It’s fortunate no one can peer inside my head and take a look around. There’s too much there for me to even begin to sort out and when I try to think it’s just so crowded that I’m exhausted even trying. I know that I can get through anything, I know this. And I also feel like any time I falter, when I even let any of this get to me, I feel I’m being just like my mom — the eternal victim, the martyr — and I think that I’m weak and cowardly and why is it that I have no strength. And it’s so hard for me to ask for help, to ever even let anyone know that I need help and I can’t let myself be that vulnerable, but then I ask for help because I don’t know what else to do and when I open myself up like that and I’m rejected, well. I don’t know. I feel foolish and selfish to say that the hurt of that just compounds the hurt I’m already feeling and all I want to do, then, is to protect myself. To never allow myself to feel that much again.
It’s just that it’s so much. The crowding in my head makes it difficult to be strong enough for any of it, much less all of it, all at once, descending on me like the night, like silence, like sadness, like desolation.
And I know I will get through all of it. And maybe that’s why I feel so weak, so dumb to even let it be visible. I should keep it all in, hide it, get through it, because I will. Why bother anyone else with it all. If I don’t have strength, what do I have?
And I want to be the strong one, the competent one. I don’t want to be weak and whiny and not able to find my own way. When I go home, I only remember more. My family looks to me to solve everything. I’m glad to help. I am. But it’s such weight sometimes.
To be the responsible one. I’ve given some of it up. In some ways it’s freeing and in other ways the guilt just follows me, a shadow, forever reminding me of my selfishness. My mom doesn’t talk to me anymore. My fault for no longer helping her? Or hers for expecting it? I see things that aren’t done because I didn’t step in and I know I just have to let it go.
I’ve already come to terms with not being everyone’s savior. (And going back to read that entry and seeing that the date was a year and a half ago, I guess I feel like I keep whining about the same things over and over and I just need to shut the fuck up already. Maybe not today. But soon.)
And while being confronted with death helps me realize that there is a shared experience with family you can’t get anywhere else, it also reminds me that life is fleeting, it doesn’t last, one day it’s over and that was all you had. Time is something you can’t get back, can’t keep it, can’t save it in a bottle for a rainy day. You spend each moment as it happens and then it’s gone.
That’s all you get. And nothing changes that.
I’ll have to sort through it all, all the crowding in my head and I’ll be fine. I’ll get through this. And there’s a lot of good too. But sometimes the noise of the rest of it makes all of that hard to hear.