It felt like I was sick but it also might have been a nervous breakdown. Who can tell with these things.
I was cold and clammy and kind of nauseous and wanted to curl into a ball and be held. That’s what it felt like. That’s all I could muster.
I looked at it, this physical reaction, outside myself and couldn’t gage whether there was anything to be done with this state. Maybe it was just this. My life. Maybe it was panic. The panic you have when you realize that something you’ve been looking to get through is ongoing. When you realize that you’ve been shooting through the shit like it’s temporary but it’s ongong. When you realize that this is your life.
THIS.IS.YOUR.LIFE.
I had an experience a long time ago that was similar, in bed. I woke up suddenly, in an almost hysterical panic. Frozen in inaction. I thought about the man I was with at the time. I’d been with him, off an on, for a year. He was a man I was thinking of sticking with. Staying with. Like for real. For keeps. For the long haul. And he wasn’t the right man. In my heart I knew this when I woke up that night. In bed, alone, watching my life stretch out before me with this man. Watching the apathy become routine. Acknowledging the real dearth of affection. Noting that he would never want me as much as he wanted something. Just something. And that he would never give me anything to do with who I was or what I believed in, and yet I seemed to feel like I should go forward with it anyway. Well that put me in a similar panic. I saw my choices as a second choice to nothingness.
And then there I was, at work, faced with another week. And sick. And cold and clammy and achy. And I couldn’t tell if it was illness or just a bad day. And I couldn’t believe that every day was becoming bad day in my willingness to exist in this holding pattern of frustration and anger and exhaustion and fruitlessness.
And so I muttered the only thing I could manage to say.

“I don’t think I’m okay”