Post Travel 'Blues'

Instead of pacing up and down my parents' impossibly large kitchen, aimlessly searching for gluten free junk food which I know does not exist in this bizarre organic paradise, and stumbling across one small square of dark chocolate which fails to satisfy the strong desire I have to eat everything...

I thought I'd write about what's going on in my head.

I don't know how I've gone from not wanting to be on medication to "OH GOD WHO CAN I SPEAK TO ABOUT INCREASING THE DOSE? PUT ME ON FIVE TIMES THE AMOUNT I'M ON OR JUST SEDATE ME BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE" because suddenly everything seemed a lot worse.

How do I even begin to speak about what's going on in my mind right now?

As I was pacing there were a million thoughts in my head, but where did they all go?

Before that, when I was searching through the saddest songs on my Spotify, the misery was endless... Yet now it's quiet.

I guess the anxious girl who lives in my head is shy when her ballsy counterpart brings out her laptop and tries to call her out on her shit.

Nevertheless, I'll try to recall where she ended up, because once I get her started again it'll be difficult to get her to stop.

Returning from a trip abroad is always hard and the three weeks since I've landed haven't been easy.  They weren't as instantly painful as I'd expected, but jet lag and Netflix are sneaky distractions and little by little the pain creeped further in and then the boredom became overwhelming and suddenly I'm here.

I'm three weeks deep in Somerset and I can't understand where the time has gone or how or what I've been doing for the past few weeks because I feel as though I have no memory of them and why haven't I done anything useful because I'm sure there are a hundred thousand things I could've been doing.

Now it's nearly 1am on a Monday morning and I'm lying awake in pain... Physical this time, but physical pain is a huge emotional trigger for me and I guess that's why everything else has hit me so hard tonight.

My back has been a low-key problem for almost ten years now... Goddamn guys, like I'm twenty three and last weekend when I was visiting my Gran and she was describing the kind of pain she was in prior to a hip replacement, I could relate to everything she was saying.  I mean it's nice to be able to connect with your grandparents, but not like this!

Anyway, I don't know what happened recently, probably a combination of long haul flights, camping on really hard ground, carrying boys up stairs, deadlifting my friends while drunk, awkward shower sex and not being able to go to the gym regularly and I managed to mess it up and trap a nerve again.

I have been in a lot of pain this week and unlike emotional turmoil, I can only suppress how painful it is for a matter of days before I snap and now I'm just mad because how am I supposed to live a normal life when I'm constantly in pain or sick or tired or depressed?  It just feels as though when it's not one, it's another and I hardly get a break just to be a twenty three year old and be carefree.

That's when I broke down, because it's just so hard sometimes.  It's so hard when I'm lying awake at night, because it's too uncomfortable to sleep and I don't want to watch Netflix and I can't concentrate on reading and I've worked out that I've spent the majority of the last nine years of my life in pain.  I barely remember the first nine years of my life and you know what I was doing most of the five years in between? Puberty.  So I HIGHLY doubt that was a great time in my life either... I heard it got better after school, my life got progressively worse.

I often wonder if I'll ever live a life where I don't feel pain so often.  It's weird to think so many of my friends don't even have to consider it, but I genuinely just don't even remember a life where I'm not in some aspect or another, whether it be to a low or a high degree, suffering.

I wonder if I will ever recover to the point where I get to be 'normal' again, where I'm not constantly plagued by those four fucking months I spent in hospital when I was sixteen years old.

I guess we'll see.