It Comes In Waves

It has been far too long since I last posted - two weeks almost. Maybe that's why my mind is going crazy - running wild, full of unprocessed stuff. My mind is funny that way - I think it is mostly due to fear and anxiety. I was just talking to my brother today about the crazy way my mind works - the way it makes things up, exaggerates things, carries them way out of proportion. What I told him was that in my mind today - I am both unemployed and dead. There is reality, and there is what goes on in my head. I am at work right now, writing this post. Very much employed and alive. That is reality, but it is not the reality that I am engaged in.

I have no real excuse for not posting anything, except that nothing has happened. My life has taken on a rather boring pattern of working a lot and going to meetings. Working and going to meetings, working and going to meetings. My life seems predictable, uneventful and down right boring. Granted, boring is what I was hoping for, but without the drama, the chaos, the uncertainty - without the "situation" to manage and get through - I begin to feel a little lost. I used to be comfortable with chaos and totally uncomfortable without it. Slowly, really slowly, I have noticed the shift taking place. My job gets stressful and suddenly it doesn't feel so good. I stir up some other emotional crap in my life, and suddenly it doesn't feel so good. I am becoming comfortable with the comfortable and that shows tremendous progress.

Before I got sober, I had no emotion - I couldn't feel anything but anger. This came much to my surprise because I never consciously drank to numb out or mask anything. It just happened that I felt nothing, ever - drinking or not. Sadness, fear, anxiety, pain - it all came out as anger. I worked with a therapist on this for a while - we used to go through this set of questions where she would try to get me to describe what something would feel like and name the emotion. All I could ever say was I think this or I think that. Rarely, if ever, could I describe a feeling, or even label it. It was like the mind and physical connection just wasn't there. I wasn't registering anything. I remember when the feeling kicked back in - after all that time of not feeling anything and not even knowing it - it came over me in a wave that almost knocked me over. I remember thinking that it might be strong enough to kill me.

Since then, my ability to feel things is spotty at best. Sometimes I enjoy the flatness and the consistency, rather than feeling up and down and all over the place. A constant state of numbness, of nothingness, unaffected by anything. Sometimes I think that I am feeling things, only to find out that I wasn't - my sponsor is actually quite good at catching this in me. I say to her - no, everything is good, everything is fine - I feel fine - I'm fine. And then again, a wave of pain or fear washes over me, suffocates me, paralyzes me. Last night, in just such a moment, I realized that I have registered virtually no emotion in a couple of months. I don't really know why it works this way - this all or nothing. I am angry, my favorite emotion, but I am also sad. I am sad and mostly I am just really afraid.

I go from nothing to unable to stop crying. Last night I was sitting there saying - why am I so angry about my job - I must be afraid - what am I afraid of right now? And then it dawned on me. I have to go for the first of many follow up mammograms next week. My mortality in front of me, again, the fragility of my life, everything I want and hope for - feeling as if it will be ripped right out from underneath me, the fear that everyone I know will get to go on without me - it is crushing, overwhelming, terrifying, painful. It is indescribable. It is almost unbearable.