quicksand

I have come to a place yet again where it is impossible for me to act as if everything was normal, and I am okay.

I am not okay.

I am far from okay.

My coping mechanisms, honed by a few years of a job which entails Faking Like Everything Is Okay (so as not to Freak Out Your Patients, Too) have been sapped.

On a near daily basis at work, I'm close to tears by the end of the shift. I cry all the time at home. I long only for sleep, so I don't have to think any more, and when I'm awake, I'm wracked with anxiety and a sense of panicked dread.

I'm physically and emotionally exhausted, all used up. Going back to work feels like facing a firing squad, or at least some modern version of Prometheus wherein my liver gets picked out daily, only to regrow itself and have the cycle repeat the next day.

There is no reward for endurance, there is no comfort in hope.

I feel like I have had my soul amputated, and all I feel for life now is the strange sensation like that of a phantom limb, or a thought or dream one is trying to have in the twilight before sleep.

One realizes, at some point in adulthood, I think, that the loss of childhood innocence is this: that it is silly and irrational to go on living, and yet, it is unthinkable not to.