Existential Anxiety

The existential anxiety of not knowing where I belong, or what I believe about home or really where I’d go if I wasn’t going where ever the fuck it is I’m going… which is seemingly everywhere and no where.
Working on making a plan for the next 5 months that involves driving around America, playing music and meeting new people. I have no idea what else to do with myself and I’m still not totally sure this is what I should be doing.
But, well, I’m already doing it. Booking shows, spending hours and hours on the internet contacting complete strangers. Getting in touch with old contacts and making plans. Writing emails to the ones I hold close that say things like “I miss you too” and “I don’t know when I’ll see you next, but I’m coming to find you”
It’s already been 5 months since I left “home” and I really don’t have any idea what home actually is? A neurotic space where I can pace and wonder and worry and build my mind up to a million concerns?
At least I know I feel better, in most ways, when I’m in motion. But for some reason, I always have this strong feeling of longing. A deep loneliness that can’t be soothed or pacified. A confusion. A misplaced heart that beats irregularly.

Somethings change, somethings stay the same.

Some people will be missed and some people do the missing.

Where do we go from here?

A resource link post for friends who asked.

C-PTSD support
What is C-PTSD
C-PTSD wiki
Self care and codependency
Dysphoria wiki
Chronic pain wiki
Depersonalizations/derealization disorder wiki

 People who are diagnosed with depersonalization also experience an urge to question and think critically about the nature of reality and existence

Individuals who experience depersonalization can feel divorced from their own personal physicality by sensing their body sensations, feelings, emotions and behaviors as not belonging to themselves. As such, a recognition of one’s self breaks down. Depersonalization can result in very high anxiety levels, which can intensify these perceptions even further.

Give yourself the space to feel angry. That anger is necessary in confronting trauma…

…Trauma is real. And we all need to give ourselves permission to grieve. We need to give ourselves permission to acknowledge our own pain, and yes, to even sit in it and wallow in it and acquaint ourselves with it.
Anger can be part of healing, but not if we suppress it. If that makes us victims, so be it.

Sam Dylan Finch – 4 Important lessons mental health recovery has taught me

Creating inspiration porn out of survivors’ stories perpetuates rape culture instead of fighting against it.

Why we need to stop tokenizing survivors

Where’s your paddle?

Floating up Shits Creek with the rest of it all.

Run Like Hell. I ran, it doesn’t work and I know that.

I’m not running away and I know I’m not running towards anything. This time I’ll just run because I want to. I like the motion. 
The Lost Kids; taking the world by storm and making threats but not following through on the promises we make to ourselves.
Failed communication, lost dreams, faded and patched hope. Internal wars that never cease their battles. It’s never quiet or easy or calm.

Smoking cigarettes to cure idle hands that need to hold on to something, but nothing is permanent. Nothing is solid or substantial enough to help us touch down.

Whiskey nights in a northern place where the season makes it so the sun never goes down. Perpetual day light with no darkness to hide from ourselves.

Opioid overdoses in mini vans at camp grounds. The lost drive to thrive and just an instinct to survive. Lost drive, broken power steering. Find the light in a place so saturated with sun that all you can see is the darkness. 

I sit in the emergency intake and try to explain why the narcan kit needs a refil. Why no one called 911. Why it’s ok, we just need more narcan. 

Broken hearts, broken dreams, broken bones, broken minds. All I can do is sit and wait and hope and help. Fight for my own part in all of this, fight for tomorrow and hold hands.

Try to understand the stories, the heart ache and trauma. Why it’s ok to cry or shake or just feel nothing. 

I need more but I don’t know what it is or how to look for it. Aimless and lost in the chaos of things and feelings.

I wonder if I’m missing something that was just never there to begin with. I wonder if my feelings are a result of some ideal or a learned belief that there is something more out there for all of us. A deeper meaning, a meaningful end game. I wonder how heart ache might be telling me lies and if I’m even believing them. Does it fucking matter anyway? I’m sick of missing people. Sick of feeling so much and so stuck with the dialogue in my own mind. But there’s no giving up or giving in. There is no choice but to keep fighting. Keep living, loving, looking.

I took a step back and called my brother. He didn’t have much to say, but he’s living right and I love him.

