Spiraling into Darkness

It starts out as a nagging feeling - doubt, perhaps, or guilt. I try to push it away but the harder I push the more energy is sapped from my veins. Dark Voices gaining support of the more neutral or confused surrounding Voices. I feel tired. The desire to hide resurfaces. The dark knowledges of which I am not permitted to think, let alone speak creep steadily into my persistent thoughts. I push them away. Always pushing away the thoughts I don't want to hear. Always pushing everything away.



The questions come up, unbidden. What else has been pushed away? What is over that indomitable Wall, that impenetrable fortress that I have created and refuse to take down? It protects me and reassures me. Yet still I wonder and fear what may lie behind it. I get little pieces sometimes, images that I can't explain but I suspect have slipped away from their caretakers and slid up over The Wall. I suspect this because seemingly innocent images fill me with a dread that I just can't justify.

I wake up in the dark, filled with the fear that someone is coming down the hall, coming into the room, coming for me. And if I am awake when the shadow arrives, I will die of terror, but if I have fallen asleep or not woken up in time, it will be much worse.

After a moment, I realize the fear that woke me up is not real. I lay in the dark and I see it isn't even that dark. The moon comes in softly through the window and what felt like a heavy blanket of blackness is only a dull grey. Beside me, my husband sleeps, the rhythm of his breathing regular and reassuring. Sometimes, a child lies between us, a tiny body craving protection from a fear of the dark that I deny sharing. His fears stem from lightening and monsters under the bed. Mine are from silence and monsters in the bed. Like his, I am certain that my fears are unfounded. Everyone has those fears, waking up in the middle of the night to unjustified fears.

But what about the times when I close my eyes and see a picture that makes no sense?

There is the man in the white painter's overalls. His is so very tall. I must only come up to his waist, if that. All I see is white painter's overalls, but they fill me with a fear that is primal and unexplainable. I have absolutely no frame of reference for the image. It is snatched back behind The Wall before I can get more than a snapshot and frankly - I'm glad.

There is also the picnic rock. I remember it. It was this big, flat rock out behind my aunt's house in the woods when I was little. We used to have picnics on it, me and my cousins. Sometimes an image of it, with it looking so very, very tall, comes to my mind's eye and I feel like I'm choking, gagging, smothering. When I was a teenager, not sure how old, I went back into those woods by myself, my cousins being long gone or busy. I found the rock. It isn't very big at all. Maybe 2 foot high and roughly 3 feet square along the top. At the time I had what I now recognize as a panic attack. Why? No clue.

Farther into the woods, actually on the far side of the woods, is a little pond. At least, it's little now. I have this image of it as this huge lake and that image makes me hurt. Again, why?

Why?
Why?
Why?

Why do I have these pictures that make no sense? Why do I have these fears that I can't explain? Why do I have half-memories of things I am told never happened? Why do I find myself crying with no idea why or when I started? Why do innocent things bring panic welling up inside my chest?

I am sure that nothing bad happened to me. I grew up in a perfect middle class home with perfect middle class parents in a perfect middle class neighborhood. I was a holy terror but so what? I learned to control most of it. And I grew up telling everyone that my life was good, too good. It was fine. I have an active imagination.

So why am I scared?

Everything spirals into darkness. The bad thoughts are seeping back into my head. I can't make them go away. Craig asks me what is wrong. I can't tell him. I don't know how. And something stops me from even wanting to. They scream at me. I hear a hissing whisper that doesn't exactly feel like one of my Voices and I know, I just KNOW that I can't tell him.

Besides, what good would it do to tell him the bad thoughts are back? He's scared now. If he knew, he'd get angry and paranoid. He might start locking up the meds, totally pointless and extremely inconvenient. Or reinstate my "curfew" like I'm a little kid. There's nothing he can really do to help and no way he can understand what is going on in my head.

I'm so scared. I'm so alone. No one understands. No one could and no one ever will. I am utterly alone. I am trapped. There is no way out. That was made abundantly clear. No highway option. No options at all. No options. No choices. No options. No choices. Trapped. Forever. No highway option.

It's so dark inside my mind...