it’s been two entire decades since my formal diagnosis and it just never gets any easier. every goddamn day i feel it inside me... this illness that lives in my brain alongside my innermost thoughts, making it so that i can’t even trust my own voice during moments of false lucidity.

and i just don’t know how the world expects me to keep on doing this, like this. i’m having such an overwhelming year that started out by getting 5150’d in january, and then snaked through all kinds of difficult moments. it was really tough for those first few months directly following my release from the psychiatric hospital, and i fell straight into the bottle to escape through sip after sip of that sweet, sweet alcoholic anesthesia.

but i finally managed to sober up after receiving a delayed onset PTSD diagnosis and started intensive treatment to help me regain control of my life again. i worked so hard this entire summer on my personal healing journey - i joined trauma survivor support groups, completed three months of emdr therapy to treat my PTSD, re-committed to consistent individual talk therapy, and i’m strictly medication compliant. i still need to put in more work on sleep hygiene as well as moving my body... but i am so fucking tired.

it’s exhausting and i’m lonely, my heart aches.

my family, my friends, my lovers... i’ve alienated so many people in my life who are important to me and my hard work isn’t making a single thing better or easier, seemingly. i can just see more clearly now the depth and breadth of how badly i have severely fucked up all of those relationships over the past twenty years and that’s getting harder and harder to look at. and while i’m intellectually aware that i’m in a position where i need to find comfort in my own skin — to validate myself and my own personal growth and progress — it sucks and i feel so discouraged sometimes.

i’m still sober (474 days cocaine free and 143 days alcohol free) and i’ll keep doing the work because i actually do see myself in the future. maybe for the first time in my life, ever, i honestly think that there is more than nothingness stretching out before me and everything feels so strange and unfamiliar.

i’m standing here and staring out into the void, but instead of it beckoning as it always does, it’s still... and staring right back at me.