The Vulnerable Banshee

Have you ever been so overwhelmed by something, you have physical reactions to them?

Not just crying like a banshee, or shaking really (though yes that's an unfortunate side effect), but sleeplessness, loss of appetite, vomiting.

You can't concentrate on anything else. You're completely enveloped in your current state of mind. Your body somehow paying the price for a mind overactive.

How do you fix things? How do you take back your happy-ever-after?

You long to turn back time, not in years necessarily, but months, weeks, even days. Try to remember the last semblance of sanity you had. Think of how things can go from so good to so bad in a matter of cumulative hours.

The loss almost death like in nature, life ceasing to exist as you knew it. Stomach turning, dry heaving and completely devastating.

How did you get here? How quickly the tides turned. And now you're drowning. Searching the shore for that lifeguard that once saved you, once pulled you to where you had never been happier, you were safe.

Now they stand on the shore and watch you go under. Allowing this overwhelming anxiety to take you over, pulling you under until you are no longer visible from the surface.

You long for that life raft of callousness you had relied on for so long, the one that kept you afloat. Now nowhere to be found.

Confused and hurt and twisted up inside. No one to turn to, nowhere to go. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

Vulnerable and battered.

Wanting to take it all back, put it back in order. Somehow.

At a loss of what to do.

The Root of All Evil

They have said over the span of time that many things have been considered the "Root of all evil". Money, greed, Facebook.

I think I figured out the real root. The deep down nitty gritty. Emotions.

Those superfluous feelings that go from every end of the spectrum. Too happy, too sad, too angry, too passive. It's either too much or too little. Not enough or in such abundance you find yourself unable to breathe.

I used to be impervious to them all. I had anger down to a science. Cynicism, sarcasm. I was the queen. The Ice Queen.

Then I melted. Let myself feel other emotions. I found joy, I found happiness, I found love. I succumbed to all I had held myself back from for so long.

Engulfed in the black hole of them all.

I drank the fucking Kool-aid. I felt positive for the first time in maybe 10 years, if not ever. I looked forward to things, pictured a future.

What the fuck was I thinking?

Emotions can cause more than just positive things. They can incur pain and jealousy. They can cause even the most sane individual to battle bouts of seemingly unprovoked mania. Fear that even the most miniscule thing would take away all that you had worked so hard to let in. To shit in your Cheerios.

You turn into your own worst nightmare. At first you're praised for this new-found mushiness. It's cute, it's unlike you. A novelty really, no different than some seedy cliché' picked up at a random gift shop on jaunt out of town.

But that kitchiness wears off. It becomes something else, an annoyance, a burden. And you're left confused by being told what you thought was wanted, to now being shunned by what they have made you.

And little things, they apparently start to add up. Things you thought were ok. Things you have seemingly worked through, but were just laying in wait under the surface, festering like a boil ready to explode.

And when it does, it hurts. It hurts in a way you never thought possible. You're entire life like a planet shifted off its axis, orbiting out of control. The one thing you had left, to look forward to, that glimpse of future you never saw before that moment. Gone in the blink of an eye.

All those years having laid dormant, fear of changing what you knew. Afraid of just what is happening. Promised that it wouldn't. That all would be perfect and just and good, and mostly it was.

So you thought.

But you apparently looking through a funhouse mirror while all around you peered at crystal glass. You, lost in your own delusion, in your hopefulness and your amorous state.

Thinking of all the things you've endured in your life, that things finally made sense, that they would finally be ok.

And it’s all for not. Those feelings you held back for so long, you're left drowning in them. Lost in a sea of everything all at once, like a tempest beating you over and over, pulling you under with currents sometimes too strong to keep your head above the water.

And you long for that callousness back. That bitter wall that once protected you. Kept you safe from hurt, from all these feelings you don't know how to handle.

And all you're left with is an empty shell. A vision of your former self, lost in these emotions. In unchartered territory, no map, no GPS. Seemingly no way out.

Confused and twisted.

Definitely the root of all evil.