Day 116: Somebody Slap Me, I'm Hysterical!

The hysterical crying comes in short bursts. Sometimes it’s 30 seconds, sometimes two minutes, but it rarely lasts as long as three. I say hysterical because the weeping isn’t motivated by sadness alone, it is a combination of grief, anxiety, disbelief and terror. It comes on quickly and is just as quickly tamped down, beaten back with a deep breath and moment of rational thinking.

This is the phase I am now in I suppose. There is nothing to be done but accept it and deal with the ramifications as best I can. Mistakes, like death, have stages. I went through denial, ignoring, self-righteousness, acceptance and now I am in panic mode. Panic because I am self-aware and awareness is a trap. You need it to survive, but its very existence dictates that you fully feel and acknowledge your own mistakes. I killed the best thing in my life once and now I struggle with that knowledge even as I strive to be a better person and rebuild my happiness.

True, you can’t ever have something be the same once it’s gone, but maybe in the resurrection you find that it can be better. This is what my conscious mind hopes for. I can rebuild it, make it better, faster, stronger. My life is now the Six Million Dollar Man project. Positive thinking does not come naturally for me. I am what I refer to as a cynical idealist, meaning that I live in two extremes. On one hand I see things at their worst and very often expect the worst so that I can avoid disappointment. On the other, I choose to ignore the more rational outlook or even optimistic one and go straight to idealism. In my perfect world, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter mate and their spawn grows at an excelled rate, becomes a liberal Democrat and crushes the spirit of the “Coul-baughs” spurring them to join a Buddhist temple and take a vow of silence for the rest of their lives. So no, I can do utopia, but I’m not great at the act of positive thinking.

These days, that is exactly what I am trying to rectify, but the hysterical crying sometimes juts forth, breaking the surface of my determined positivity and casting a panicky, breathless, sob filled few minutes on me. There is no prediction for when this happens and it does not seem to matter if I am in public or at home alone. One minute, I’m eating my homemade vegan, gluten-free apple crisp sweetened only with organic agave nectar and the next I’m having difficulty catching my breath from the sheer force of the terror-filled grief that overwhelms me.

I often wonder if others have these moments as well? Does your past haunt you? Do your recent choices cause you not just doubt, but panic? Do the tears interrupt an afternoon of football? Perhaps the depth of my sadness is so great that my mind and emotional well-being recognize my inability to deal with it all at once. These little breaks of composure are the incremental processing of my pain, sadness and fear. I do not wish any of this on others, but I hope I’m not the only one. It would be nice to know that others have doubts and fears that come back to bite them in the ass now and again too.