Feeling That Familiar Burn

I'm not sure if it's being in this house again, but I'm feeling that familiar manic burn again. It's that pressing need, the need to do something, to get up and get gone, change my entire life into something else. It's the presence in my stomach that screams that I need to do something--anything--to make it shut up. It's the compulsion to destroy something to make sure that I'm alone again because that just makes things easier.

I guess I fooled myself into thinking that this feeling would change once I started school. I thought perhaps I'd get busy, and my life would just fall into place. That burning feeling prompting me to get off my ass and do something would be shut up by the fact that I was off my ass and doing something. It turns out that I may have been wrong. Of course, this means that my inner panic level is rising rapidly, like the water when the tide is high.

I'm trying to be more and more honest with myself. I've been working pretty hard at trying to give myself time to be truthful with myself, time to look in the mirror and decide what my opinion is of what I see. Yet, it feels like even my harshest truths--about myself, about others, about what I want or need or what I'll do--are lies. My best faces are exercises in fabulous manipulation. More and more, I just seem to feel like a huge screw-up. This is not the woman that I hoped to be. This is not what I wanted for myself. All my attempts to cure it, all my attempted triage to fix the problem doesn't seem to be helping at all.

I'm a little bit afraid. What if this feeling never goes away? What if I always feel like there's something else that I'm supposed to be doing? What if I always have that burning? What if I have to be on meds again? What if the panic attacks come back?

If I'm being truly honest with myself, I probably should be on meds again--nothing too serious, just a mood stabilizer, something to take the edge off the panic. At the very least, it might help to assuage some of the general freaking out I'm doing. I always hated being on medication, though. It makes me feel like I'm depending on everything else to fix me. But then, am I not the girl that keeps saying that I just want someone to hand me the answers, to give me a life solution? Maybe I do depend on everything else to fix me.

The one constant in my life is that I'm really amazing at messing things up. I'm also really good at allowing people to think that I've got it all together, that I'm really fine. Faking it is a specialty of mine. Will I ever be real? Will I ever be really, truly honest? Am I even capable of that? How do I find my place in the world? How do I stop breaking everything?

I used to have this same feeling in high school. It was always the most terrible thing, keeping me awake at night, keeping me full of fear. What an interesting irony when juxtaposed against my fearless, ballsy image! In high school, I just had to wait it out. I had to let it pass, find myself. The older I get, the further from my self I seem to be and the harder it gets for me to get back there. I've been down in here before. I need to fight my way out again. I need alone time. I need to start at square one. I need to keep a journal, to push myself a little further than before. I need to get it right this time.

I just need to breathe. Step one is just learning how to breathe again.