Poison

I think I’m poison. I made it through the holidays through sheer will and maybe some kind of grace. But now…it’s a new year and so, yeah…what now, right? I’m just breathing and I even forget to do that sometimes. It’s like I’m waiting on something. Holding my breath. Expectant. And I guess that is kind of hope, right? So there is that. And there is my kid. Who is…well, everything. But then there is all of the other stuff which is big and small and there’s me who messes up and I have honestly begun to think maybe I am poison.

All my life I wanted someone to save me. I wished, I prayed, I dreamed, I projected. And when I finally was old enough to realize that the old adage of no one else can save you but yourself is actually true and did said saving myself (for whatever that is worth) I realized that I was still waiting on someone else to come and fill in the missing pieces. I can’t get rid of that. Chalk it up to a woman raised on Disney movies and fairy tales, I don’t know. But now I’m lost and I pick the broken ones to fix and of course that never ends well, which I think I always kind of know going into it or maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. But last night? Someone told me I was worth something. That I deserved better than what the situation was. And I wanted to tear him apart. I wanted to cry but I wanted to just rip into him because that’s what I’ve always wanted someone to say but I didn’t expect that it would feel like that, some bittersweet mix of relief and anger. And I told him that he was wrong. Because I saw it all in my head the second he said it. Where it it would go, when he would leave. I’ve played this game before.

So here I am again. Thinking about the past and past mistakes and things that I’ve said, done, been. And the future that is cracking and slowly crumbling away in front of my eyes because time just passes so damn fast. I think of all the things that I want to be better at, that I need to be better at, that are vital that I be better at. It seems like so little and an easy task but sometimes in my deepest darkest places I just want to run away. Or disappear. I can’t set the reset button, where is that damn thing at, anyway? So I keep thinking of pressing “quit”. Because there are nightmares and flashbacks, because parents are killing their children on the news, because I’m afraid, because I don’t think anyone who has ever touched me has loved me, because the news never fails to make me sadly shake my head,  because I can’t let people in, because some days I can barely get out of bed, because I carry this anger around like a parasite, because I want to be a better mother but some days are so hard, because when I’m in the abyss I don’t see a way out and I know I’m on the road to a long, slow decline. Because depression is this nightmarish self-imposed “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” narcissism. I realize this was rambling and a grammatical nightmare but I just needed to write. Thanks if you made it this far.