Post traumatic stress from October

I have been sick.

I have had a head cold, that has been slowly fighting a nightly battle deeper into my body. At the same time, I have been fighting another battle. Ever since the October post, a slow sickness has been creeping into me. Complacent disregard. I am doing it again. Drinking too much, not sleeping, not taking care of things, hardly caring to...This is a bad place.

   I know what it is. It's just sheer depression. No panic. I DID spend a night in the hospital. Again. A 3 am jaunt up to the infirmerie' to have an ER Doctor tell me what I already knew. Shredded nerves, adrenaline coursing and mixing with the caffeine and alcohol and nicotine to create me into a racing engine pressure vessel of emotion. Why did my physiology have to be so strong? Where is the breaking point? I cannot describe how guilty I feel, spending my entire life tearing my body apart, only to be told "You're fine. Go home." One perscription later for a sedative I will NEVER take, and off I go, a clean bill of physical health, to start destroying myself once again. Relieved and yet wracked by absolute pangs of guilt that I, the bad one, the irresponsible one, had to be the healthy one. I begin to hate myself for it. There is no justice in this world. I should be dead. She should have lived.

  I will never take the sedative. I do not even bother to get it filled. There is one thing I hate more than the torturous constant stress, and that is peace, and happiness. It always came naturally to me. Quick to smile, quicker to laugh, and to make others laugh. I learned to be introverted over the years, so as not to downright embarrassing to my family with my goofy and loud nature. Now nothing produces more pain than a good day. If it is all under control and running well, on the inside I feel nauseating mundaneness. I have become addicted to the fractured; the insane. Nothing is done except in an emergency, on the edge of panicked failure. It makes time pass quickly, and keeps me occupied.

   The first two weeks back here at the house were the worst. God, I spent two lifetimes in what had become a museum of past lives lived waiting for something, ANYTHING to happen. That was a new level of insanity. I would check the news daily to see when the world would end. And when it became apparent God and I were on two completely different schedules, I adopted my own for a while. Didn't work.

   I feel like a once proud man o' war that has lost it's main. All of the things that used to be so important, the lines and tackle that held the world in place now tether me to what pulls me under. I am lost with it, and lost without it. What has not snapped from the strain is unraveling. Some of it I hack away at mercilessly; a madman. And what then, when this sea anchor of love and pain and distress and...then, I will be adrift. Crippled, shattered, a rent remnant of what was and what should have been.

   And people want to have a chat. I need more platitudes, I suppose, to clear my head, and adjust my perspective. And the whole world can heap all the drugs and talks and prayers and warm feelings or just stay the Hell away, and what will be the difference? What's done is done. These are the things that shatter lives. Am I too good to go down in history as a destroyed man?

   I find a strange, bitter pride in it, too be honest. Keeping a lone vigil, holding ground on a forgotten field, smelling the smoke of a battle long forgotten. Take that from me, and you have taken everything. I don't have the strength to strike out again. I was not wounded, my frame was warped. Sinew and bone and mind and will were committed and in end the end pitched against the will of God almighty and defeated. I have succumbed. I have prayed and asked to be forgiven and repented. But to what end? I am Jacob's hip. The spirit touched my whole life to remind me daily of my defeat, and Satan gnaws at the bones of my destroyed will, cavalierly tossing aside the carrion of care and resolve.

   I am depressed, and don't even care to fight it. Right now, anyway. All I care to do is to make it through the rest of this life without causing pain for anyone else by my actions or lack thereof. And that really doesn't seem possible. Maybe the obvious thing to do is to shut the Hell up and smile big. Everything is going fine. How is life treating you, Dear Sir?