It says something about me, that the times in my life that I feel at the absolute height of who I am, is when I’m in all outward appearances to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown. I live for anxiety. There is an eerie calming of my mind in those times when my heart is thundering in my chest and my hands are shaking so fast I can barely keep hold anything. I can understand why adrenaline junkies exist, but I could never really be one. I’m too scared of a horrifying death.
I’m an emotional adrenaline junky. Bouncing from highs to lows is just part of riding that roller coaster, but, something about that moment when your skin is burning from the inside, and your legs are bouncing, it just makes me know that I’m ready to handle pretty much anything. I’m addicted to it.
Which is why I used to pop pills, over the counter diet and energy pills, to be specific. Popping a handful of pills could give me the same sensation. I kept it up for a couple of years, ignoring the fact that my blood pressure at one point got up to 214/128. Yeah, that’s like double where its supposed to be.
In February of 2006, I crashed. Hard.
I’m proud to say that I’m still clean. I haven’t taken a pill in four years. It wasn’t easy to keep going though. The last for years have been extremely difficult for me and full of a lot of heartache. Some of it I might write about eventually, some of it I’ll probably keep bottled up until well after the human-to-robot conversion has taken place and everyone I know now has been dead for more than a century.
But, that’s not the point of today’s #Reverb10:
December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors)
No, all of that is back story necessary to understand where I was at in my life when I had my moment. Sitting at my desk, reading a thread on a friends facebook that linked to an article on my other blog, I realized that there were actually people in this world that were going to harbor the same anger and spite for me that I bare for some other politically vocal Americans.
I refreshed regularly as I watched two otherwise intelligent people descend into what basically amounted to “No You’re a Dummy,” pretty much spitting on everything I try to stand for. That of course was after they had spent some time hurling fairly hateful insults to both my character and my writing.
So there I sat, staring at my computer, twisting into a ball on the inside. I quickly learned that trying to inject a moment of civility and dignity into the blatant ignorance only fueled the flames. I sent a private message to the friend who’s Facebook had been absconded by something like 95 pages of inane dribble and invented history, and apologized for apparently fueling the third grade equivalencies of Ed Schultz and Glenn Beck into a forest fire of insanity. It didn’t stop. I read comment after comment, the guilt growing with the useless feeling that slowly flooded me, and then, I snapped.
I wrote deleted and rewrote for hours. I didn’t want to let my anger get the best of me, and yet I didn’t want to continue to do nothing while the US fell deeper into the pile of shit that it was rapidly becoming. In the end, I had written this post. In hindsight I probably should have edited it a couple of more times, but in the end, I just wanted to say something.
After I published it, my friend once again linked it on her facebook. It was interesting to see the reactions to the two monkeys that had already followed their social programming once start to follow it again, then stop and realize I was calling them cowards. There’s a funny thing about cowards, they never want to stand alone, so the two of them united to complain that I would call them out.
That was the moment. You see, I had already learned that I could recreate the anxious, gut wrenching feeling by writing things too close for comfort, but this feeling was new. I felt, vindicated… accomplished. Mostly I felt right. It was the first time I’d ever felt better alive without feeling like I was going to explode. I just felt good.
I liked it.