Hornets With Squatter’s Rights

This post is raw and… wrong. Wrong as in “incorrect” because words fail me in areas that only tears can adequately fill right now (I. Don’t. Usually. Cry.) and so this post doesn’t paint a replica of the picture I am looking at. It comes somewhere within a mile though, and it dances around a topic that may be triggering to some people.

My mum told me today that I am like a different person since yesterday. And I’m not. My head is still in a terrible, alarming place. Something inside of me is trying to choke the life out of me, and an even bigger something is telling me to choke the life out of myself. I hurt. Not in the way I’m used to – chest pain and other niggles are a part of everyday. But emotionally, I am going to collapse under the density of this darkness, going to explode with the pressure of this agony. I’m lighter, though. I’m so, so relieved. I didn’t realise how much I had been dreading going back to living alone in my studio until I knew I didn’t have to any more, and the release of that weight made me feel like I’m flying. Which is deceptive. Because my smiles are genuine, and it’s so, so much easier to act normal today (I actually managed to, and I haven’t had enough anything to do that for a few weeks now), and now that I’m not being so crushed it feels easier to try. But… that doesn’t make it better. I thought it would. I didn’t understand that you could be in such agony, and watch grains of the absence of that feeling slip through your hands. People think I’m physically well – people who don’t understand the impact hearts and kidneys can have upon a human’s ability to function. People who assume an invisible illness is a non-existent one. People who fell for the mask I have worn for so, so long over every singe flaw, every single struggle.

I had to break before I could admit to anyone that I was breaking. In front of them I ground to a halt and stopped functioning and socialising and caring and looking after so many aspects of myself, and I withdrew and… I hid it all so well nobody noticed. I pulled it all around me to keep everybody safe, and nobody saw, until I was so lost that nobody could pull me out, and even then they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. Hello, I am being crushed. This is because some of the people I have surrounded myself with are selfish and ignorant beyond belief and use me as an emotional punchbag or for attention, because they know I will always be there. It’s because the majority of the people I’ve surrounded with just didn’t know, just could not comprehend and still can’t. And I don’t blame them for that. Even my own mother was ignorant (although not intentionally). She complains that I don’t talk but shuts down every discussion, particularly if feelings creep in.

I just wrote the entire rest of this post, and then deleted it, because it does not belong here. Oh ok so apparently tears are a great idea to my eyes right now. Excuse me for a while…

Edit: FYI the re-attempt at this next half says nothing I feel either. It paints the wrong picture. It sounds pathetic. And I’m sorry for it, but I wrote it, and I don’t want to make this post pointless. 

…

 

No look do you know what, I can’t even. I CANNOT EVEN HANDLE THE IRONY. I cannot even write the irony. Because I can’t handle the hurt it just drove through me.

I just feel let down.

I always make an effort to be there for my friends, to poke the hornets nests of their minds until they let out the swarm and I take the stings with them to save them from at least some of their pain. I have been used by people. Only a few people, but they used me. They let me take sting after sting, then they put me in a position where I had to take them, messaging me when they knew I was fighting for my life telling me they were going to end their existence and putting their life in my hands. They took everything I had and then left me in my emotional overdraft. Even when I tried to say I couldn’t be there, I couldn’t take any more stings because the hornets in my own nest were eating me alive… When I was so emotionally drained and broken beyond broken myself, these people took. They used. They were selfish and they never took any of my stings, never even offered to (not that I would have let them but the intention speaks louder than the action). They added hornets to my nest. They put their own hornets into my nest to relieve the pressure on themselves, and it made them feel better, and it killed me inside, and they didn’t care, because they didn’t hurt any more. They saw strength or whatever else they think I am. And before them I was stung near to death and they just. Kept. Sending their hornets my way. Even when I said, please don’t, I can’t any more (which was so, so hard for me to say, and rang alarm bells in the few people who genuinely know me).

Some people appreciated that and thanked me so much for being there for them, and left me to quietly handle the hornets alone but let me know that they were there. Some people poked my hornets nest but I grabbed onto whatever flew out, tore out the stingers, and let them deal with hornets that could no longer do harm but that got them in a panic nonetheless. Because people are afraid of anything stripy… But anyway. Some people ignored that. Some people went even further and ignored me because I no longer served any purpose in their lives.

