Like I said, most of the time I keep it beaten down and away from the surface self that deals with the world. But its always there. Its always whispering to me.
Sometimes it finds a way to sneak up on me. If I get distracted, stressed, or worn out, it can find its way to the surface. Saturday was a bad day with a capital "B", the blackness found a way up and none of my usual coping stratagies did much to slow it down. Usually I can distract myself with work, a book, or a move, but Saturday I could focus on anything enough to be distracted. Another thing I can do is sleep, if I can get a good deep sleep, I can usually wake up if not all the way back to normal, at least tolerable.
But the kids were with me this weekend and I can't sleep with them runnning the house. I tried to just avoid them and anything else, but it just kept getting blacker in my head.
Crippling worry with lines of logical causality ran from the events of that morning, through Isaiah's birthday, past Christmas and into the distant future with disaster in their wake.
I tried reaching out. Sometimes a rational voice that isn't from inside my own twisted head can short-circuit the black. But my dad was busy, my cousin was taking care of sick kids, my friend was in Wichita at a family event, and the man I thought of as my boyfriend interpretted my reaching to him as some sort of emotional blackmail.
In other words, instead of getting better, it got worse.
It got so bad I didn't trust myself anymore. I had Isaiah call his dad. I'm sick, I said, I think the kids would be better off if you came and got them. I'll come for them sunday evening. But that didn't help. He turned the conversation into a fight over parental duties and threw in a bunch of implications that I tend to be entitled and lazy before making it clear that he wasn't going to come pick up his kids.
After I got off the phone with him, I was a wreck. What the blackness had started, the (might as well call it break up) with Jason accelerated, and the fight with the asshat pushed everything over the cliff.
I called dad and just sobbed. Nothing was ok. I was a terrible human being, no one loved me or cared for me, I was a danger to my kids. Life was one frustration after another that would never end or improve or get better. I was looking down a long, black tunnel of loneliness and drudgery and I would be walking it alone.
Talking to dad helped. Being able to cry helped. Getting the kids calmed down and off to bed (a little early but not unreasonably so) helped.
It was a bad day for me, but at no point was I yelling, screaming, abusing the kids or threatening to do so.
Then the police showed up. Ass hat had decided that they needed to check on us.
I am now humiliated. I am sure that between people driving past my home and the kids who walked by and anyone in town with a scanner, everyone in Iola knows that a welfare check was done at my house.
I can live with that. What I can't do is live with this black monster any more. I can supress it, but I have yet to know how to get rid of it. And as much as it hurts me by telling me what a failure and disappointment I am, and how ugly I am, and how nothing will ever improve, it has also been a cold, hard core that I've carried with me, past all those who have said I can't do what I've done.
I don't know how to explain it. I did dig out the celexa I had been on and I took one this morning. That shit makes me feel . . . fuzzy.
I know that diagnostically, there is something wrong with me. I know that I have to keep this black monster away. But other than that, all I can do is hope that these very bad days and very few and far between.
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