Make it or break it time

It’s late, the house is quiet. These late nights and early mornings are my favourite time to write, when the rest of the world is sleeping, and in the silence I can hear my thoughts clearly. It’s been a long week, a week of highs and low, and more lows. The hopelessness seems to have settled in to stay a while. I wake in the morning, after the hour or two’s sleep I manage to snatch if I’m lucky and feel it pressing down on me again. It’s there as I make my coffee, when I read the kids stories, tidy up, make their dinner, brush teeth, do school work. A deep ache inside. I spend the days trying to ignore it, to push it down and plaster on a smile. Get on with life, as it won’t stop and wait for me.

I’m floundering, not sure if I’m swimming anymore, or even treading water. I’ve reached a point of exhaustion, when months of self-neglect have weakened me. Tired of being tired, and tired of feeling like this. Knowing that it’s only me who has the power to pull myself back up again, yet seemingly to exhausted to do what needs to be done.

Longing to run away, hide from the world and not be honest and truthful. Tuesday night I tried to drown the negative thoughts in my head, forgetting that they at least know how to swim. Drinking away your sorrows never really solves anything, just leaves you with a pounding head and a bucket load of regrets the next day.

Writing helps – putting down my thoughts and fears and truths and sending them out into the world is my version of therapy. Allowing me space to process what I’m thinking and feeling, somehow what I can’t put into words in my head, I can on paper. I watched a movie with one of my girls the other night, a real-life tale of a gymnast who defeated all the odds… something she said about it being “make it or break it” time struck home. I may not be working to make the Olympics, but I’m working to make my life.

This is my make it or break it time. Either I figure out a way through or I’ll be stuck forever, and forever might not be such a long time after all. My body is exhausted, run down, and crying out for some love. Crying out for me to be its friend instead of its enemy. When every waking moment is taken over by your thoughts, and whether you’re going to eat or not, it gets hard to function. Hard to push through and actually live.

I’ve been lost for words, unable to put my fingers to the keypad the last few days. Or maybe it’s because I don’t want to type out the words and admit they are true. That it’s now or never. I can either B E G I N, leave behind the old ways, and make a new path, or I give in. because in all honesty, I know that I cannot do this anymore.

I’m out of fight at the time when I need the fight the most. For every step I take forwards, I take five back. Going around in circles, unable to just let go.

I’ve been pulling in, seeking solitude, avoiding social media, hiding away from the world, yet at the same time knowing it’s the worst thing for me. I need to fill my days with company and activity. Speak my truths, hold myself accountable.

It’s like that plaster, that’s held a wound together for so long, that really it’s no longer needed, but you can’t quite make yourself pull it off. For you know it’s going to hurt to rip it off – only for a short while, but hurt none the less. So you leave it, let it fester, but it’s all you can think about.

This is the last plaster that’s been holding me together all these months. And I’m stalling in ripping it off, for it’s been my control mechanism for so long, the thought of letting go and surrendering control is terrifying. And yet it’s time. To let go, to begin, to surrender and lose control. To take the messy, the hurt, the hard, the fear and turn it into something magical.

I didn’t come this far, to only come this far