I’m staring at a blank page, not because I have writer’s block. In fact, I have too much to say.
An Emily Wright original shared secret of a dark reality. Depression, tigers and the inability to fight, just no today. One woman’s struggle to cope, January, mental health, financial woes.
The problem is, today, I feel worthless and mocked. I am doubting all the things I have told myself, trained myself to think in resistance to a broken childhood. I am rejecting that voice in my head that tells me that I am good enough and the words I write have value to someone somewhere, even if it is at my expense. Today, I am drowning in debt. My partner from yesterday has gone. Slipped off from the side lines swallowed by his own darkness that casts a shadow that today is too heavy for me to hold up.
There is so much to say. Why would I feel as though it is worth the time, effort, and draft space to express? I am a silly girl who has been faking it for too long. Yesterday, an error of my own was dropped at my feet. I let down the one person I vowed to never let down. I have tripped over this mistake and am struggling to get up.
Down here are all of my mistakes. I can not push them aside to find purchase on the ground below without looking at them and rolling them over in my hands. They are scattered around me like bones in a mass uncovered grave. They tumble and clatter together like a morbid mosaic of my life.
What business have I raising teenagers with a collection of bones just below the surface? I have no right to attempt to direct them on this path of life given this pit of my own making. Among these scattered bones, not one is for my children. Some are of parenting decisions and behavior I should have thought better of, and conversations that were better left unsaid. They make up the many chips and fragments of bone that dig into my hands and knees. They peirce my thin exterior and tear at my already raw and battered self-worth. Now punctured, my armor is exposed for the camouflage vail it is, an exhausting illusion I can not bare to carry today.
The idea of my children having their own basement of bones stops me cold as I consider how many I have personally put there. This thought robs me of breath and drags my heart through the dank dirt of bad decisions. Entitled decisions on the self-proclaimed pedestal of superiority made up of the falsely earned right of the parent to abuse priveledge through lecture, demand, and rule.
Today, I am sad. Too empty and weak to dig through in an effort to find solid ground I can stand on before climbing out of this pit. Today, in the cold darkness of January, I dwell on financial woes and all that could have been in my life. Today, I will allow the words of doubt and self-criticism, the voice of my own parents, hold me down and bury me alive.
A dyslexic writer! Hah! Who am I kidding? A lifetime of academic and professional wrong turns, yet I think I deserve more. Why? How delusional am I? I am nothing but a fraud who is able to convince others that I am somehow capable, confident, and credible. Today, I am anything but. Today, I will continue to fake it for the sake of my children and colleagues, aware that it is to my own detriment. For today, as I go to work and put in another day, my mind will continue to drag my heart through my collection of mistakes. Pointless torture from yesterday, a past I can not change.
Behind my forced smile and deceptively warm eyes, there is a cold dark pit to which I have fallen. It took so little to get here, but it is going to take everything I have to get out.
But not today.
