Into the void...

2002-07-01

2:07 p.m.

I really wish I knew what it was that makes the back of my neck tense up around the same time every afternoon. I've been forced to become a morning person these past few years because the goddamn medication they put me on is only allowing me to function as a normal person from about 8:00 am to 12:00 noon. Any normal feelings experienced outside that time frame are completely inexplicable and unexpected.

This time of day everyday, I start to feel dizzy, my head feels heavy, my vision gets foggy, and the harder I try to think about something, the more disconnected from everything I become. Today, I'm spending the time thinking about benefits for my new job. I have to elect all the benefits I want, and I swear to god they couldn't have made it much more confusing if they were trying to explain the entire history of the universe without contradicting themselves once.

Thinking about benefits is actually getting me a bit down. It's kind of funny considering this is something I've been wanting for ten months, and now that I have it, I'm down. I'm not down because I have access to these benefits, though; I'm down because this feeling in my head is just one more reason why, as a twenty-four year-old, I have to waste my time thinking about the fact that I'm forced to sign up for long-term disability coverage because if I don't sign up for it now, I'll never be able to get it later. And the way things have gone in my life, I'd say it's probably reasonable to assume that I'll become disabled by my condition, or perhaps even ANOTHER condition, at some point in the near future.

My experience in Georgia definitely taught me the hard way that if you're going to sign up for insurance without company benefits, you'd sure as hell not have any pre-existing conditions. Now I know that I have a pre-existing condition and I've landed a full-time job, so this is the best time ever to sign up for long-term disability coverage without having to spend assloads of money on my stupid fucking condition, should I ever decide to leave this job or be forced to leave this job by my utter inability to function as a normal human being in society.

I don't know what I'd do right now if I didn't have Rob. Every time I stop to think about how miserable I feel and how horrible my life is, I remember that Rob is here, we love each other, and that's at least one thing I can't complain about. Other than that, I can't think of a goddamn thing.

This feeling isn't NORMAL. I feel like I'm so drugged up I can barely see straight. I feel like the effort it would take to move my head from the position it's in at the moment would cause more problems than a terrorist at a hoedown.

I feel completely disconnected.

I feel fucking awful. I feel like I just fucking downed twelve beers and a handful of pills. I think I would ordinarily blame it on doing drugs, but then I sit here and think, "This feels familiar," and when I try to figure out why it feels familiar, all I can think about is high school. I feel like I used to feel in high school.

Again.

I can't even tell you how often I sat in high school so engrossed in my own thoughts that everyone else might as well have disappeared. For all I knew, that was normal. Perhaps the first time I realized it wasn't normal was when I went on my meds for the first time. That was the only time when I really felt I was somehow participating in the outside world. It's all inconsequential now, though, if the disappearance of outside events is starting again as it seems.

The back of my neck hurts so much.

My muscles are tight from working out lately, but isn't exercise supposed to make you feel better instead of worse? They even prescribe exercise as a method of alleviating depression. Well, that's one more treatment method down the drain because I've been working out regularly now for well over a year and a half, and I generally feel worse than I did before I started working out.

An interesting thought occurred to me earlier. It struck me that, as much as I love Rob and feel it is an absolute necessity to have him here with me, I also feel as though I'm trying to somehow appear better than I am for his sake. I mean, I let my guard down sometimes, and so does he, but the fact of the matter is that being with Rob all the time makes me tired like I'm continuing on for his sake when without him, I surely would've given up by now.

I'm tired of life.

It's like the feeling I used to get when I worked out too much; my muscles, rather than getting stronger, would get weaker day by day until they were so weakened by my overuse of them that I could no longer work out. Or, it's like working at that stupid retail job. They gave me incentive to do well, so I'd work to the end of my potential and beyond. Well, it's the going beyond my potential that so harmfully affects me, and I just don't know what to do about it.

It appears to be part of my masochistic nature.

And as if that wasn't enough to have on my mind, I'm also having another problem. Since Rob just had a birthday and I've had aging on the brain, of course I'm reminded of how I always thought I'd die by the age of twenty-six. Call it a stupid teenage prophecy if you like, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a constant chorus in the back of my brain repeating, "You're going to die by the age of twenty-six," over and over again, not to mention the corresponding, "If you believe something strongly enough, it will eventually come to pass."

Even if I try not to think about it, the thought is still there, stuck well behind all the other clutter in my brain. And it's that damn, "If you believe something strongly enough," shit that really does me in. I've never believed in something that strongly in my life, and I have had FAITH, my friends. I have had faith in lots of things, and nothing has ever come from those things. However, the resulting logic brings me to conclude that I must've only THOUGHT I was really believing in those other things, and this is the only TRUE belief I've ever had.

My friend Ami always tries to tell me I'm being ridiculous about this particular belief of mine. Every time I see her, she asks, "So do you STILL think you're going to die by twenty-six?"

I don't have any choice.

What with a family friend recently dying, I've recognized in my family members an awful lot of trauma that I really don't think I would've expected. I've seen them react to the death of a young person they all knew well, and it has occurred to me how devastating it would be to my family to find that I died by the age of twenty-six. It's not that I didn't believe that before, but I recently had the opportunity to get a much better idea of their reactions and what they would be like.

It would be bad.

So, now I have to deal with the feeling that my impending death is upon all of them. And Rob. And all I can do is feel SHITTY about it because there's nothing I can do. If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. I would never, EVER intentionally die without Rob, but that only serves to reassure me that I'd be doing him perhaps the worst disservice of all should I die unexpected within the next year and a half.

I feel shitty all over again.

AND, I'm recently working on the next Great American Novel, as we all know, and I sincerely doubt that it'll be finished within the next year and a half. Maybe it will - who knows? But I suddenly feel this overwhelming pressure to finish it because I'm going to die too soon for it to be something I take lightly.

Ah, hell.

I don't know. All of this serves only to remind me that I'd really just like to go home and go to bed in a nice, air-conditioned apartment, where I never have to wake up and I never have to think, and Rob and I can live somehow suspended together in life and death without wholly being in either. Perhaps then the two of us will be relaxed, happy, and finally able to deal.

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