wake up, wake up

i had a revelation the other day about myself. i meant to write and then once i started i stopped and havent found the time to come back. there were also several things that i also wanted to write and now may have forgotten, i knew i should have written them down so that i could later make blogs. oh well.

well my roommate from last year/friend spent the night last night and shes still sleeping on my other bed so i figure its a good time to write.



over the last two and a half to three years i have been faced with several different challenges, each making me feel as if that time was the hardest time in my life thus far. it has been a hard couple of years; a time that my stregnth has been tested and a time that i have had the oppertunity to really learn about myself.

in summer 06 i was diagnossed with a panic disorder. it started with difficulty getting to sleep at night, but soon my late night phone calls were not enough to get me through the night, i felt as if i was dying almost every night and was scared to fall asleep. as i got scared, the feelings grew worse, i was having panic attacks which often mimic heart attacks. i didnt know what to do with myself and soon no one else was able to sleep because i kept them up at night. i was threatened to be put on meds and i refused, i agreed to do anything i needed to to get through this as long as i didnt need to take meds. i agreed to therapy despite my dislike and uncomfortableness with therapy, i didnt talk much, one word answers only giving her the specific information she asked for. yeah i know, i was difficult and was not very helpful from my end. my reason therapy doesnt work for me, i cant open up on the stop to some stranger thats analyzing me, im too scared of how i will be percieved and of letting someone in to my deepest fears and secrets that no one but me knew.

i speculate it was the extreme heartache i was going through that pushed these always present feelings to the surface and creating my breaking point and onset of the awareness of this anxiety and this disorder. the relationship, if you want to call it that, was complicated and left me pretty broken. there was something different about him, as there always is, and i never truely got the chance to get to know him because he was always coming and going. he had just disappeared for what ended up being two years when this all started. i decided, a year from the night we met would be my date, the date that i move on if he had not come back and gave me answers or something.

a year came and i still had not heard from him, i had gotten myself to a place where i was ready to move on, i was ready to put myself back out there. i was slowly regaining control of myself, sort of. i knew how to better hide my feelings, i knew how to distract myself, and i knew catch the panic attack before it started and try and revert it. i learned how to cope i guess. things were lookinig up, i was gaining my life back, i even really liked myself for once in my life. my best friend had just moved away for college and we were closer than ever and i was in my senior year loving life.

at the beginning of december my grandma was admited to the hospital, she had had a stroke. surprisingly she lived from this particular stroke that usually kills people immediately and was recovery fairly well. within the next week or two she had a second stroke, another kind of stroke. everyone pretty much wrote her off, predicted her death, and even planned the funeral. though i did say goodbye, just in case, i would not partake. her vitals were stable, but she was unable to really do much, though everyday she did move a little more and come a little more to. there was discussion of whether to let her live or die, as the discussion continued i was alone in my opinion to let her live, but i saw something in her, something was keeping her life, she must have still been fighting. i cant tell you what its like to be a signle person in a waiting room of about twelve people argueing against family and even doctors for what i felt in my heart. i had faith in her, i knew she wasnt ready to die. in that moment i decided that everyday until she gets better i would see her, give her something possitive to look forward to and some possitive feelings. she is now in a convelesant home and has made too many trips back to the hospital. she is stable, she has improved a whole lot, but still not really living. it kills me to see her as she is, but i still see her every day. i didnt realize how much i was holding back from this untl i went to her house a couple of weeks ago to pick something up. everything just caught up with me and i starte to cry and walked out while my dad was still there. my mom has been so torn up over this that she has been leaning on me, i have felt like i cant be scared, i cant have doubts, i cant worry about her because if i do my mom had no reason to beleive that she is okay.

through all of this, my best friend told me she thought she was in love with me, almost at the same time as this all began. i didnt know how to react, from what i knew of myself i was straight. for years people were questioning my sexuality and i felt obligated to prove that i was straight to both myself and everyone else. i told her i love her, but not in that way, i didnt think that anything was every possible in a romantic way. thinking she was straight, she was scared too, she had a boyfriend at the time who she was in love with and slowly falling out of love with. she didnt want to have these feelings, but she did, she tried to escape them and push them away. she was getting high and trying not to feel, it only made things worse. we grew distant emotionally, but somehow closer. we were spending more time together when she was home and our conversations slowly became monopolized by what to do about us, if there was something more there. we sort of both came to entertain the idea, though neither of us really secure in the idea. its now september 07 and we decide were best as best friends, we had something great and we have only complicated and destroyed what was there, we want to just be best friend. two weeks later i go to visit her in san diego, waking up in bed next to her might have been on the single most amazing things i had ever felt, it just felt so right and so perfect and i knew i could be in a relationship with her. we decided to be together, things were rocky neither of us was completely comfortable and we didnt know where it was going. fights were more frequent and we ended up breaking up in january after a fight over her ex. she stopped talking to me, when we talked we faught, when we didnt talk we were misserable. three months later she is home and decides she wants to see me, we saw eachother and everything was still there, the passion, the romance, the heat; we couldnt fight it. i knew we needed to talk before anything could happen, but i was scared of that talk. we ended up getting back together, no talk, no nothing, just kind of picking up where things left off. things were better, there wasnt much fighting, but it was mostly in fear of brining anything up. what i didnt know was she was still smoking, she was hiding from these feelings, trying to escape reality and wasnt herself. she was lying to me and i had no idea who she was anymore. we broke up again in september, and all this began to come out, the truth, the lies, everything. she stopped talking to me again, she said that i dont let her be herself and she feels better when im not in her life. a couple of weeks later she shows up at my house and wants to talk, i let her in and we talk, she goes back and forth with whether or not she wants to talk to me for about two weeks. she started therapy and was attempting to recover from her weed addiction, which no one other than me saw or knew the extent of which it was at. we were talking and i thought things were going to change, we were going to rebuild the friendship we had lost and we were going to be there for eachother. she wanted more, i still had feelings for her but i knew it wasnt the right decision right now and we agreed to be friends and see where things went. two days later, she tells me it was a mistake to start talking ot me and she doesnt feel like herself and shes smoking everyday and i make her feel horrible about herself. none of it makes much sense when just the day before, even hours before she was saying she wants to be with me and how happy she would have been if i was in san diego with her and what not. when she stops talking she always reverts back to being straight. i think shes scared, i think she is denying her feelings to herself because she doesnt wnat them to be true. the only way to have a healthy relationship with me is for her to be able to accept those feelings and to create a healthy lifestyle for herself. it has now been about a month since that last time we stopped talking. i love her so much and it kills me to not have her in my life, i think about her everyday, but i am slowly moving away from the idea of romance with her. looking at old conversations and emails, i think she is terrified of any kind of relationship, most definately one that tests her perception of herself; my life will always have room for her, she is a huge part of who i am, but i have no idea what the future holds in the way of romance.

throught all this, i also graduated high school, started college, moved out, then moved back in. transition after transition. i am growing each day, becoming more and more me and i hardly have time to breath, i just have to keep rolling with the punches.


somewhere in the mix of all of this i lost myself. i stopped feeling, i become almost like an emotionless robot like being. i ddint have time to be scared. i couldnt deal with the pain. i became numb to everything. in doing that, i lost myself, i stopped being a good friend, i suck at relationships. i have reverted back to when selective mutism controled my life. from this point on, i am trying to be an active me, regain control of my life, my feelings and my being. focus on other people as much as i focus on myself and make all of my efforts genuine and real.