Disheveled.

On the outside, I may put on this appearance, this facade, of being completely put together. Inside, I am a hot, disheveled mess. Outside, I am on time (barely) to work and I am organized and calm.

Inside, I am ambivalent. Inside, I am a screaming, destructible mess. I have so many fears, so many anxieties. When something good happens, I feel it as stress and not the good thing that I am supposed to feel. Why don’t good things feel good to me? I’ll never be able to figure it out. I still wonder, though, if I will ever feel a good thing the way it’s supposed to be felt.

The guy I find cute not responding to my messages is a flat out he’s not interested. My friends tell me that I am wrong and that he probably doesn’t check his social media that much. But I just know that he’s not interested. I know that he isn’t going to message me back. I know that my fantasies of going on a first date with him, are, just that. Fantasies.

The good news I got delivered today is how am I going to be able to afford all these changes and how the hell would I even go about pulling it off. I don’t think I can even handle any of it. I wish I could wake up in the morning and actually want to get out of bed. In reality, it takes three separate alarms going off every nine minutes for almost an hour. It takes countless pushes of the snooze button on my phone and then a panic that I might be late for me to actually get out of bed. I barely make it on time to work. It’s not like I want to be late, it’s the inevitability. It’s the absolute inability to get up. I can’t figure out how to change it.

I am usually so exhausted from my insomnia that it takes hours for me to wake up in the morning. Due to a thyroid condition, I am allotted one coffee per day and that’s what I use to wake me up after a 30 minute shower. I am barely functional when I arrive at work. If one of my kids displayed any behaviors, I would be at my weakest. It’s lucky they haven’t figured this out yet. I don’t wake up until after the combination of my 11:00 lunch break and my hour-long recess duty from 12:00 to 1:00.

I don’t stay awake after I fall asleep. I am haunted by weird dreams of people that I am afraid of that I just want to forget. I wake up 500 times a night in a complete panic that something is wrong or that I’ve forgotten something. I dream of people I love dying and have to spend an hour when I wake up in the middle of the night convincing myself that it was just a dream because it felt so real. I have constant, cycling and repeating dreams, of being alone forever.

I have never been a morning person but the older I get, waking up seems to become more and more of a struggle. Falling asleep and staying asleep is harder than ever before. Being mentally present is even harder.

I don’t know why I feel smothered by this absolutely stifling insignificance. I have dreams. I have goals. I have places I would love to go travel. When things seem to be getting better, I am met by humongous walls of anxiety and I don’t know if I have it in me to climb them.