Maybe I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing but I am trying to figure it all out. I lost a part of myself I was told I wasn’t allowed to be, leaving me hollow chasing a feeling I couldn’t imagine to be real. A life I never felt I deserved. I fantasized of a life more than this and far worse too. It wasn’t about an unwillingness to risk, more so it has always been the willingness to sacrifice my wants and needs for others to only find it was never enough. It always takes pieces of me and I’m not sure who it is that is left.
On no more than two to three hours of sleep a night for weeks now (or longer honestly) I find it difficult to raise to the standards some are used to. It’s much harder to pretend I am alright with little sleep, being awoken by horrific nightmares that continue to haunt me for days. My gypsy soul wants to wander, explore and feel alive but these things are selfish so I push them far from me. So I work toward a better life for the one who needs me most regardless if that is the life that would make me happy. I’m not sure if my happiness has ever been a primary focus in my life though sometimes I’m sure it seems this way to others. I have been trapped in survival mode, enduring so much for such a very long time now. I’ve fooled so many into this strong version of myself unable to rely on anyone the way I truly need I’m not sure who I am anymore or if this is me. If a version of myself free exists some where or if that version is lost forever.
All I can think now at 1 am is, have I stayed up late enough to avoid these traumatizing nightmares? Will there every be a reprieve for me?
I soar out of bed grasping onto hope that what I endured was not real. It wasn’t but it feels so real my body and mind in fact believe it was and so I carry it with me always. The nightly nightmares I bare increasingly more traumatizing and horrific the worse my waking state seems to be. The more fighting or arguing, the more lack of support and help, my dreams feed on it and love to rub my nose in it. It’s strange to me how some people think because the words of support pour out of them without action that is sufficient. Claiming interest in the things you care most deeply about with little to no investment if it is not a shared interest with the expectation of a return on their own passions. Putting in ten percent while lying to themselves they are one hundred percent invested and expecting undivided attention and when its not given turning harsh and cruel. For someone with PTSD (and those without), it adds to the stress and when that person has spent more than half of their life enduring this suffocating existence trapped in survival mode continuously made promises however true at the time that cannot be and never are fulfilled it makes the enduring of this existence much more difficult to bare. This isn’t a blame game, regardless if my bipolar diagnosis is warping the chemicals in my brain to make me two different people shoved in this one broken shell, this shell everyone speaks so kindly about, that isn’t really me is it? With a constant fluctuation of moods and personality traits how am I to know who I am anyway? I was told the darkness within me was evil but it’s the only constant and safe part of my life. It takes a hold and comforts me when I need it most when I am at the point of quitting it all, washing away my tears and sometimes my pain if only for a short while. It never judges me and I wonder if denying it’s existence is the part of me missing that makes me feel whole. I am beyond damaged and more alone than I ever could have imagined trying to pretend I’m something I’m not for the sake to not cause discomfort to those I care most about. At some point they all claim I do not have to do that with them but if time proves anything at all, it proves the fallacy of what they can endure and the fact I can endure almost anything, but with great cost. 
How could I possibly trust or rely on another being when time and time again it is proven I must be the strong one? I am so very tired of asking for what I need only to be let down and challenged with the notion I should be grateful for what I have. Unwanted assistance in nearly an opposite fashion to what my mind is screaming for. I so wish that I was loved because those want to love me and not because they need to love me or need my love. I’m tired of being needed. In the beginning of all things I am wanted, chased and at some point I become some burden who is no longer giving them all the things they want. Eventually never enough all while draining the life within me while striving to be what they want me to be with no return.
Here’s the hardest part of all of this, I need help. So do many of you. I have a psychiatrist, therapist, trauma therapist, neurologist etc. Helping me fight for my right to not only endure or survive this life but perhaps live it. This isn’t the help I mean but clearly the help I do need will never come. I wish others would do the same, fight for themselves rather than live in a different sort of darkness they refuse to climb out of, playing the blame game attached to an idea that life or people owe them something when they don’t. If only they took care of themselves rather than adding their baggage onto my back and wonder why I’m breaking and unable to help them, they may heal and maybe I could too. We are here to love, to live. “…All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you…” To live… what a beautiful fantasy like three moons shinning over a clear blue sea, and sand between my toes. I am suffocating and trapped and every step forward I fight through the chains and weight of a thousand worlds attached at my ankles and yanked yards backward. I need my own space, I need more time than most to myself by myself, uninterrupted and not to be treated that what I need and want is not valid because it hurts someones feelings or offends them because fuck that bullshit. Learn to love yourself, be alone with yourself, survive on your own as I have done. To many being alone is a curse or the worst punishment of all but to me as a survivor I can always rely on my self to endure, to survive to fight through every god damn thing thrown at me. It’s people who break me. With intention to do so, without intention to do so. Does that part even matter? Being alone is where I can find peace in a world so horrible and filled with chaos and selfishness. I haven’t been alone with myself in so many years, taken from me just as the control over the chemicals in my brain has taken my control over my emotional and mental state. 
Taught wanting such a thing is wrong and cruel to those who surround me, smothering the light inside of me wondering why I feel so vacant. I have a gypsy soul and that was snuffed out too. So we are left with this shell, the shell everyone seems to love and I despise. Somewhere in the darkness I am screaming and clawing my way out, if only I had help. If only it mattered more than…
