I'll be Gretel

After each refill my stash of pills dwindles, and inevitably I find myself standing in the kitchen staring into the amber abyss of an almost empty prescription bottle.
I should be used to this.  It's been years.  It's almost been decades.  I've lost count of the amount of times I've told myself, my friends, my family, even strangers on the internet that I am a person who will need to take a pill every day for the rest of my life.  If I don't take that pill then I lose the ability to be the person I am, and instead become someone else.  Someone who cannot add anything positive to anyone's life, or is convinced she cannot, and so doesn't try.  Someone who becomes consumed with sorrow.  The idea of it, the feel of it. The weight and texture of despair become a part of every breath and fill the space in between every heartbeat. I have lived in that dark disorienting place.  I have followed the twisting logic of depression right to the brink, and am lucky enough to have found my way back.  I don't want to go back there.  No one does.  Ever.  I promise you, no person ever wants to feel that way.  Not once, and certainly not twice, or three or four of five times, or however many occasions I have wrongly decided that I was cured, I was fixed, and I didn't need any stupid pills to help me.
And yet . . . every month I wonder.  Who am I really?  Is this who I was supposed to be?  I was barely a person when I got lost in the frightening woods of depression, so it's hard to say.  How can I tell, at almost 35, if I am the person I was on track to be at 17?  There is no app for that.  No picture to take and extrapolate from.  I cannot know, and it's that exact fact that keeps me wondering.  What I can know is this:  I lost myself.  I lost the very core of who I was, and who I could be.  And I found myself again, by swallowing a trail of pills, one each day, until I limped back into the world. Changed perhaps. Limping and skittish, certainly.  But present, and capable of joy.
It is this knowledge that I rediscover at the bottom of that amber bottle.  I was, and I will always be, Gretel.  I was lost, and I was willing to be found.  I will keep following that trail.  If only because I know what darkness lies behind me, and I would rather step into the unknown with hope and love.

Anger Ball

I keep waiting for the nauseated twist of my anger and fear to unravel.  I keep waiting for it to subside, so that I can swallow the bile that keeps rising in my throat, so that I can smile without forethought.  So that I can laugh without then feeling guilty.  None of that has happened yet.  I have to imagine it will. 

The anger is the trickiest beast, and managing it is the worst kind of rodeo.  I need to stay on top of it, sly and cunning as it is, and I need to stay on top of it every second of every day.  Eight seconds will never be long enough to win.  It's trying to trick me into  thinking it's done, or I've broken it, only to frenetically burst into action again with no provocation.   Managing these bouts of almost paralyzing anger leave me shaking.  They leave me wanting to cry.  They leave me feeling more alone than I have ever felt in my adult life.  Because there is no one to strike out at.  Try as I might to focus on one thing, or one person to be this livid at, I can't.  Which means that I get a little mad at EVERYTHING.  All this emotional energy needs to go somewhere.  I can't keep managing this.  I can't tamp it down.  I can't contain it.  I can't.  It's stealing my ability to focus and laugh and love and just be.   I am becoming less me and more anger. 

This is upsetting as it stands.  And more so when I think about how hard I have worked to be happy.  How hard I have worked to control who I am when I am angry.  I don't want to be hurtful.  But now I do.  I don't want to tear people down or make them doubt themselves.  But now I do.  I don't want to explode and spew bile and hate.  Except that I do. 

I want to scream.  I actually want to cause another person physical harm and it doesn't even much matter who.  I want to vomit.  I want to shake and cry.  I want to sleep for a week. 

I yield.  Whatever it takes to not feel this way.  I am broken.  Please help me be whole.