I'm sitting in the living room. Next door, Dave plays a lively card game with his family. Their laughter is light and warm. I am sitting in the dim light of a lamp, waiting for my headache to ease. It is quiet, and I am enjoying being on my own.
2012 is almost over. We have had Christmas with two of the other interns, and most of the hype has subsided. The next couple of days will no doubt be full of this sense of numbness and post-Christmas exhaustion.
It is the end of another year. A little while ago the Mayans prophesied the world would end. Our lives could end at any moment. But life still seems long. The years pass simultaneously quickly and slowly. I am 24. I am young but old. Every year feels more and more like the last. Circumstances change but new phases of life bring the same stresses and breakdowns in me. I remain the same.
I am afraid I am losing hope that things can change, that I can change. I think I am losing faith that I will ever be able to break free of these things in me.
It's approaching the end of the year and I am numbed by a familiar sense of melancholy. I wonder whether it really is true that everyone can break the cycles that bind them. I think I may be caught in them forever, and the best I can hope for is ploughing on, managing, hanging on by the skin of my teeth. Trying to believe that all of this is worth it, that me being alive is a good thing.
These may seem morbid thoughts but the truth is, nothing has changed. I have felt this way since I was 11, and I am beginning to really and truly doubt I will ever be free.
I wonder whether it is time to admit defeat. Whether this is as good as it gets for someone like me. Whether nothing about me that is broken can ever be fixed in this life, and the best I can do is try to hobble on without jumping headlong off a cliff in resignation.
I am tired of feeling tired and overwhelmed by everyday life. Sometimes I see that the things which drown me are no longer anchored to circumstances or the movements of my life. They are deep inside of me. And I can't run away from me.
As I sit here, I realise how alone I feel. I feel like an extra piece of a jigsaw puzzle that never fits. Sometimes I wish there was someone left that I could pour out to, who I could tell these things without fear and pretence. Instead I am blogging this into cyberspace, into a silent void. Comfortingly familiar as I plough on, the realities of life unchanged.
Life is difficult universally but sometimes I wonder at the ways that I get stuck. My friend once said to me that my life seemed idyllic from the Facebook photos of my little family, my house, my husband and my dog. I now have a job, and have found a good church. The hole inside of me continues to suck me in. I feel drowned and small and alone and out of control. I wonder if I will ever be happy or at peace.
I take my meds and I do all I can do to keep a lid on things. I know that I am not in a depressive episode. I am tired that I am never really okay. It is so boring and tiring. It is so profoundly disillusioning.
This is an honest blog post and all I have left is my honesty. Sometimes I wonder why it is that this darkness and emptiness never seem to fade. Severed from everything that brought it into existence, it still seems to thrive. I live in the memories and scars of things I can never change. I can never run away from it.
People make new year's resolutions in the hope that things can change. And I am afraid, because with every day that passes, every person I meet and every experience I have, I believe less and less that they can. I am losing hope in myself, in my life, and in humanity. And I don't think I can get the hope back.
