Vent Book

Shit Hits Different

Have you ever dissociated? If yes, you know all too well this little known symptom of runaway anxiety. For those of you who don't know, let me try and explain it as it is for me.

Imagine that you stand up to go into the kitchen, and suddenly you can "feel" reality bend and warp. As if the very fabric of reality itself has shifted around you and now you're viewing things from just slightly off center. Everything feels wrong, the air is too harsh, it's too hot and too cold at the same time. The walls seem to squeeze in around you.

Everything is moving too fast, although it seems like the very air itself is frozen in time. Eternal, the one constant against the pounding of your heart as you try and remember where you are, who you are. You're not quite sure what set it off this time, but you're knee deep in it now and none of your coping mechanisms seem to be working.

So you sit there in your computer chair in a catatonic state. Each second seems to last eons yet you know time is passing normally, and most likely quicker than it should be. You try to breathe, to soothe the rising panic in your chest.

The loud footsteps of one of your neighbors on the stairwell jars you out of your sense of security. Is that the door opening? Is someone knocking? What if it's not your neighbor. Are they coming to take you back again? You're not ready, it's not your time.

You're trapped. Can you climb out the window? No, you live on the third floor. The drop would kill you. Which, isn't a bad thing, but you'd much prefer to continue existing because at this point it's all you've done for twenty years and it seems to be the only thing you know how to do.

Now you really don't know how long has passed. It feels like it's been an eternity since you heard someone else's voice aside from the voice screaming inside your head. Your thoughts swirl around like a black maelstrom constantly reminding you of past mistakes that lead you to now.

You'd kill for some silence yet all there is currently is silence. Maddening silence, you want to scream, shout, say something to break the glass. Although your voice is stuck in your throat as your eyes are drawn to the corners of the room, or the space behind your laptop where you swear something just moved in the darkness there.

"Fuck it" You say to yourself, you're tired of this bullshit. So you lay down to go to bed and hopefully redo things tomorrow. Even though it's only 1:30 PM you can't take anymore of this. However, you know that tomorrow there's a chance that you could wake up and have to deal with this same thing, because it's not just a daily thing. You remember that one time in the summer where you dissociated for seven days straight, the utter hell of being barely able to move as you felt the world wheel and spin around you. Barely even remembering your own name much less that you had food the entire time.

So now you're half starved, you've missed out on so many things with friends, your balance has been fucked since the onset so trying to get to Martial Arts is out and now all you can do is sit there and pray that it stops sometime soon so you can go back to pretending you're a normal adult whose mind doesn't try to fight him every other week.