Run like hell

“It’s a slow decline into nothingness.”

That’s what I heard, anyway. Those words that vibrate beneith the thin disguise of hope and dream and make believe. Where sometimes some thing is said, but it means another thing that’s totally different or a thing that’s the same but more or it could mean exactly what it is and less.

The fragile state of Make Believe.

A friend who I want to love said: “The city has its talons, gripping tighter, bleeding us out. Dont play dead, break the hold. Run like hell”

And “don’t stop”

No one said “don’t take my advice”. So that’s what I’ll do. Not listen. Make shitty choices. Crash.

The city is gripping me by the throat. Half it’s bite on my scruff saying “you’re safe here, I’ll carry you home to total destroy.”

I’m thinking, what the fuck is home anyway? How do all you people do this shit every day of your lives? Because I don’t belong here, I never will. I can’t make myself fit.

We are wild animals in a farel world.
Sometimes being wild isn’t beautiful, but we are all capable of so much more.
We can be different for each other than what our fear pushes us towards and learn from the life we fight through.

One thing I’ve been thinking lately, over and over, is “You don’t need to burn every bridge you cross”
Thinking this for my self, but also for you.

We build these bridges together and cross them.
We get to make our own stories in this sick world of make-real.

I have nothing but time until I die to try and become a better person. To truly learn to love and care for the people I choose to have in my life in whatever capacity and way they fit.
I want to make the space to do that.
I’m trying.

 

Dear (Friend),

We’re getting old and I miss you.
Sometimes I miss the days where we were curled up in the fetal position, orbiting each other and everyone else like wounded satellites. Too broken to fix anything, too beat to care.
We’d roll around on dirty floors, in dirty jam rooms. Nap on thread bare couches with tears resting in our eyes. We’d walk the cold streets of a city I can’t name in our shredded shoes, our big hearts resting in our throats and trying to strangle us. We’d search, aimlessly trying to figure out how to breath again. How to breath deeply and with meaning.
How to breath through the cigarette smoke and smell of dirty laundry. The dumpstered jokes and food bank treats rotting next to the compost bin. How to breath through the oppressive smell of our sweaty dreams shouted out like threats all over this city. Threats used to cover up the fact that we’re cowards as we roll another smoke, roll another bitter joke over our lips, roll another piece of paper into a ball. Another piece of paper containing a failed letter to another failed friend. Again and again, because practice makes perfect. Ball your fists, balls of paper. One better than the other to throw around, one better than the other to fail at I suppose…

Dear (Friend),
We’re getting old and I miss you.
Sometimes I miss the nights were we spread our arms wide and yelled out at the dark. Our thoughts falling all around us into ideas and dreams as we believed in anything we could wrap our minds around. Our hearts exploding with hopes and desires and caring.
Sometimes I miss the idea that things could be that way again, before you were broken, before you broke trust with me…

Dear (Friend),
We’re getting old and I miss you.
Nothing will ever be the same again, and for that I am grateful.

Dear (Friend),
We’re getting old and I miss you.
Please stay strong. (I’m trying to forgive you)

We’ve built bridges to reach our dreams.
Once we cross them,
I plan to stop and watch as they burn.
I want to be sure I’m on the right side of everything.

I want to be sure that I don’t have anything else to live but my dreams.
So I can move forward knowing that I don’t ever have to go back
to how things shouldn’t have been.

I don’t ever have to go back
to living something closer to a lie.

So I can warm my hands on the flames,
and move forward knowing nothing ever has to be the same again.

 

Emo night, no cover.

Sometimes I get hit by a wave of sadness so hard and fast that it feels like a sucker punch to the gut. Taking the wind right out of me and leaving me disoriented and in pain.

There’s so many people I’ve loved over the years, and now I’m sitting here in my room at 2:44 on a Friday morning wondering how so many friendships just faded or went on hiatus.
How so many people can fail each other. How much someone (me) can miss because shit went sour and then went even worse.
I’ve made mention to leaving, to change, to running away.
I was so fucking broken when I left that I didn’t know what else to do. I spent three years drunk as fuck and shit got bad. Sometimes it was better but worse than before. Other times it was just worse.

