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I am not invincible, but I’m trying to be, and it’s going to catch up with me. I lie to myself everyday, telling myself that I don’t need therapy because I’m stronger than other people. I don’t need help because I’ve fought this war for years and I’m not losing, and if I’m not losing, I must be winning. I don’t need a therapist, or my mother, to tell me how to handle my problems because I’m a survivor. I lie to myself until I believe myself.

I am not invincible, and trying to be is destroying me from the inside out. Normal people feel something when their fathers die. All I felt was a burning irritation at these people in my home for mourning. At the time, I didn’t understand why, but it’s clear now that I hated my family for mourning because I was incapable of allowing myself to feel true pain over the loss of dear ol’ pops. 

(This paragraph is subconscious) I feel this burning desire to be so strong that other people can barely stand to look at me. I want to be rock solid. I want to be Superman. I want to be Iron Man. I don’t have to mourn because I’m made of iron, sweat, blood, experience, tears, cuts, countless nights spent making friends with shadows on my wall, and the wars I face in my own mind daily. I cannot be weak. I cannot fail. I cannot fall down. I cannot fall down. I cannot fall down.

I can fall down.

[My lunesta kicked in about right now]

I’m going to therapy. I’ve accepted that I’m a wounded animal, desperately trying to hide its wounds from predators but I’m leaving a blood trail a mile wide. The harder I try to hide it, the faster my heart pumps, and the faster my blood flows out of my veins.

I have to go to therapy. I have to give someone a chance to take a pickaxe and drive it straight into the crack in my self constructed and self destructive armor that I’m whispering this through, break it open, yank me out by my earlobes, slap me, give me a hug, and tell me to stop being such a little bitch and face my fears.

This is why I need therapy.

1) I repress emotional trauma.

2) I’m incapable of handling rejection correctly.

3) I may have PTSD.

4) I subconsciously, and I know it isn’t true, believe all women are lying whores who want to break my heart.

5) I don’t know how to act when people close to me are in emotional pain.

6) I’m incapable of expressing negative emotions face to face.

7) Even when I’m capable of explaining my emotions, I don’t explain how it FEELS. I explain it from a third person point of view. I sound like a therapist describing a patients symptoms instead of a patient.

I will pay a price for my invincibility later.

Cleaning is catharsis. I’m not certain why, but for some reason, obsessively cleaning my house makes me feel much better about myself and life in general. It relieves my stress and grants me a temporary reprieve from my depression. It gives me time to breathe and enjoy something. The feeling of a clean house, clean sheets, a clean floor..it gives me an hour or two of time to just enjoy a movie, or Xbox, or anything.

Could it be that cleaning is a stand-in for healing, and my house is a stand-in for my mind? Possibly. metaphorically scrubbing the depression away while getting the spaghettios out of my carpet with a fork? Maybe I have OCD tendencies that cause disorganization to contribute to my depression and instability. 

Or maybe it just takes my mind off things and gives me a feeling of control. I, RYAN MICK, KING OF THIS HOUSE, can control how clean it is. Maybe that’s all it really is. I can control whether I clean or not, and it gives me a feeling of power when I feel otherwise powerless. 

Who knows.

It’s one in the morning and I should be asleep. I’ve got school in eight hours and a psychiatrist appointment in eleven. I wish I could fall asleep but I can’t stop thinking. I can’t lay in that bed calmly. I’d rather lay on the floor. I’m thinking about everything I’m going to tell my psychiatrist tomorrow. She’ll be shocked, I think. Normally my appointments are so simple. “This is what’s happening.” and then she responds with “Sounds good. See you in six months” and my prescriptions are refilled. End of story. That’s all I typically need.

Lately, it’s a different story. More panic attacks, more anxiety, more problems. I think I’m going to see a therapist for my tendency to repress emotional trauma and probably see what I can do about the panic attacks. I can’t stop playing the conversations over in my head and deciding how to word it all. 

My life is really simple and really complicated at the same time, at the moment. It’s stressing me out pretty badly. Oh well. I complicated it with my own two hands and my own decisions.

This doesn’t really seem worth posting because it doesn’t actually express how I feel, but rather the circumstances surrounding how I feel. 

I’ve posted this before but it’s been on my mind today as it goes along with the theme of me hiding my emotions.

My problems were pretty apparent in high school. Everyone knew I was addicted to prescription drugs, my cuts were visible, and I was clearly depressed. I needed serious help. I needed someone to punch me in the face and tell me to stop hurting myself. I needed an intervention. I needed help. I needed people to grab me, tell me that they loved me, and tell me to stop before I destroyed myself.

No one did. I walked alone and none of my friends, and I had a lot, ever tried to stop me. They ignored it and went on with their lives, pretending that Ryan Mick was fine. Pretending that I wasn’t going down a path that people don’t leave. 

