I don’t know about anyone else, but I am having a rough week. Outside of, or on top of, the same sort of coronavirus concerns that the whole world is experiencing (though, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t been quite as concerned about that as maybe I should be until the last couple days), I am, on a personal level, having a “valiantly resisting the urge to smash plates on the counter/going off to scream into a pillow/trying very hard not to angry-cry” sort of week.

I don’t want to get into specifics, but suffice it to say that I am feeling ill-used, and taken-advantage-of, and taken for granted. I THINK, though I am never sure these days, that I am justified in feeling this way. But… well, my family (and an occasional friend) has always had a habit of implying (or flat-out saying) that I am a) overreacting and being melodramatic, b) imagining or misunderstanding things, and/or c) misrepresenting or actually lying about the things I have to put up with… so I live in constant fear that I really am imagining myself worse off than I actually am, without realizing it. Or that I am complaining about things that are totally normal and maybe I really am just over-sensitive, or in some cases (as my family has been known to accuse me of) just being lazy or selfish. I honestly, genuinely can’t tell anymore.

I know gaslighting is a thing. I understand the concept. But how do you know if you’re being gaslighted, or if you really ARE just that unreasonable/over-sensitive/etc? I don’t have an answer.

So I spend a lot of my time biting my tongue, screaming into pillows, fighting off anxiety attacks (or failing to fight off anxiety attacks and proceeding to hyperventilate, cry, and so forth), and complaining to my two best friends who are pretty much the only people I trust to NOT tell I’m being a whiny baby.

I have been swallowing back so much anger and frustration and anxiety since I was a teenager that I sometimes (more than sometimes) feel like there’s a black hole at the center of my chest slowly eating me away. I always – and I am not exaggerating, I really mean ALWAYS – have a pain in my sternum and in my back right between my shoulder blades. It never goes away. Since I was 14 years old.

I spend so much of my time wishing to be somewhere else. Wishing to be someONE else. Anyone else. I do not like who I am. I do not like where I have ended up. Child-me, teenage-me, would be so disappointed by today-me. Hell, today-me is disappointed in today-me. And I am trying so SO hard to change that, but so far it isn’t going so well.

So, I spend a lot of my time swallow back screams and tears and resisting the rage to break things – plates, windows, mirrors, myself.

This is not a book-related post, for which I apologize. People don’t really need or want to hear me complain about my life. Sorry. I have finished both Middlegame and Disney’s Land. Hopefully, I will post reviews for both soon. But today I just needed to write this. In the hopes that writing it might help purge some of the anger. I’m not sure it worked.