Despair

Be warned, this blog will be as dark as my mood. If you want uplifting and cheerful, don’t read any further. I’m in the black hole and I don’t know how to get out, or even if I want to.

Recently I have come back to my home country, and in no time have been reminded of all the ways I have failed in my life. The bright colours and creativity that I fought so hard for are draining away, replaced with the grey void of fear and anxiety that has stalked me for so long. Fear and sadness are becoming my constant companions again.

To add to the mix, I have discovered that the people who mean the most to me are the ones most hurt by my inability to live in this country. I don’t know how to explain why I can’t live here, why the ongoing effects of the recent years have instilled in me this fear and anxiety. Coming back I have plunged into the emotions of that time as though it was yesterday; panic attacks strike every night, insomnia has blossomed, appetite has plunged. My heart palpitates and my hands shake. PTSD in fact – one of the reasons I left - has not gone from me but has been hiding this whole time, waiting to drown me in the blackness.

I don’t know how to chase it away, this black cloud of despair and fear. I don’t know what to do. My therapist told me recently that I am a strong person to have been able to overcome this, and to start again. She was wrong. I am not strong. I only managed to dodge this by fleeing the country, by living a totally different lifestyle. I am not strong. And I have hurt the people I love who can’t understand why I would prefer to live in poverty and rescue street cats than to live here. How can I explain the fear, the irrational, unreasoning fear that is turning me into a basket case again? I can’t, I can’t explain it to myself.

There’s no need for it because the past will not come back to hurt me again. But the past has not left, maybe it never will. Maybe this fear and blackness is my legacy, to carry around with me for the rest of my life. Maybe this inability to trust will never go, this inability to communicate properly with my family, this crippling misery and sorrow. Maybe I can’t let it go because I still, deep down, believe that I don’t deserve any happiness in my life. Maybe I believe I don’t deserve my family. I have two sons who I love deeply, and am so proud of. But I don’t know how to tell them so they don’t know. They, poor souls, got a broken person for a mother and they deserve better.

I don’t know how many of you will read this blog since I have temporarily turned off Facebook, and that is where I usually give you the notification to come here. Some of you come anyway, so I guess you are reading now. The rest of you may never see this particular post. I’m writing it because I have to, I have to let it out and this is the only place in which I can purge some of this, for a while. But still the blackness spirals and despair reaches out its talons. And I don’t know what to do.