I’ve Been Avoiding All My Pain, And Now It Feels Like I’m Drowning

I avoid things: big moments, confrontations, and more recently, emotions. In my past, I’ve been in both states of mind, one where I’m a hard-hearted, fake-a-smile kind of a girl or the one where I’m a hot mess, seeking help.

I spent most of my 2015 being the latter.

And now, I don’t know where I stand, but it’s somewhere in between. A grey area I can’t quite comprehend navigating, because there are days I want to scream at the top of my lungs, talk about my disappointments and things that are falling apart and then there are days where I want to succumb to a dark reservoir of pain, self-loathing and nothingness.

All I seem to be doing is swallowing my words, living my life with one foot underwater and the other on solid ground.

This isn’t a war with my life; it’s a conflict within my inner self, and I am not exploding anymore, on the contrary, just collapsing.

You know that moment when you hope for someone to ask you if you’re okay? I want someone to care enough and want to ask, but then, the more I think about it, it’s a question I don’t want to answer, not to them, not to myself.

I usually find my answers in music. So obviously, I’ve been listening to this song all day “Unsteady by X Ambassadors” and there’s this line that goes, “To fight when you feel like flying,” and the implication of that sentence hits real hard and real close to home.

I want to fall, fall so hard and never get back up, not have my shit together and stop putting on a show of carefully chosen reactions and words.

On the other hand, I know that I can’t fall anymore; I don’t have it in me to rebuild shattered glass when my edges are still crooked from the last time.

So laughing with vacant eyes and a lost heart it is.

Here’s the thing, when someone who once cared too much loses their intensity to love, it’ll be one of the most heartbreaking things to watch.

You’ll see them lose faith in that one thing that defines them, that one thing you thought ran deeper than infinity in their heart and soul, that one thing that is now barren. When you watch that one person who has never given up on you, go down, that one person who was always there, disappear, what would you do?

And it is harder now than ever to realize that I’m no longer sinking, just floating in my own distresses, ricocheting off the bottom of the ocean and the shore. The emptiness no longer feels like an alien experience; it’s not uncomfortable, it is just unexpected but present, like a sigh of relief with a heavy heart.

In that moment I know that I’ve become a walking paradox, the complete picture of a broken mess.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one.