mindfuck

I woke up this morning, and the world was black. I felt suspended in a place between reality and falsehood.

I remember a time in 2010 or 2011. I was on an extended stretch of third shift, and suffering from the effects of sleep deprivation. That summer was particularly swampy, and the humidity hung in the air like a foul third dimension. I woke up around 10 pm, buried under a quilt, and I was already damp. But, typical of my body's anarchy against shift work, I was chilled despite the looming heat. The room was black, the house was silent. I was alone.  For a brief minute, I could not discern between up and down. I was floating in a black pool.
I felt suspended in a place between reality and falsehood.

"It is real, or is it not real?" I ask myself this every ten minutes these days. When it gets too complicated, I try to count the things that I know are real: the latches on gates in the Hoof Palace, the number of surgery mats in the Casting Room, the recognizable haunches of my cycling mates.

Last night, I had the horrifying realization that Cognitive Progressive Therapy is going to be a total mindfuck. I knew this last week, when I was choking on my words to my therapist. I knew this while doing my exercises. I knew this while doing my homework. But this realization hits me again and again. I was like a caged animal - one shitty thing said to me by a close friend, and my flanks were to the corner, my ears were flat against my neck, my teeth bared & hackles raised. I lashed out. There was no reason for that reaction. But there I was, hateful beast that I am.

I once had an ex-boyfriend who told me that I was impossible to love. I see now how that is true.

Is it real, or is it not real?

People say things, people whom I trust to pull me in a peloton of twenty people, people who I trust to see me naked & vulnerable, and I don't believe what they say to me. They say things that sound like lies. They say things that sound like platitudes. I don't believe in myself, how can they believe in me? It's never enough.

The weight of the crash hangs over my left shoulder like a heavy, damp curtain. I can't see my periphery. Sometimes that curtain hangs back farther, and other times, it presses against my scapula in the most oppressive manner. Other times, it almost become translucent, like a murky veil. Always, it is there, like ghosts. That's what I say to people, anyway. When I withdraw into myself, or my eyes go dark about the rims and I'm staring into the abyss. "I'm seeing ghosts."

In August, I felt like the carcass of an animal, and everything & everyone was picking the flesh off my bones.

Is it real, or is it not real?

I do not believe in ghosts, I guess. Spirits, demons, the devil. When I was younger, certainly. But the pragmatism of my mother & the Brethren Church did not really leave room for fantastical, otherworldly speculation. Campy Halloween ghasts. I met Sonya at the Found. and she considered perhaps there is a component we cannot see, that there is spiritual warfare around us. I ultimately concluded, as I have settled into the post-religious Apathiest faith in which I dwell now, that the only demons are the ones in our heads. The only devil is the one in which our baser needs listen to. The ghosts are the memories of the past.

I said, "I feel like I am being split in two. I have lost my mind. I feel like I am crazy. I feel like I am possessed. Is it real, or is it not real?"