The ticking clock, a symbol of time moving forward, leaves me in a peculiar paradox, wishing time forward and also fearing the night

I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. But what choice do I have other than to trudge on like a quivering, jangling, empty cadaver, shuffling slowly and quietly in the dark, flinching at shadows, caught up in the cluttered mishmash inside my mind. I ache and I throb with exhaustion. I am fearful and crazed and the machinery controlling me continues; whirring along, shifting gears frequently, and causing my words to become disjointed. As my heart beats it sends something blistering and rancorous coursing through my veins. The sadness of the past few days has given way to an acidic anger that I am having trouble harnessing at the moment. There is no prioritizing the distress. I have attempted to alleviate the pain but seem to have lost the ability to soothe and pacify them today. It is not possible to mitigate or ‘make space’ for the parts of Grace right now, and the fear of the familiar internal hostility is hanging above me like a looming funnel cloud.

The clock ambles on…slowly…leaving me in bizarre paradox as I seek to wish time forward and yet at the same time I fear the darkness of the night. This constant battle within myself stretches me to the threshold of my very existence. So many nights I find myself here, in the early hours of the morning, trying to write out the congealed sediment of my mind just to keep myself from dying. I realize that sounds dramatic and theatrical, but it’s how it feels – as if at any moment, it will finally become too much and my heart will simply stop beating. It’s like somehow I believe that if I can just purge all of these thoughts, memories, feelings…if I can somehow allow all the parts of myself to write out the pain and the anguish that is rooted into the innermost part of my being, that the lethal depression will dissipate and I can salvage what is left of me. Metaphorically speaking, I want to dig deep and wide until I pull all of the shame and pain out by the very roots that continue to allow it to grow like a weed inside of me, smothering me, taking away my oxygen, until I can no longer breathe and I just wither away… and I’ve tried. The struggle of putting it out there, on paper - words that I have been unable to write, or speak, even to DT, the one who knows more about me than anyone else, still feels like too much, and my own fear of judgment and ridicule, disgust and abhorrence, prevent me from exposing too much of myself. I cannot permit those parts of me to be seen, taking the chance that anyone who may read my words might see the true me, the real me, as I often see myself~ bad, dirty, worthless, unlovable…disgusting and ugly.

Unable to purge all of this shame out of myself, like arsenic, it continues to poison me, as each night I find the different parts of myself thrashing and straining, fighting each other until every muscle in my body aches and cries out in pain and anguish. They carry me away to somewhere so dark and desolate that each night I fear I may never return. And each morning I feel even more battered and bruised from the battles of the previous night and each night I struggle to make it till morning.

Every night, as I wait for the cocktail combo of drugs and alcohol to take away some of the pain, I listen to the clock ticking away the minutes, the minutes turning into the hours, as I face the East, awaiting the first light of dawn, a sign that I made it through the darkness of yet another seemingly hopeless night…