Perhaps the one thing I would like you to know is how mentally busy all of this makes me. How overburdened my thoughtspace is, with the compounding excess of things I should not need to consider, crowding in over the top of all the ordinary things I need to think about. It is so taxing to have such essential facets of my life relentlessly unresolved. And not just my thoughts, either, but my feelings too. My feelings are woefully entangled in these great unsolved mysteries. And the heart wants what it wants, all the feeble desires of a thwarted life, all the tantalising promises of improved circumstances, and the brutal counterpoint of the real difficulties I encounter day by day. (This is not what I thought it would be, any of it). And there’s a workload to all of this, a cost of thought and strategising and difficult decisions that never seems to lessen, no matter what footholds I manage to clamber onto, even briefly. And with it, self doubt. The grind of not-knowing, of having no certainty, of constantly guessing at the meaning of so many things, of reaching for confirmation and finding only speculation, always. And it would be one thing if it only concerned my own little bin-fire of incompletions and failures. But it goes further than that. It touches the lives of other people, and then rebounds back onto me with redoubled vigor. And I ache with the absence of people I value, people who may, for all I know, have decided I am too much. Too much confusion, too much crazy, too much effort. And even the having of this mental load adds to that, as if my right to clarity and communication and transparency of intention is somehow muddied by the process of daring to claim it, even in my own mind. “Stress” doesn’t adequately describe this overload. Neither does “burnt out” capture the depth of my weariness. I am tired. I am tired of the conscious load of always reaching for anything worth having, only to have it denied. I am tired of absence, and failure, and mixed fucking messages, and wanting. I am tired of acting like the unbearable burden of this on me is OK. That I am OK. I am tired of the constancy of having to question even the easiest of apparent facts just so I can find the shape of my own sanity in such a distorted mirror. I am tired of having my crazy wrung out of me like it’s its own commodity. And I am tired of the effort of believing you ever cared, most especially when that belief is still, even now, something I cling to. And I am exhausted by the mental load of knowing how utterly pathetic I am to have that need, as if there was anything different I could do about it. And even that is a burden: trying to understand what, if anything, I can do to change it. Because this overload, this constant hum of mental turmoil, is not my natural state. It is something I have acquired as a result of being confronted with the baffling inconsistencies of fractured cause-and-effect that now govern my life. It is a response within me to something outside my locus of control. (Or is it? Have I missed something obvious?). And it shouldn’t be such a grinding source of disempowerment. But if you knew, if you only knew, the fullness of the burden on my life, the delays and denials and disruptions and disappointments and disconnections, you might marvel at how unfathomable it is. And you might understand, in a way I cannot, how much of an effort this is to me to even comprehend it.
