The problem when you are afflicted by several things at once is that you're never quite sure which is the culprit of how you're currently coping or as the case may be not coping.  The lines blur between what is normal and that which is not until you have to ask yourself are you okay?  Or more often than not, how not okay are you.

It’s not the words that 

I need to share

It’s the silences

that I wish you could hear.

The world is flat and grey.  A thick impressionable grey that begs to be reached through, smudged or drawn upon yet you can't even touch it.

The emptiness is overwhelming, it's not around you, it's within you.  Sometimes you exist stupefied within it as it spreads like some vacant barren expanse that you're never quite sure if you're on the precipice of waiting to fall into it or else simply in the midst of it, lost.  Other times it's those million shivering holes, vicious and paralysing.  Carniverous and invisible.

 & I can’t remember if I’m the holes

or the remains.

It's hard to explain why you don't do that which needs doing, the laundry has been ready to put away for days, the pots ready to put away too and they're right in front of you yet you're exhausted mentally because you got dressed today.  You brushed your hair. You may have even had a bath in the last few days. You're remembering to provide answers, of a sort, when spoken to.   You're lazy, they say so you obviously don't give a shit and to an extent they're right.  It's not that you don't care it's that you can't.  You have lost the capacity to care about everyday things.  There's no room to think about them when your thoughts are consumed by breathing in and breathing out.

You're overeating, again.  It's not even like you're hungry.  You don't need this food, hell you don't even want it.  Yet you're eating it.  It's like a compulsion.  You're not even sure why, is it some physical attempt to fill that void inside?  Is it just another form of self destruction, to become the hideous that you feel.

You can't control this.

You lie in bed for hours in agonising silence as you feel yourself suffocate from the inside out.  What is that noise?  That strangulated noise?  Then you realise.  It's you.  It's been so long since you cried, the sound is alien and you can't breath.

You're angry.  You're distraught. You're empty.

Your apathy is deconstructing life around you, demolishing it bit by bit.  It's no dramatic explosion it's mere crumbling through neglect.  There's a handgrenade in your mouth, you're tonguing the pin, it's all the things you can't say.  the things that would blow apart your world.

& I can’t decide the greater evil

The inability to feel

 Or the possibility of feeling

I’m terrified by the allure of

Loaded thoughts

As words poise unspoken

With the potential to blow

Apart

My world

I’m afraid to ask myself questions

In case I discover how to answer them

Everything feels wrong

I am a hand grenade

And the pin is decaying

What would happen if your life was reduced to rubble?  Sometimes you're tempted to pull the pin, just to feel something.  To destroy everything.

Some days I’m desperate for something violently radical to happen, just to check i’m still here.  Underneath all this. That somewhere somebody sees me.  Maybe in time, they’ll hear me.  

I’d introduce myself but I don’t know who I am.

Anymore.

Then there's a small break, a mere crack in the clouds and you're clambering to it on all fours attempting to drink the light in hungry gasps.  For this short time you're breathing. .  You're feeling in colours and thinking in shapes.  Everything is so vivid and bright as you stare at the most inconsequential things in exquisite awe.  There's a fluidity in your movements, an unstoppable stream of words that need to be spoken.  It's like the world's in some subtle dance against your body willing it to move as you see revelations in the clouds.  The energy is electric, you need to go here, go there, do this, so that and you're laughing.....the sensation of laughter is ripping apart your veins in it's insanity.  It feels good. You're laughing in air to empty hungry lungs.  It's like the kiss of sunlight on dead flesh, you just want to feel this for a bit longer, just a little while just a ...

It's gone again.

I'm gone again.

Trying to breath out without

breathing in

the grey turns to black

if you swallow

it swallows right back.

Running After The Rain

At the sound of your 

giggles, falling like

soft rain upon the wall

of fog i’m trapped behind

I can’t get out yet

I feel you

and for a while

the world becomes a lighter shade of grey

my heart takes a gulp

and you’re

like the sunshine

running after the rain.

Promised myself I wouldn't weep.

The thing with having long term invisible illness' is that you're either written off or else people assume that you're over it.  It's the ongoing part that people struggle to digest.  That and the general gross misunderstanding of mental illness.

If you have a migraine or a broken leg, you suffer and then it gets better.  If you have a terminal disease you either recover or you die.

If you're slashing at your wrists, having hallucinations and delusional whilst crying 24/7, you're depressed enough to warrant being depressed. The depression is visible and thus real. If you have situation or event triggered depression, people will molly coddle you for a while then it's a 'there, there dear. You'll be okay soon' which translates roughly as 'Oh gosh, how terrible! I don't know how you cope.' which then turns to a 'pull your socks up' after they deem you've had long enough to 'get over it'.

Yet, If you suffer from long term depression, anxiety or personality disorders that was triggered by nothing other than faulty wiring or genes, people rarely know what to do.  They understand neither the longevity nor the peak and troughs that accompany it. You're not seen as ill, you're just flaky and mercurial. You obviously can't have Social Anxiety because they saw you say hello to someone last week.  You're obviously not depressed because a few days ago they saw you smile and Egads, laugh. You, you faker you!

The thing with invisible illness' is, people only accept them in their most visible moments.  They only see the mask.

Mental illness isn't just about the darkness, It's the torturous rays of light that momentarily blind and panic you too.  It isn't just about the blackness, it's the fifty shades of choking grey in-between.  It's not just the drowning, it's the unexpected hard slaps that put you off balance.

It's not that you're okay or even not okay, it's the varied struggle of trying to be okay.  It's the soul cracking realisation that you may never be okay enough, again.

& the mask keeps slipping.