Apr 15, 2004 00:26
Ahh! I hate this feeling. Like something inside me is eating my organs. I can't sleep but I'm exhausted. Heck, I shouldn't be sleeping. My film midterm is due tomorrow and I haven't even started working on it. My thoughts are so scattered but I'll try to make sense of them myself so that I can articulate them.
This week I have realized how an alcoholic feels when he's been sober for a while. When I stopped doing all of those self destructive things I've done in the past (which I will discuss in a minute) I no longer felt like myself.
For the past four years, I started to feel a drive in me begin to surface and take me over. There is a part of me that's always pushing me to be better at this or that. Last year that drive reached a fevered pitch. I was in pain over how increasingly awkward I was feeling in my life and the fact that it was becoming more and more obvious that I fit nowhere with no one. I had a few friends that year but to be honest with you, I don't even think too many of them liked me that much. Maybe not too many of them really knew me. That feeling of emptiness brought on a horrible pain in the pit of my stomach. I became a slave to that pain. The only way I could dull it was by working. I had to be as intelligent as possible, as multi talented as possible. Nothing was good enough for me. When people complimented me it bugged me because it made me feel like a lie. They would say "You're good at that" and all I could think was "Not good enough." Not good enough for me to really consider it a talent. My eyes were harsh when it came to judging myself. But it pushed me. It made me better at certain skills then I ever imagined I'd be (though I would never have noticed that I was any good at anything at the time. Everything I did, in my eyes, could be better.)
I would stay up for days. Sometimes to work, sometimes because I just simply felt the need to put myself through physical pain to dull any emotional pain I was going through. Or maybe it wasn't even to dull emotional pain, maybe it was just because the only way I really feel like myself is if I haven't slept.
The last week of school was the worst. I was a wreck. I don't know what I did but somehow, I basically got myself into this weird emotional state where I was somewhat nervous all the time. This caused my adrenal glands to pump every minute of the day. I barely slept that entire week, if at all, I don't know, I can't remember anything from that time too well. I do know that the last day I had an emotional melt down. I broke down and cried in my economics class. It was so embarrassing but I couldn't hold anything in at that point. By the end of that adrenaline filled session, I had made myself sick. During all of my senior activities I was under the weather (when they got a picture of me at Knotts Berry Farm on a roller coaster, it was one of me coughing.)
After my high school graduation, obviously, I was really burnt out. I couldn't even be my normal over-analytical self. Even when I was very young, I was always the one to analyze the world in disgusting detail. Yet, somehow I was just too tired to do so. I was drained in ways I never thought possible. I was too tired to feel pain or to let that drive take me over.
Lately, I've still been in that state. I had four years of driving myself (Only the last year was as bad as I described. The other three years were bad, but I didn't bury myself in work the way I had in the last year.) And now I'm just tired. The only problem is that I don't feel like myself anymore. Every time I read how horrible my writing has become, I'm disgusted. It's almost as if I've forgotten how to do things that I learned when I was 8 years old. I've forgotten how to use things such as parentheses and commas. I don't know what's wrong with me.
In this exhausted state, I was able to get a pretty good amount of sleep every night. I was happy 85% of the time and the other 15% of the time were just fleeting moments which I made numb because I was too tired to feel pain. But all of those positive things matter very little to me at this point.
I've just been floating through life for the past few months. And now, what do I do to fix that? I stay up until 12:00 AM to write a journal entry while I still haven't started my homework. I know this isn't good for me. I know I shouldn't be torturing myself this way... I just can't find some middle ground. Remember how I wrote in a previous entry that I had become undefined as a person? The more I search and the more I try to figure out, the less I understand. I suppose that's always how things work.
I'm not sure what all of this was. I suppose it makes me look like a lunatic (as if you all didn't already think I was one) but my mind is awake in a way it hasn't been in months and when it's like this. I HAVE to write. Now I'm going to try and do a good job on my mid term. I know that this is film and it should be an easy midterm for me but this teacher's different and as previously stated, my writing isn't exactly where I'd like it to be.
Give me strength.