I am just a Misguided Ghost
If any of you are fellow writers out there, you may be able to sympathize with how I’m feeling, or maybe if you have PTSD this unconventional post may speak to you… Technically and introduction should be in order for all of you to learn a little more about me, but I just can’t.
I have this pain in my chest making me want to scream. A darkness inside tempting me to quit. My head swirling and spinning as though a three year old took a black crayon and scribbled on every surface of my brain, mixing up my emotions, logic, thoughts, and desires.
I deeply feel there is something i need to say, something I need to expel from my body, a sickness, an opinion, a story, distress–something I have to get out, to tell someone about. Yet each time I reach for my journal … What’s the point? The thought of explanation exhausts me.
I’m just going around the merry go round. Trudging through the mud of my mind, my body, my life “with no conviction. I’m just one of those ghosts. Traveling endlessly. Don’t need no roads. In fact they follow me. And we just go in circles.” (Misguided Ghosts, Paramore).
I guess I’ve had a setback, which is part of the process too. *sigh*. And it makes sense why:
In the last week I prepared for Hurricane Matthew and evacuated, not knowing what I would come back to, wondering if my life would get harder just because it seems to. Sometimes my mind tells me that if bad things can happen to me, they will. I shoot this down as much as I can. But I rocked that hurricane, I only became a little anxious and my family and I found everything intact. No damage and the power on. That is when I felt it. The ‘what ifs’ the terror that could have been.
I had a panic attack over whether or not to go to a ‘we survived the hurricane’ party for the neighborhood. I know no one. I realized my fear of social interactions was worse than that of a category four hurricane. I didn’t know my social anxiety was so bad.
I am constantly prodded by the absurdity of life. I want to make my life my own, I know what i want. I just don’t know how to get there, even when the evil gremlin of fear isn’t staring me in the face.
Confession: I hate money. I hate that I have to have it to live and I hate what I have to do to get it. i’m not a stripper or anything else that may come to the imagination, but at least three times I’m nearly quit and started stripping, because that would be easier than saying, “I work well in groups!” and “I love challanges!”.
No. I just want to write, draw, paint, and read. And can I do this while having a job? Of course. But every job has turned into a sick joke in one way or another where I work harder than everyone and get passed up for promotions, where my supervisors don’t realize that it’s not that I “won’t take calls” while having a panic attack, it’s that I can’t take calls. I have a mental condition that is just as valid as anyone else’s bodily condition (even though the mind is a part of the body, right? Go figure) and maybe that is the biggest frustration as I even now continue to job search and ensure I make ends meet for other bills.
Canceling subscriptions, missing a credit card payment here or there. All the darkness tells me I am not fit to work, and the state says even though I applied for disability due to my “PTSD and suicidal thoughts, we have determined that your are not disabled and your condition is not life threatening.” Say what? Do I need to give you the definition of “suicide” State department?
Right now there are hurricanes, death tolls in the hundreds, people who cannot get the care they need and are forced to work jobs which they will eventually leave because management doesn’t understand mental illness. We have LGBTQI being brutally killed in the streets, people of color just for being there beaten to death by cops, white rapists holding “get out of jail free cards” so they can go to college, and a terrible rapist, sexual assaulter, tax evasive, uneducated, crude, fucker running for president. Trans women who can’t get jobs no matter how qualified they are and how much they “pass”. And “The ones we trusted the most, pushed us far away.” (Misguided Ghosts, Paramore).
“But now I’m told that this life. Pain is just a simple compromise. So we can get what we want out of it. Would someone care to classify, broken hearts and twisted minds, so I can find someone to rely on. And run to them. To them. Full speed ahead” (Misguided Ghosts, Paramore).
Compromise. What a word. All just so I can have an ounce of happiness, of contentment in this world–while still on my psych drugs I assure you. Is this life? This can’t be life. I don’t want this to be my life. Is this Earth? My Earth?
It is. And I can’t control anything on Earth but what I do, and what I take as my attitudes toward these “compromises”.
I guess my next step, the path I trudge out before me is to accept this. And as Paramore says, I know i’m not useless, I am just a misguided ghost.
