I Am Tired of Existing, I Want To Live Again.

After a call with a therapist, almost two weeks ago, to assess what would help me best in managing my anxiety, which has become extremely high functioning during lockdown two, she asked me about how I was feeling. I replied, I just feel like I am existing, that is it. We are no longer living, and she said I could not have phrased it better.

I wake up and I am here, I try my hardest to get through the day, try to sleep, and then wake up to continue to exist tomorrow. And existing makes it hard to want to continue on this Earth because we were not put here to simply exist, we were put here to live. And what’s the point of existing if we can’t live?

And no I am not suicidal, I have no plans to do anything like that to myself. I worry too much about how that would hurt the ones I love, and I could not do that to them. I also have things to do on this Earth before it is my time.

But, I worry whether my body will survive much longer, simply existing. These last few weeks have put me in so much pain to the point, one evening I was in so much pain my whole body ached right down to my fingertips and toes. My chest is in pain every single day, with the only thing that manages to calm it down for a few hours is the pills my doctor has given me. But how long until they stop numbing the pain? Not to mention that they don’t tell my brain to stop saying the worst things about myself, and cast the worst doubts on every aspect of my life.

I feel like I am watching myself decay. I am losing a piece of me every single day and there is nothing I can do about it.

I know the world is struggling, I know my friends and my family are struggling. I see the pain and I feel it. I have always felt others’ pain alongside my own, and it just feels like there is too much pain in the world that I can’t cope with. The only solution seems to be detachment. To withdraw because if I keep to myself I can’t feel others' pain, and maybe my own pain will become easier to manage.

Even as I become busier, things look up career-wise and I began to feel that zest for life again. It came crashing down twenty-four hours later. How can I be happy with all of these things, if I can’t enjoy them with the ones I love?

I am craving the intimacy of human interaction. To see the creases in my best friend's eyes, as she laughs at a joke my funniest best friend cracks up. To hold the hand of the one I have fallen way too quickly for despite the lack of actual days together because the universe decides to introduce us just as the world enters a global pandemic. To be able to run around and laugh and joke with my little cousins. To feel happier again so my parents don’t have to see the pain I am trying so desperately to hide from them and from the world.

The only way I have found someone or something that actually understands how I am feeling, how my body is feeling, is through music. I am a bit of a playlist hoarder, in that I create a billion based on mood, genre, and season. It seems like my formerly known ‘mood’ now turned ‘sad gal hours,’ has become one which has become overplayed and expanded. I have found many songs written by musicians over the quarantine/lockdown period dealing with anxiety and all kinds of existential dread, and it helps. It helps to feel heard in my mind’s darkest moments because I can’t speak them for myself without having a meltdown, so to have someone sing them in my ears almost allows someone else to carry that burden for me.

I journal and that helps, it gets the day's thoughts out. But, when I struggle to hold the pen, my google doc of the darkest and most painful thoughts is the place I go to. It has the most erratic ramblings of my mind, and again it helps because I cannot express how I feel to others because I really can’t have people worrying, for them to feel the pain I feel. I can only ever talk about my feelings, once I have felt them, otherwise, I would be a teary mess.

The solution? I don’t have one, all I know is that I can only get better once the world starts to get better. Once I can actually see a future. A future working towards the dream career, a future with stability, a future where I don’t have to worry about when I can next see my family or friends, and a future where I can fall in love with that one person, where I can fall in love with life again.