I am so tired just trying to survive… I don't have the energy to live

When I was a child I just focused on surviving.
Now I am sick of working so hard to survive…when do I get to just live?
Not relive… live.

How do you find the balance? How do you let yourself feel and not become overwhelmed? How do you listen to the hurt ones and not blame them, feel too much, and become incapacitated by them?

Both Sunday and Monday nights I found myself so overwhelmed with the pain that I was lying on the bathroom floor in a full-fledged panic attack; alternating between shaking uncontrollably and hitting my head on the floor, to pacing the floor considering ways to **** myself. In that moment, anything, including death, is better than living like that night after night. Major crazybrain freak outs both nights!

I feel so far away from myself. Each morning, after a night of dissociation fear and destruction, I try to put myself back together again. But each time I break apart, it gets harder and harder to fit the pieces back together again. Somewhere in the midst of these nightmares I lost my soul. I am not connected to this soulless body… it is merely a carrier for my traumatized brain. I feel tangled inside a mind I cannot escape.

Every night so many voices, so much confusion. His face before me, his hands on my body, his breath breathing on my neck. She takes a step back to avoid contact with him. She cries out. He advances toward her. She takes another step back, retreats further into the dark abyss waiting for another to help with the pain. Hopeless. She reaches out faintly while being overtaken by the memories boiling over. Step back! Get back! Step back! Get away! Over and over, night after night. Shame. The unspoken pain and shame.  What happens when it truly becomes so overwhelming that it does **** me?

I know you think,
you're drowning,
But I came to tell you,
Its only a puddle.
Stand up,
You're body needs better,
And your brain needs the oxygen.
Breathe....
Rise...
Weather the storm.

Sadness lives to hollow the heart
Its pleasure is our pain
It abides in darkness and fear
It lives for weakness to gain.
Burying itself within our minds
Trying to steal our dreams
Desiring one tear to fall
Knowing it shall succeed.
Sadness is but a figment
That of which we can control
If we refuse to get lost within it
It cannot deprive our souls.
Our strength and our wisdom
Keeps us standing tall
As long as we fight sadness
We are saved from it all.

Seven ruler-straight
horizontal lines
Two solidly thicker
vertical lines connect
those to the
palm of my hand
And one in the shape
of a hot, bent, metal stick
almost hiding in my
arm's crease.
They look so soft now
but I remember when
each one of them was
ragged and ******
and I was crying out
for someone to help me.
I never left without my sweatshirt,
I tried to blame it on the cat
because I couldn't explain to anybody
my reasons for harming myself,
you can't just
describe your demons
that easily.

These scars are a map,
a storybook on my body
of the time I needed so badly
for somebody to hold me.
When nobody came with a rag
to soak up the blood I was
trying to get out of me
I realized that
I was either going to have to
learn to love myself
or let myself die right there.

I am happy to have these scars
for they mean that I chose the former,
escaped that dismal ending
I had chosen for myself.
They prove to me
that if I can come from the edge of death
to the person I am today
there's no reason
that I can't do anything else.