught in this huge whirlwind of emotion and it can feel like drowning.

But what am I supposed to do with all these feelings, if they are not really happening to me right now?

I had a plan to get up this morning, do some dishes. Clean the kitchen. Go to the nooner meeting. Do stuff. Stay busy. Live my life. And yet here I am sitting in bed, in the dark as my cat cries to me. It’s time to wake up. But feelings are not facts and I live by the way I feel and today I don’t know how to feel.

Because I have this joy and happiness inside of me for how amazing my life is, and I feel so blessed and lucky. But there is a disconnect.

I feel wired. I feel tired. Are these facts, or are these feelings?

I need a moment.

16 years ago today I woke up with swollen fingers and swollen ankles. I was about 37 weeks pregnant. I had no idea what was going on because I was rapidly swelling. I was living in Aldergrove at the time at my parents’ house with my boyfriend. I called my pregnancy program which was located downtown Vancouver and I explained to them what was going on. They told us to take a taxi directly to the office and they would pay for it. They had an idea of what was happening to me, but couldn’t confirm it until the doctor saw me in person.

Downtown Vancouver was a long taxi away from Aldergrove, but we made it. I don’t remember much of the details, because I was terrified. I was so young, and so scared about what was happening to my body. As soon as we got there they said we needed to go the BC Women’s hospital, which was another long trip away. They transported us there and immediately I was being poked, prodded and tested. My urine was dark red, and I was getting more swollen by the minute. They said my blood pressure was through the roof and that I was in a very dangerous and sick place, because I had developed pre-eclampsia. I had no idea what this meant for me or our unborn baby girl, but soon I would find out that it could kill both of us if we didn’t induce labour.

I was so scared. They told me they were going to induce labour the next morning, and so they put me in a room overnight. I just assumed that my boyfriend could stay with me in this big empty room, but they kept telling me no. I didn’t understand why I had to be alone. I was so scared. I suddenly realized the urgency of the situation, and I didn’t feel ready. I felt like the remaining few weeks of growing this baby inside of me was just being taken from me. I remember laying in that hospital bed that night, in the dark crying to myself. Feeling so confused by the size and emptiness of the room around me. I had never seen a room so big in a hospital before.

In the morning I asked if I could have a bath before we started the process of inducing labour. They told me I had to be quick. I just needed a moment with my unborn child. I needed a moment to regroup and centre, or do whatever it is that a scared 21 year old does before they give birth to their child.

I remember being interupted and told that my time was up. It was time. I was escorted to basically an open room with numerous other women and their partners and everyone was hooked up to a machine and they pulled the curtain around me and they inserted something inside of me. We watched her heartbeat draw pictures on the paper beside the bed and I waited. Then it happened, and I felt like it was almost instantly that I started to go into labour. And it wasn’t anything that I could handle because I was so emotional and I wasn’t ready, she was still growing. I didn’t know how to breathe through the pain because I only went to one prenatal class. I had no idea what was happening to my body.

I was in hysterics. I was crying. I was scared. She wasn’t ready. And I had no idea that my not breathing, meant that she was not breathing either. I didn’t know. I had the mind of a child. And so at about 8 cm, even after they gave me an epidural – they told me that they had to cut me open. She was in danger. She wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I didn’t understand.

And so the next thing I remember is being on that operating table. And it felt so tiny underneath my heavy body. Everything was frozen. I couldn’t feel my chin even. I was so scared, and everything was numb. When they cut her out of me, they didn’t pass her to me to hold. I didn’t get to hold her for the first time until days later – because they took her right away and performed surgery on her because she had duodenal atresia which meant surgery immediately after birth. They didn’t let me hold her. I felt a million miles away. When she was done her surgery she went into the NICU because she was premature. She was so small. She was so perfect. She looked tired. I just sat in my wheelchair beside her bed and would hold her hand. I was so proud of how strong she was. The nurses wrote ‘baby’ with my last name on her baby bracelet and I told them thats not what her last name would be. She would take her dads name. I thought this was the right thing to do, since I gave him no choice in her first or middles names. That was my idea of being fair.

She was so tiny, and so fragile. And still just a million miles away.

The truth is I have never felt like I gave birth, I felt like she was taken from me. Because she was removed from my womb. I couldn’t even handle the simple task of breathing. I couldn’t give her life. I wasn’t strong enough so the universe took over.

Like she was so great and so important that the universe just had to take her from my body because it was time for her to be born.

I wanted to finish the story, but honestly this was one of the hardest things I have ever written. I need a moment.