Another one of THOSE posts

I am tired.

Whether this is due to lack of sleep, the rubbish weather or the stultifying course I was compelled to sit through this afternoon is a matter of conjecture.

I don’t sleep very well at the best of times. For the last few nights my sleep has been broken by a variety of weird and terrifying dreams – not of monsters and chasing and your average nightmare fodder, but rather of feelings and unseen ominous things and actually I’m going to stop there because it is freaking me out all over again.

I know the increase in sleep problems is symptomatic of how I’m feeling at the moment. The last couple of weeks have been horrible. Tomorrow, I have to do something I am absolutely dreading.

The post that was eaten by blogger (bad blogger! Bad!) on Sunday was very hard for me to write. I have become accustomed to “talking” to a (small) audience and this has meant that, to a certain extent, I have lost my confidence in talking about subjects that are very personal to me. I became consumed with whether I was interesting, or funny, or whether people would comment. As valuable as quality of writing is, I lost sight of my opportunities to use this blog as a means of sorting out the rubbish I carry around in my head.

So, I’m going back to basics, for the next little while.

The last couple of weeks have been exhausting. I have had to confront things that I have been variously ignoring, hiding or pretending are not a problem. Things are a problem. I am in a scary place and am finding it very hard to focus on how to get through it. The issues I have to face seem, at present, insurmountable.

I have spent most of my life telling people I am fine, really I am. Tomorrow I have to sit down and tell a complete stranger* that actually, I am not fine at all. I haven’t been fine for a very long time indeed. And all the while I will be wondering if I’m actually just feeling sorry for myself; that it’s not so bad, that lots of people have it worse than me (and I am well aware that this is the case – every day at work I see, interact with and hurt for people who have suffered things I don’t want to imagine, mostly at the hands of people who were meant to be loving them).

I have to remember that while I may be in some way responsible for the symptoms, I was not the cause of this. At three, or at seven, or ten - up until I left at seventeen - I couldn’t control my home environment. I didn’t choose the things that happened to me. It seems that the damage has been rather more far-reaching than I anticipated.

In three weeks or so I will turn thirty-four. I refuse to still be feeling like this when I am thirty-five. I am going to do the thing that I have been afraid of all this time; afraid that I will be seen as weak, as self-pitying, as someone who should just pull themselves together and get on with it.

It’s gone too far for that. I can’t carry on like this.

I’m going to ask for help.

* I mean a doctor, of course. I'm not going to start going up to people on buses, or anything. Christ, I'm not that far gone.