Why is it that I still associate with these individuals that averted their eyes and ignored my dark side. Oh, I totally understand not knowing how to act, but when you care about someone, you help them even if you aren’t sure how to help them. Did I do that? Did I ignore people and try to stay uninvolved? I’m sure I did. I don’t remember it, but I’m not a saint. I’m sure I decided to let someone else help them. You wouldn’t hear about friendless loners killing themselves if my some people didn’t do what my friends did.

How I got over it all, I’ll never know. I stopped cutting, I forced myself off the drugs, and I went to a psychiatrist. I walked the line of suicide and didn’t do it, perhaps by sheer luck.

You dicks.

For years, I would whine to anyone who would listen. Everybody who wasn’t smart enough to tell me to shut the hell up knew my life’s story and about everything that passed through my unstable brain. Sure, people would talk about how pathetic I was behind my back, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I didn’t care until my best friends and a girl I was in love with talked about how I was dramatic and turned everything into a shit storm of drama.

So I changed. It shocked me into growing up a bit and learning to keep everything on the inside. Shoving it into a box where I could feel it, but couldn’t let it out. (Writing this out is making me feel worse) It would shake and in my head, I would scream, but I never showed it. I never wanted to cause people I loved to grow tired of talking to me again. I never wanted to whine again. I wanted to be happy for them. I wanted people to want to talk to me.

So I shut up. I kept it all inside. All of it. I didn’t tell anyone and it was fine. It hurt and I had no medium of expression, but it worked. People no longer heard my sob stories and my feelings. 

This is the source of my problem. This is why the closer people get to me, the less of myself I can show them. I can’t tell my closest friends about how I feel, and even if I start to, I panic, pretend it’s not a big deal, and end the conversation. I go back to hiding. I can’t help it. No matter how hard I try, I’m overwhelmed with a crushing guilt for telling them. The crime of venting.

Bah. I’ll go see a therapist. Maybe he can help me get over this. I have a psychiatrist appointment on Thursday so I’ll ask her for a good reference.

I have a remarkable talent for refusing to learn from my mistakes. I play with fire, get burned, and ignore the lesson that I’ve learned. I douse myself in gasoline and juggle lighters no matter how many times I ignite. I see the sparks and dive straight in.

I ignore warnings, advice, threats, my gut, logic…I ignore everything that screams “STOP!” at me until I’m miserable and only at that point do I realize that this was a horrible idea and I’ve made a terrible choice and have to pay for it. I learn my lesson and promise to never make this mistake again.

But I do. I forget the lesson and try again, only to fall back into regret. I lay alone in my bed and try but fail to focus on anything but how much I wish I had listened. But I’ll do it again. I’ll do it again because I refuse to learn, to adapt, to make the right choice. I refuse to grow. 

My catharsis is non existant. I get on Tumblr and write it out like a thirteen year old girl, unable to deal with her feelings. It doesn’t fix anything. I’m falling out of myself with a straight face. I mask it with looking tired. If I can’t smile, I look tired. I pretend to be exhausted no matter how I feel because people don’t expect smiles. They expect me to look tired after this many years of me being worn out from emotional stress a lack of sleep.

So I have to buck up and wait. Wait it out. Wait and pray that it’ll end eventually and I’ll have a time of stability and maturity before I dive back into regret.

Hah. I’m such a cry baby.

I used to be able to express my feelings well. I could write them out, explain them, post them, show them, put them into art, etc. I used to be crazy, too. Unstable, paranoid, irrational, sleepless, irritable, happy, etc. All those traits and emotions swirling around in my skull sponge, trading places and mixing. Painful? Extremely. I enjoyed the creativity, though. The raw emotion and feeling that I could shove anywhere I wanted. Tip my head and my little spout (head. get it out of the gutter) pours crazy everywhere. Like I said, this all came with the heavy price of severe self loathing and inability to lead a happy life. So it’s not as if I was happy. Not most of the time, anyway. 

I’m relatively, emphasis on that last word, stable now. As fixed as I’ll ever be. I think that my medication prevented my inevitable suicide. I was strong and desperate to hold on, but I wasn’t strong enough to withstand that storm for the rest of my life on my own. In a way, that makes me feel ashamed and afraid. I did not have the strength to hold on forever. I needed help. Help. Help help help help. 

The downside of that help, and of the medication, is that that instability was a major part of my personality. Yes, it hurt, but the pain and insanity was part of me. I can’t pour myself out anymore. I have a terrible time trying to express anything now. Emotional pain, sadness, happiness. The cost of artificial stability is YOU. I still feel it though. I can feel the crazy and the creativity and the chemicals in my brain swirling around, I just can’t feel them.

Totally worth it though. The paranoia was the worst.

I’m in one of those sit-and-write-for-hours moods but I have nothing to write about. I feel like a blind painter. I’m not a particularly good writer but-

Holy shit. I’m hypomanic. lol

The sick truth about stability is that if you struggle long enough to gain it, it’ll bore you once you have it.

It feels kind of meaningless to have so little crazy left in me. 

I think a symptom of bipolar disorder is starting blogs, staying up all night to post, then never using it again.