I came out of those years yet again wondering what the fuck happened. Again destroyed even further with hurt, pain, lies, abuse.
I came out of those years with a fucking drinking problem and a concussion.
Some more scars and chips to put of the list of shit I’ll never, ever fucking let happen again.

What ever friendships I had saved from before those years really struggled to survive them. I lost more friends because I was broken and becoming more broken. I was hurt and becoming more hurt. I was losing myself and for all I fucking cared I was about to drowned in the bottom of a 20 pack of Caribou green and set my self on fire with a pack of Canadian Classics. Preferably every night. Or die trying. Hopefully.

And now I’m sober. I’m trying to give up smoking.

I’m starting to see folks around that I haven’t seen in years. It looks like a lot of people are moving out this way. People I used to be closer to and miss dearly. I’m terrified to open back up again, I’m not sure if anything has actually changed. Some of them still hold parts of me. Some of them I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive. Most of them probably don’t give a fuck about me anyway.

I miss so many people so fucking much, but maybe it’s better off like this?

Tonight is a night of sadness and loneliness.
Of remembering the ones that are lost to me, but not gone.
Tonight is for missing you and wishing I could erase the hurt.
Wishing you would come and hold my hand like you used to.

Tonight is for mourning parts of myself that are better dead.
For believing in my ability to find strength even in my darkest times.
Tonight is for honouring the feelings I have and respecting that I can miss people who hurt me deeply in the past.

H-NYE2U

December 31st, 2016
11:58 pm:
Peter farts.

 

January 1st, 2017
12:00am:
Peter says, in a false dismal sounding voice “happy new year” from the couch.
The stench of 2016 still lingers in the air.
I hope 2017 smells better soon.

Peter and I go for our last smokes of the 21st century.
Peter says “Tonight was perfect, exactly what I wanted for New Years Eve.”

I point out to him that he started 2017 by smelling a fart from last year.

 

January 1st, 2017
12:16am:
I’m sitting in my room laughing so hard I feel like I might have an asthma attack.
This year is gonna be hilarious.
It’s time for bed.

WatlerFest, 2016

Evan’s dad gets annoyed, in the least annoyed way, that no one wants food yet. It’s 8am and everyone is just waking up. I’ve been up since 6, ate my bananas, went for a hike in the dark.

“These people don’t eat much, do they?” He mumbles to himself while making a second pan of bacon to go with the yoghurt and fruit he’s already prepared. It all sits on the table, untouched, while the rest of his family, and the two weird kids his son brought, drink their morning coffee or tea.

Later in the afternoon Cam, Evan and I end up at the corner store. Cam is buying a bar of local made soap.

I say to myself “Now that Eric is dead, I don’t have anymore soap”

“What an asshole” Evan replies.

By late afternoon Cam is surfing. Evan and I are walking the beach and scaling a rockface ocean cliff to a view point. I watched Evan almost get swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Making risky choices so he could climb a rock formation.

He says the fear is part of what made it worth it. I think to myself that I’d be happier knowing that’s how he died as aposed to being another statistic to the fentanyl epidemic. A sad terror that’s hit the west coast and ripped through the hearts and homes of so many people.

A lot of people are dying right now.

Evan threw fire crackles at Cam (not crackers) while he was trying to change out of his wetsuit.

We talked of setting up a hot chocolate stand and selling it for $4 a cup to undercut the foreign traveller trying to raise money for a ticket to Maui who was parked next to us.

We left an anarchy symbol behind in the parking lot. It was drawn in siracha sauce.

We left unlit firecrackles for people to find, tucked away in a coffee shop.

I’m so tired and so physically exhausted from so many things and from working for 16 (? I don’t know) days straight that I don’t know how to interact. I’m happy to be with friends. Im afraid of dying boring. I’m not sure how to find new soap, it feels wrong to not have Eric’s.

There’s a lot more happening inside of me, but I don’t know the words. I’m afraid I’m refusing to feel things. I haven’t been talking so much lately, I’m in an introverted head space. Maybe I just don’t know who to share with.  Maybe I just don’t need to. Or maybe I just worked too much for my little body and big mind. Maybe I just need to sleep it off.

I won’t die boring, Keith says that’s impossible for someone like me.

We all leave each morning
to labor on the earth’s field.
No one does not lift a great pack.
-Rummi