Breaking Point

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once. ~Jennifer Yane

I'm humming like a high-tension power line, like a rubber band that is being pulled tighter and tighter. When the world starts falling in, it just keeps collapsing it seems.

The past two days have been difficult on so many levels and for so many reasons. The big obvious ones don't need explanation. Watching someone you love go through something like a heart attack is sufficient unto itself. The trivial crises of daily life, too, don't need explanation, the lost items, the broken appliances, the frustrations of injury or inability. All these things are pebbles in the pan of the scale, but not the things that cause it to tip.

Instead, the things that make that balance swing are feather-light, but unbearable all the same. It's watching perfect strangers being told that I'm unable to handle basic situations like I'm some sort of mental and emotional incompetent. It's having to pretend that I'm an absolutely solid rock of Gibraltar or have to be relegated to a corner like a crippled child for daring to show a shred of emotion. It's never being allowed to talk about any experience I've ever had without being told that I don't really know what that experience is because someone else has lived through that experience or something like it before and is therefore the undisputed expert nonpareil. These are the tiny moth-wing brushes that are destroying me.

So I swallow down my every response, something I swore long ago that I would never do again, and I go on. What else is there to do, really? I comfort myself with the knowledge that misconceptions of me don't have to become the realities of who I am. But all the time, I can hear the discordant sound of the strands of my soul tightening, tightening....