FORMAL COMPLAINT!

Okay, it's more of an Informal Complaint. Do you ever look around at your life, and go WTF am I doing? Am I living my life, or is my life an entity of its own, swirling about randomly making messes and my job is just to try to clean them up and maybe keep it from hurting anybody else? I just seem to have such a list of clean up on aisle 10 that I feel like my life, at least the fun part, is pretty much over. I'm on the downhill side of life at 37, heading towards the finish line. It might be more fun to go barrelling down the mountain at breakneck speed, but am I really in this big hurry to get there? but if I just keep grabbing at branches that scratch my face, trying to slow myself down, don't I just end up all bruised and tired, and bloody, and do I really want to spend as much time as I can doing that?

There just are people out there, people in my own family who would look at that scenario and go cool! You're on a mountain! Why don't you try flying??! Why do you figure you have to run or fall and roll? And I just never would have thought of it that way. Not anymore. Things that used to be thrilling and exciting just make me feel full of fear and anxiety now. Is it the same thing? I've just forgotten how to interpret it as joy so it's learned to be terror and angst?

Once I was young and actually FUN. Now I find that when I spend any significant amount of time around any number of people that might resemble a crowd, or even a small gang, I become physically sick. Either with a headache, or just sick to my stomach. It's like I just don't know how to be around people anymore. All that extra energy barrage, and I WANT to be social, I WANT to just hang out, be with people, know people...

And then the insomnia hits, and I can't sleep and I just lay there thinking, what am I doing? Paying bills? Just keeping my head above water? Never really making much progress, not exactly running in circles, because that would be sort of focused. I start one circle, then see another one and go over there, start running that circle. At least if I stayed in one place I might accomplish a rut.

It's like, the most important job I have in life right now, is to be the person who takes this little girl downstairs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so she doesn't have to do down in the dark by herself. Which feels pretty important. At least to her. Typically at the time, I've been up half the night with anxiety and insomnia, and every time I almost fall asleep my brain convinces me I'm having a stroke, or a heart attack... so when I finally do get to sleep, that's usually when Charlotte's little alarm goes off and she has to go potty.

It's the craziest thing really... when all is calm and quiet and right, that's when I am most likely to have a panic attack. Put me on a freeway bridge that's falling in, an earthquake, a woman having a baby, and people are panicking, and I am your voice of reason, your take charge person, your calm eye of the storm, your rock in a crisis. That's me. Maybe I just need to be in crisis?

Horks alive, that's just ***ked up.