Lake Lewisia #532

Evgeniya spent so much time either designing new recipes or cooking up the successful ones, she seldom had time or appetite to indulge in frozen confections herself, subsisting instead on sandwiches sent over by Leslie and eaten in the back office at Zelena Mishka. Sometimes, though, when the evening air felt just hot enough to soften ice cream but not melt it, she left the front counter to the kids and wandered out onto the patio. She would slurp at an ice pop that matched the sunset and tasted of grapefruit and daydreams, eating up the light and breeze as much as the sugar.

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LL#532

plague journaling

[Content warning: discussion of anxiety, depression, and past suicidal ideation.]

I mentioned to a friend recently that it feels like everything is catching up to me, emotionally, about this whole pandemic situation. The incident at work yesterday just reinforced that. I'm still anxious from it--will likely be anxious about it all through the weekend despite my best efforts to move beyond the feeling. It's more than that one incident, though.

The day job, whatever it might be, is usually the worst source of stress for me, combining as it does so many weaknesses: interacting with unfamiliar people in quantity and at length; opportunities to be judged and found wanting; pressure to maintain an income at all costs. So it tends to be the focal point, if not always the (sole) source, of my anxiety.

It's not unusual for the anxiety to bother me when I'm trying to fall asleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night. I've worked hard to get good at falling asleep rapidly; I haven't had much success with cutting down on the incessant wakefulness. Now, though, I'm starting to see a resurgence of the worst stage: morning dread.

At the worst times in my life, my anxiety has gotten so bad that I wake up terrified of the new day, desperate to be able to just go back to sleep and never face it. 2013 was the peak of it, when I would regularly wake up already dry heaving from terror. To be fair, that was literally the worst year of my life and I had every reason to be in mortal terror. Still. Not a helpful habit. While I'm not there yet, thankfully, I'm waking up more and more often to an internal monologue of "no, please no, please no."

In hindsight, my lifelong struggle with thoughts of suicide might have less to do with depression than with anxiety. These days, they tend to manifest as an idle awareness, just my thoughts falling into a well-worn neurological path without any strong impulse driving them. And I've started relabeling them whenever they come up.

I want to die. I want to escape.

Because it's coming from the anxiety, the flight impulse, the excess run-from-tigers juice. It's just that, at a very young age, I got it into my head that the only way to escape was just to frickin' die. I don't, actually, want to die at all, a revelation I wish I could go back in time and share with my child self. I just really want to get out of whatever situation is freaking me out so badly that not existing seems like it would be an improvement.

Right now, I really want to escape my life. I want to take off running and not stop until I've left behind the job and the bills and the rules about masks and sanitizer. Run until I'm wild and alone, somewhere beyond humanity, beyond my own skin and synapses.

Barring that, when things settle down enough that seeking out medical care isn't a Grail quest and goes back to just being a mini-boss fight, I think it might be time to get some treatment. I need some idgaf pills to counteract the run-from-tigers juice.