I can’t go dark again.

I have been feeling like I am going dark. Like the darkness that you don’t want to talk about, or even hear about. The darkness that feels like it should be kept a secret, but I know with every fibre of my being that it shouldn’t be a secret. I should speak about it in some form of communication. I should let it out because when I hold in the dark – things get bad. They get really bad when I hide the truth about where my thoughts are taking me.

A major reason I hide the this darkness is because there is no reason for it. My life is perfect. Everything is amazing. I have to bring myself back up, from below the soil. When I get back to earth it’s only because I compare my life to the lives of those who are stuck on the streets. They carry their lives on their backs, in shopping carts, and in their pockets. Some have addictions that run so deep. I have felt that before. I have been there, but not there.

They are entrenched and from where they are standing, policies and laws will never be in their favor. They feel as though they might die on the street. I have hope inside of me that something might change for these people, because I know where I came from. My little secret that’s not a secret. But when I walk by them outside, as I am on my way to my car – I feel like I am almost confused that I even own a car. How did I get here?

I can’t go dark. I know that it’s important for me to continue to manage my wellness, and so when I saw my doctor on Friday for a prescription renewal, I told him what’s happening. It felt good and weird all at the same time, because I am in charge of my body. I am in charge of my mind. We made the decision to adjust my medication as I have been on it for 3 months now, and off the Wellbutrin. I hate to think that I need to rely on a higher dosage of my medication to bring me out of the darkness, but I can’t feel guilty for having a chemical imbalance in my brain. I can’t feel bad for admitting that something is wrong, because I have been avoiding talking about it for months. I have been acting like I am ok, when I’m not.

But today I am ok, because I have taken my wellness back into my hands. I can’t go dark again.

Living.

There is a trickster that is living in my head these days. I keep finding myself thinking thoughts that don’t feel like mine. Some of them are dark. But the thoughts that are at that spot, the one that actually makes decisions, are really getting to me.

I keep pausing for moments to find myself arguing with myself why I should quit school. That this is starting to feel like more than I signed up for. The sharpness of mania has subsided and I think this has alot to do with my medication change. I am starting to feel like a fraud, in every sense of the word.

I think about the road ahead and how much work is going to be involved in it and something is telling me no. Something keeps coming back into my thoughts and trying to change my mind. That where I am should be good enough to get a sub-par job. That where I am is enough.

I feel so bad for even thinking the thought of wanting to just quit, nevermind actually saying it out loud. But it’s eating me up. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. For any of this. I feel like I’ve been faking this for so long and it’s catching up to me. These thoughts are not even the darkest in my mind but they are the most dangerous because it’s trying to take me down.

I have a future, and I know this deep down inside. But I can’t see it. I can’t quite visualize where I am even going to be five years from now. What kind of group of people I might want to work with. How will my life look when I’m done school? I can’t even see myself being able to manage the work that is involved in being a third or fourth year student.

Is this just self doubt? By saying this stuff am I going to create a self fulfilling prophecy?

I think I am still in shock at my current place in life. I’ve come so far, and yet at the same time this is the hardest thing I’ve ever have to do in my entire life.

For once in my life I am really living, and it’s so fucking hard.

The box and the cup.

I can feel myself becoming something else. There is a change within me that I have never experienced in my entire life. It’s kind of confusing. There is a quietness that I am almost confusing for depression. There is a stillness that I am experiencing that I feel like I could mistaken for laziness. I don’t know what to make of any of this.

I feel like I should be treating whatever this is with bandaids. With medication. With therapy. I don’t know what to call it and without a name how do I know how to even treat this?

Is this what learning is like? Maybe I’m just stressed because life and school is just so overwhelming right now. Maybe I am just normal and that is it. Why do I have to give everything that I am experiencing a name?

Because that’s all I have ever experienced in my past. Labels. I lived inside of this box where I had given myself thousands of labels and I stayed in that box. I became a girl in a box just covered in labels. And now I am something different, because I no longer live in a box. This is all still so terrifying to me.

Maybe this is just my midlife crisis. I turned 37 yesterday and everything was so perfect. So relaxed. I spent the day with my boyfriend doing stuff that I wouldn’t normally be able to do because I have been so busy lately. I feel like there is not enough time. But yesterday there was.

And I stumbled upon something that made my birthday feel so complete, because no matter how full my life is – the truth is that I have a hole in my heart from where my daughter is absent.

I found her music that she wrote and sang and I stumbled through her life for a few hours. It was like medicine. It felt like it was a gift to me and that was enough, because today when I went to stumble through her life again I wasn’t able to. I feel like the universe gave me a few hours window of access to her world and it was like medicine.

My cup often feels empty because I am drinking so fast from it and forgetting to fill it up. But yesterday my cup was overflowing and today I know that I need to be in charge of refilling my own cup – that is my duty, and nobody elses.

I am changing so rapidly. I don’t know who I am as a person anymore but I can feel a wholeness that I never even knew that I could experience in this life.

I thought I was born broken, but now I know that to not be true. There is nothing broken about me. I am just like everyone else out there.

Just trying to figure out how to stay out of that damn box, and keep my cup sufficiently filled.