And then I get a message telling me one of our lecturers left.

And the concern, the concern I’d voiced before and acknowledged but no longer had no room to feel. They wanted to bake him a cake and arrange a thing and make sure he was ok. The had these huge plans to be there for somebody they didn’t know. And I’ve picked so many stings from my mind that I took for that person because I wanted to, because I wanted to take them all, because that’s me, that’s who I am, that’s what I instinctively do for my friends, and I knew this person didn’t want to hurt anybody, and was stinging themselves with their own thoughts… And I tried to expose my own hornets now. And.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony, at the amount of concern and the action and the responsibility felt for someone a couple of times our age with his own huge support network around him who actually know about his out-of-uni life… These people that I know inside out, these people who came to me when they wanted to end their existence, who I spent so long telling how necessary and worthy they were until the hurt passed and a few words stuck… These people who I carried through hard times on a broken, fractured, bleeding mind that could not support itself and really needed their help, because it was dealing with bigger (but not bigger because everything is relative) things than they could ever imagine… These people that are meant to be my support network… They.

I was just lost for words, to be honest.

I still am.

And I’d started this evening to feel like maybe I could claw back something. My mum and I wrote all my uni hours onto the calendar, because she likes to organise things and stuff and decided to organise my life; and I was trying to force myself to imagine that there was some comfort in the idea that I only have to go to uni for a few hours at a time and then I can escape again in order to appease the thing trying to make me choke the life out of myself… And I bought a week-to-view diary and a weekly wall planner thing, and I filled it out. And then like that. Imagine I clicked my fingers there. Just like that somebody shut the door and trapped the hornets in. And I just lost it all. Just like that.

Blissful ignorance. Clueless bliss. Only, I was open, and if that person knew me, they would have known. Some people just…

Aren’t there. I’m a difficult person to be there for. I can’t even complain. I can’t even.

And the reaction and response told me things about myself that that person never meant to say.

It said I didn’t matter.

It said I mattered less.

It said my problems weren’t problems.

It said nobody understood me.

It said I didn’t matter like I thought I did.

It said nobody would ever kill the hornets or even smoke them to subdue them for a little while (I guess my dog is like smoke in that sense).

It said there was no concern.

It said nobody would miss me.

It said… Go.

And I want to join a gym. My mum suggested we start yoga or something, but I want to run again. I want to swim. And she said no, not until my heart is sorted. But she is out tomorrow, everybody is. And I want to run. For so long I have craved that runners high again. I miss it. It was part of my daily routine for years and it was the only thing that ever helped the hornets. The temperature is finally sub-zero (usual British winter is occurring for once) and I want to get so cold it hurts (like I did this morning when I walked my dog with my next door neighbour and their puppy). Like I said, the only thing that ever kept those hornets out of my head was sport. And that’s what I want. I want to run, even though chest pain is pretty constant now and arrhythmias happen a lot, and just walking through the woods this morning left me unable to breathe… My brain is desperate and lost and it will try ANYTHING to stop hurting, to stop hating itself, to feel less hate about its own existence.

So I’m going to run. Tomorrow morning. And even if I don’t, the thought of that run right now is the only thing… The only thing.

I’m willing to take a chance.

Right now, I just wish I wasn’t sat in the dark crying alone. But it isn’t just crying. It’s aching. It’s fighting with a part of me that I am out of control of that tells me my life is worthless and so I should just do what everybody wants and end it. It’s being at war with this constant weight of feeling like the only way to cope with the choking, relentless emotion is to seek the company of death himself. It’s trying to let out the parts of me I have hidden for so long and failing at doing that properly even here, let alone to people who I have helped let out those parts of themselves. It’s… I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know how to get through it, is all I know. But for some reason today I’m trying. I’m trying to plan and kidding myself that it might make things easier. I’m thinking of trying stupid, desperate things that aren’t as final as the stupid desperate thing that feels like the only way.

Nobody knows me at the moment.

Even I am beginning to find myself in the presence of a stranger, and that stranger seems to have squatter’s rights.

 

 

My hornets seem to be exploiting those squatter’s rights.