Dammit. My neck's just been hell again lately and I keep getting headaches that ebb and flow and often feel like their just inches away from turning that corner into a full-blown migraine. Ugh. I hate it so much when my neck gets this way because there's just nothing I can do. I sleep and I wake up with it stiffer then it was. I try to crack it and it doesn't, it just makes that awful wet bone sliding noise (anyone who has problems like this with any part of their body which requires manually "popping" it back into place on a regular basis will know exactly what I mean). My Love rubs my neck to loosen it up and it hurts so bad to have him touch it, but I let him really beat it up and it feels better for like ten minutes, but then I go and sit back down and suddenly, there's not a single position I can sit in where I'm comfortable. It's just miserable and I hate it.

Not to mention, I'm all kinds of stressed out over the fact that Monday is looming closer. I just don't want to do this. I don't want to go work for this guy. Logically though, we just need the damned money and there's no "good" reason for me to pass up on it. (Besides needing time to pack and sift through way more stuff then we'll have time for even if I wasn't going to be stuck working all day. That and I know physically and mentally I'm just not ready to work full time for weeks at a time. It's just too damned much of a jump and I can't explain that to anyone who hasn't been on this side of the fence and hasn't gone through the depressive lows and the long, long time without schedule and restriction that a full-time job requires.) I think to myself that I should just grin and bear it, but then I also think that I'm not just willing to do anything for money. If I were, there's a lot of ways I could make quick cash in this world. I think to myself that I need to stick to my gut and that I need to stand up for what I don't feel right about and what I don't feel I can handle. But then I feel so selfish and worthless and like I can't even pull my own weight every now and then. It's just that I don't want to do it like this. I've planned and mentally prepared myself for a long time to get where I'm comfortable and even excited in a small way about my SLOW re-entry into the world. Where I can easily conceive of myself as doing three days a week or half-days or something smaller at a time. I can see it and it's a goal I know I can handle. But eight hour days, five days a week with the added stress of having one car and needing to get my Love to and from work before and after me, plus having to pack and move and deal with all of that on top of it, I just don't think I can do. I feel so stupid for not standing up for myself - why didn't I just tell him I could do it, but only part-time? Why didn't I stress that more? Why didn't I say that I just didn't want to commit to something that was more then I could handle? Now, if I back down or out I'll look the failure. Worse, I'll be the failure. And everyone will see me as failing by my own hand. They'll think I set myself up to fail and that I'm not willing to try. It's not that I'm not willing to try it's just that I have to know my own limitations. I don't need failures right now. Failures will only spiral me back down into a depression again. I need a slow and controlled return to working and schedule and situation. This is forcing someone who's forgotten how to swim (and who sometimes wishes she'd drown) into the deep end of a very cold and terrifying pool. I'm not ready for it and I feel like the walls are closing in and that I'm going to panic and try to breath underwater. The awful little part of me wants me to fail so it can stop trying. But I don't want to give into that part. So I panic that such a jump will just fulfill my worst fears and then I will have ended up giving it what it wants anyway.

I'm not ready for this!

How do you explain to someone this concept? How do you make someone understand the rising taste of overwhelming fear that's choking you? How do you explain it so they don't hate you. So they don't think that it's just an excuse or some desire to be lazy? I WANT to work my way back into the world. I'm just not ready to do it like this. I've mentally prepared myself for something so much smaller that I can't handle facing this mountain head-on. You don't start out swimming across the ocean, you start out swimming across your pool. I need smaller steps right now but I don't know how to do that and still make sure people understand. I don't want him to stop loving me because he thinks I'm not trying or that I want to be this way. I don't want him to resent me because he works and I don't. I don't want him to hate me because he thinks I'm chicken when it's really that I'm trying to re-learn living IN the world instead of watching it from outside for so very long. How do you explain this? How do you make them understand?

~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream at 12/4/2003 11:43:22 PM ~ ~