28 January 1999

Downward Spiral

Sometimes I look at the path of my emotions and I think that I see an endlessly repeating pattern, I spiral that trickles down from the top and up from the bottom, over and over again.

Right now, in an appropriately Nine Inch Nails moment, I am on the downward spiral. Maybe it's because I ran out of thyroid medication and am 24 hours off cycle. Maybe that's all it is.

But really it has more to do with the fact that I made not one, but two life-changing decisions in the past 48 hours and I am still reeling from the shock of having made them.

Somehow the world just doesn't seem quite real anymore. Faces slide by me, horribly distorted, like shapes in a fun-house mirror. Buildings and streets stretch away from me at impossible angles, reaching for the far off distance, making me feel like I'm caught in some crazy carnival world where everything is an illusion and finding truth amongst the mirages is an impossible dream.

I told my boss and the director about my decision today.

The odd part was that I dreamt that scene in my life-movie.

I dreamt that we would go out on the balcony and that the director would smoke and that he'd look unsurprised, but disappointed. I had trouble looking either one of them in the face. I wound up admiring the fifty foot deep pit on the other side where they're building a Ritz-Carlton residence for habitation some time in the next millennium.

Now I'm sitting here staring at the screen, trying to get some work done, and completely incapable of doing so. My mind keeps jumping around nervously, my heart is as heavy as lead and I keep wanting to cry.

That's the clincher really -- every time I want to cry, I'm in a public place where I have to hold it in and pretend like everything is normal. By the time I get home I've psyched myself into being cheerful.

So I haven't cried yet.

Maybe I should just go hide out in the ladies' room and have a good cry.

The problem is that I don't even know if that will make me feel better.

As the world flashed by this morning on the train, a sun-splashed world of houses and buildings, people going about their lives, all that I could think of, is how much I wished that I could turn back time and do things over again from a very specific point in time.

Up until now, though I've had moments of regret in my life, I have generally not felt like I would change anything.

But today, the desire to go back to a moment five years ago and take a different path, grew strong.

You see, in many ways I feel like I haven't really been living for the past five years. It's like something in me broke then and I've never been able to fix it. There was a brief moment where everything came into focus for the space of two months while I was in Geneva. I had a sense of achievement and empowerment, I'd finally reached an emotional and mental peak where the possibilities of life opened up before me. For the first time in a long time I felt good about myself, about my place in my world and the meaning of life.

All of that came crashing down after spring break of that year, turning that golden moment into a dimly remembered sense of something good that slipped from my clumsy fingers at the worst possible time.

But the sleepwalking through life began before I got my heart broken. It began the year before, what I think of now as the year of crisis, the year where everything started to slide away from me. The year where I got lost and made a string of increasingly poor choices that eventually led to the position that I am in today.

That's the time I would go back to. That's when I would make the changes. That's when I would have signed up for a different set of courses. That's when I would have stayed home through the summer and temped at home to save money instead of digging myself further into debt and 'net addiction. That's when I would shake the younger me and tell her to grow up and stop Mushing her life away.

I would tell that me to get her nose out of the air about counselling, to go talk to someone about the things that were bothering her, get her frustrations out in the air, maybe even get some medical attention sooner to find the thyroid condition and get it treated.

Of course, it's all hypothetical though. Because I didn't do that. I didn't wake up to the fact that I had problems and I let them hang on far too long. I let them seep into my psyche, let them eat away at my personality until I became someone that I didn't want to be.

Now I have to pay the piper, live with the choices I made back then and live the life that I've got, somehow try to find that joy for living that I lost hold of somewhere along the way. Somehow, get off the downward spiral, and find a better way to deal with the chaos of emotion that inhabits me daily.