Anywhere but here

I have long suffered from the desire to be anywhere but here. My whole life probably. And by here I do mean literally wherever it is that I happen to be at the moment. I would rather be somewhere else most of the time. I don't feel this way all of the time anymore, but when I do feel it, it is acute. I feel the impulse to run. I feel that feeling of being so uncomfortable in your own skin that you don't think you can sit in it. I guess I would say that I have been feeling this way less and less as the past 2.5 years have gone by. In fact, maybe I haven't even felt it in a while. But I am intimately familiar with the feeling. Maybe feeling it now, feeling the way it feels now after not having felt it in a while is like the fist time I felt really anxious after having a reprieve from anxiety. It was different, less tolerable, more obvious.

This feeling, it is borne out of a desire to avoid, as if changing circumstances can change the underlying reality. I think it used to have more to do with the fact that I always used to feel like I could be someone else if I were just in a different location. If I wanted to change, I just had to change locations, clothes, cars, boyfriends, jobs - that kind of thing. It was never consciously to avoid feeling something, though maybe that was always a part of it. Now it is definitely to avoid feeling the way that I feel - or the way that I would feel, if I wasn't right in the middle of trying to distract myself.

I am in Michigan. And it isn't a bad place to be it's just that I feel like going home and I've only been here a few hours. But here's the thing, I don't feel like being in Chicago either. I wanted to come here this week for the distraction - to get away. So that I wouldn't be alone, so that I wouldn't have to think about being diagnosed with breast cancer, so I would have something to do on my birthday instead of spending it alone. Either way I can't win because I don't want to be here or there.

All I wanted was not to have to think about it. It's all I can think about. And when I do think about it, the pain of the entire experience is overwhelming. The fear is indescribable like I've said. I don't really know what to do. I am definitely an isolationist. And I thought that it would make the most sense to come here, to force myself to spend the week with my nephew and my friends here and family - cause I never come home for a week - usually only 3 or 4 days at a time. But there is this part of me that doesn't want to be around anyone because if I have to feel this way and I have to find some way to deal with it, I just deal better with things alone. There is nothing anyone can say anyway. And maybe it isn't so bad to just sit in my house and cry about it. Maybe I am perpetuating the problem by coming here instead of just staying there and feeling however I would feel. I'm not sure really.

More later...