Day X

11:32 p.m.

I am exhausted, having barely gotten any sleep last night, and yet my body doesn’t allow me to go to bed. Thoughts are running across my head, everything that went wrong this day and everything that might go wrong this week, and how I feel like I’m losing my best friend with many miles between us. So many thoughts. It’s like a loud television news channel, but there is no way to turn this noise off. I find my mp3 player and plug headphones in, listening to a soft song on repeat. It helps me drown out my thoughts sometimes by helping my mind focus on the lyrics until that is the only thing running through my head. Typically I can fall asleep to that. It doesn’t work tonight. The room feels stuffy. I feel trapped. I hate feeling trapped. I can’t feel trapped. I can’t. I stand and stumble towards the window, opening it up. Even though the night air is cold, it is welcome because there is a feeling of freedom with that air. I finally am able to fall asleep.

4:39 a.m.

I jolt awake, and there is this tight feeling in my chest and a bitter taste in my mouth. This is the fifth or sixth night I’ve had a bad dream. I’m losing count, and sometimes it’s more than one bad dream in a night.

9 a.m.

It’s time to get up to go to work. There was no more dreaming, thank goodness. I go to work. I feel good, I feel fine.

9:40 a.m. – 11:40 a.m.

I feel productive with small victories such as cleaning up my desktop. These little victories are something that get me through in life now. At one point the phone rings. I freeze. I haven’t been trained on phone protocol for this part time job yet. I’m terrified of picking it up, of saying the wrong things, of not knowing how to help the person on the other line. My boss comes out of his office, gives me a perplex look and answers the phone and takes care of the student. Afterwards I stammer out that I didn’t want to answer wrong. He tells me to not worry about it. I just have answer and state our office name so they know whom they are calling.

12 p.m. – 1 p.m.

I’m done with my part time for the day and now I’m at my other job, manning another office at our university for a student organization. I’m still doing fine. I’m doing fine until a friend back home messages me. Things back home have been a bit turbulent. I left. I escaped because it was full of triggers and my mental illnesses were controlling everything in my life. They are bringing things up. They need someone to talk to. I try to listen. I try to be okay, but then it gets too be too much. Back home there is this pressure that I wasn’t good enough, that they are happy I am not there anymore, that I will not be welcomed back when I come back. They want me to never come back. These are my thoughts, the ways I feel. Reading my friend’s message it brings it all back and I feel my chest tightening. I want to flee. It is my responsibility to stay in the office until 1 and then I have class at 1:30 but, but, but I want to flee. I feel like I am about to lose control. I feel like it is going to consume me.

1 p.m.

I hurry out the building. I have to hide. It is raining and people have their umbrellas out to shield them from the rain. I use my umbrella to shield my face from others. Don’t look at me. Please, don’t look at me. I’m shaking, struggling to breathe. My breath is coming out ragged, and I’m trying to swallow it down. I don’t want them to hear. I don’t want them to stare at the freak I am for not being able to control myself. I start dry heaving, but I see the dormitories. I rush inside, into the elevator. It’s not empty. There’s another girl there. I turn my back to her. I want to imagine she is not there. My right hand is clutching my left wrist tightly something I find myself doing when I cross certain lines in anxiety. I’m on my floor inside my room. I haven’t been taking medication over here again. It is too expensive. But I have some left, some I leave for dire situations like this. I take it and crawl into bed, hiding into the covers, clutching a ragged stuffed animal because holding something in my arms is something I need to do. I can dig my fingers into it instead of into myself. I cannot go to my classes. Not like this. I don’t know when the medicine will kick in. How will I explain this to my teachers? How do you tell them you cannot go to class sometimes because of things like this? I was perfectly fine this morning. My friend messages me again. I feel like the worst friend in the planet. That thought is also berating me inside my head. I tell him let’s not talk about this again, it’s a trigger, I’m sorry I cannot deal with this right now. I feel like I can’t be a proper friend, a proper student, a proper human being.

5:30 p.m.

It takes five hours before I am okay enough to leave my room. And even then, the anxiety is still there, like a small tangled mess inside my chest. It’s manageable now though. For now, it’s manageable. I have to go to my internship tonight so I’m thankful that’s at least one place I will not have to explain this sort of thing that seems to rule my life. At least not yet.

-OU Student, Human Relations Major