Cement Shoes

Look into a mirror, what do you see? A reflection of yourself, some days less like yourself than the previous. Now imagine looking into the mirror and realizing you are the reflection on the other side—not in control, only mimicking. The feeling of panic starts to set in; anxiety floods your system and takes over, trapping my thoughts and self in a psychomanteum of delusion and paranoia.

Lately, this is a feeling that I can't let go of—a pit with no bottom and no mercy, a well of false hopes and insanity. Casting a coin into this well can be a curse, though. Blessed with the gift of abstract thinking, yet chipping away at all the work that had been done. Crumbling and dilapidated, hardly standing. These thoughts are intrusive and elusive, waiting for their 30 seconds of fame—a match burning to a stump.

A therapist I once had described my situation in a way that has always stuck in my mind: mental illness is like a child. You wouldn’t give them the keys to drive the car, and you also can’t shove it in the car trunk. You have to learn to drive with it sitting in the car on the road trip of life. Trauma has followed me since childhood, always poking its way through the fog of consciousness—something I learned to put on the back burner, only to simmer down to a destroyed, carbon-filled pan. Black, never scraping off, even after soaking in chemicals. Unable to be used again, it sits in silence until it's time to be thrown out.

I have always had a tendency to hyperfocus, letting important things slip through my fingers. I would never focus on the necessary task at hand—usually only focusing on tasks and things that will saturate my mind with enough thought and stimuli to drown the thoughts of existentialism and anxiety.

I have learned recently that I cannot put cement shoes on my mental issues; they end up just floating downstream with me when I get carried away. The weight is too much to pull up from the depths, chaining you to the bottom of the river like an anchor, preventing you from progressing and moving to calmer waters. I did this—always. A thought process of “future Me’s problem.” This becomes an issue when future Me does not want to deal or cope with the issues at hand. This makes planning for my future seem impossible and sometimes unnecessary—legitimately thinking I would not be here for that future.

Being told that it's all in my head is diminishing, to say the least. Not only do I have a hard time grasping my own reality, but those around me tend not to believe my situation or think I am exaggerating. I have learned it is better to hibernate on this information when opening up to people—just let it sleep in the cave and DO NOT disturb it. Sooner or later it will come out, hungry and angry.