clarity

<king>

I’ve been thinking a lot about my life, lately. Where I want it to go, what I want to do, things like that. One of the manifestations of my anxiety disorder is that I get easily overwhelmed, and I don’t take the time I need to reset. I push myself. I sign up for things I know I shouldn’t. I double-schedule myself, I wake up too early, and it all happens so much.

I’m kind of hitting that point right now. It’s a little hard to breathe, and I don’t know if that’s because I have asthma or if I’m going to have a panic attack in the future. My therapist thinks that I might be slipping back into a major depressive episode again. (gr9. i have so much sh** to do & i don’t have time to stay in bed and feel sad all day. get with the program, brain.)

So I’m sad. I’m listless. And I’ve been thinking a lot about my life. I’ve been on an antidepressant for a while now, and that, combined with therapy, has started to give me some clarity about my life.

One of the things that I lack most about my childhood is a sense of time. Everything is blurred together. I know that they happened, but I don’t know when they happened.

This extends into middle and high school, too. There are days where everything is exquisitely real, days where everything seems hyperrealistic and I’m floating through them like I’m not aware of my own existence. There are the normal days, where I can function and be a normal human being.

Then there are days like today. I woke up. I ate food. I went to class. I did some homework and wrote a lot.

But it’s still hard to breathe and I’m tired yet wide awake at the same time. My mind races so that I can’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. So I’ve been thinking.

My grandmother died shortly after my father did. Those months between their deaths are a blur. I don’t precisely remember what happened. There are some flashes, and if I’m prompted, the rest of the memories will come back, but on my own, it’s just one big blur.

I remember returning to my chorale group and being hugged by a blonde girl named Izzy. She told me that she was sorry. I’d never been hugged by Izzy before, and it was a weird experience.

I remember being angry. I remember not being able to focus, much, and being asked by my middle school teachers how I was doing. I remember telling my middle school best friend Mitchell that my father had died on our seventh grade field trip, and he told me that I was a good actor.

I remember quiet, and I remember yelling.

But the one thing that I never had about my life was clarity. I was blindly angry at everything, and the person I was during high school is someone that’s unrecognizable to me now.

I think I’m gaining clarity. My experience at EHS was tainted by anger and apathy. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t want to care. I swung between being an okay student and being the one that leaves class in tears. I became the teenager who needed the jujitsu dojo as an outlet for the angry. I shut up. I stopped liking singing, stopped making friends, just… stopped.

There were so many days in high school where I was just wandering around in this person-shaped humanoid, and everything was going too fast and too slow all at once, and I couldn’t focus on anything for more than a couple of seconds, and I would go to jujitsu and punch until my knuckles were purple. Pain was one of the few things that snapped me out of that daze.

I never cut. I didn’t need to. Somehow, through some miracle, I found a place where I could get it out through fighting. I found jujitsu. I found Sensei G, who took me in and taught me what I know and showed me that there is a life worth living, if only you can snap out of the daze. I broke my nose in the dojo. I sprained my ankle. Sprained my toes countless times, which is a surprisingly annoying injury. I broke a couple fingers and got plenty of bruises. But I kept going back for more. I ascended the ranks and found my home.

Anyways. I’m in a weird mood, and I’m going to be late for jujitsu if I write any longer. I’ve got therapy on Monday, so don’t be worried about me. I’ll sort it out.

</king>