1:20 AM

This is not a poem. This is simply a stream of consciousness with line breaks.
I do not pretend it’s a poem.
I am simply trying not to think.
To think, means giving voice to the thoughts clamoring to beat me to a pulp
The typical, “You’re not good enough,”
“You worthless
piece of
s h i t”
Such a cliche in every way, and yet what can I say?
It’s the daily the soundtrack to my brain
Alongside, “I want to die.”

So instead I try not to think.
I keep busy.
Busy, though rarely productive.
I try not to think about that too.
I make jokes about wanting to be in a coma so I can finally take a break
People laugh awkwardly, making a face like they’re not sure if they should
But what else is there to do but joke, and try to laugh, and not think about wanting to die

Not think about how tired I am.
Of life.
Of living.
Of living like this specifically, with nary a clue how to change it.
Blocked every time I try.
By the universe, by people, by weird bureaucracies, by my own guilt for wanting something different
Something more than this.

There has to be more than this.

I’m trying not to think about it.

Anxiety Attack

It’s so soft and sad,
this quiet inner crumpling
Shaky foundations crumbling
Pent up emotion stumbling
flowing upward, outward,
heart thumping

Breaths turn into gasps
Gasps turn into sobs
Eyes burn with tears
Throat rasps
Time stops
Head pounding with dark thoughts
Stomach turning itself in knots
No room for logic when it’s fear
calling all of the shots

Rot
in the pillars holding everything up
Barely keeping things together
and it all just feels too much
Body and soul a giant bruise
that aches at the barest touch

Such
a shame
Pain, with no foreseeable end
Falling apart over and over
struggling to mend
what little can be patched up
until it happens yet again.

Intentional Insomniac

I have become scared to sleep.

Not because of night terrors, or nightmares.

Not because of the anxiety dreams that sometimes (though with increasing consistency, now) plague my nights.

But because sleep has begun to feel like lost time. Wasted time. Any moment where I am not at work is bliss, and to sleep feels like losing out on those precious extra minutes or hours of freedom. It gives me anxiety now, having to go to bed, and my hours have become more and more unreasonable.

I do get tired. My eyes burn, my bags growing darker and heavier, my face more gaunt and haunted. And when I finally do give in to sleep (provided the anxiety dreams don’t return and I’m not waking every couple of hours in a heart-racing panic), I am loathe to wake up because it means facing yet another day.

The weekends, too, are a struggle— a fight between my need to finally sleep in and my fear of wasting the hours that I could be spending on literally anything else that is not work. YouTube, Netflix, writing, cleaning, reading, learning… The possibilities are endless and yet by 8pm, the anxiety starts to set in, even though these days I’m not asleep till past 4am, forcing myself awake by 1 at the latest on weekends (and only ten minutes before, or up to an hour after I am due to sign on to work on weekdays. Such dedication). How is it so late already? How do I only have a few hours left?

It unsettles me, this newfound fear. Logically, I know this is not a healthy way to live, to feel. I know how important sleep is, and how by shirking it I’m only exacerbating my already tenuous hold on mental and emotional stability. But I can’t help it. To sleep is to lose free time, and I need every second of it I can get if I am to survive each work week, crawling along day by day, hour by hour.

I resent what my job has turned me into.

I resent being trapped in it.

But I am still scared to sleep.

And I don’t know what to do.