the voice in my head

Storytelling is healing. As we reveal ourselves in story, we become aware of the continuing core of our lives under the fragmented surface of our experience. We become aware of the multifaceted, multichaptered ' I ' who is the storyteller. We can trace out the paradoxical and even contradictory versions of ourselves that we create for different occasions, different audiences... Most important, as we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realize that what we understand and imagine about ourselves is a story. And when we know all this, we can use our stories to heal and make ourselves whole.
- Susan Wittig Albert

The past week has been kind of a blur, a haze of thoughts and crying and confusion and doubt. Without warning, my mind plunged me into this biased, self-deprecating look at things that have been and never were, things that I did and that I didn't do, things that I once thought and that I might have thought, things that hurt me and caused hurt.

It was sudden, and it hasn't let up. Even when I wake up, it feels like, for the few hours that I have been sleeping, my head has been itching to throw something new at me, something unexpected to jostle me out of bed and into a fit of exasperation.

And for what? Clearly just to hurt me. Suddenly I have found myself at the judgment table, and I am both the judge and defendant, and yet I cannot remember how I got here. The worst part is that despite my annoyingly amazing memory, I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm starting to make things up just to make myself look bad. . . in front of me.

Blessed with obsessive compulsions, it's not all that difficult for me to fall into this obviously useless spiral, but I can also very intelligently step back and look at the situation with a discerning, somewhat objective perspective - my mind is my worst, most feared enemy. It plays games and dances loud tangos so that I sit up when I thought I could finally lie down. It pinches and prods when I was about to relax. It makes me remember only because it knows I can distort what is actually there. It nudges me when all I want to be is left alone.

But the catch-22, the irritating dilemma, is that it is also my most trusted, closest friend. It inspires me when I'd rather not think. It reminds me to look when my eyes are closed. It pushes me into the spotlight when I'd rather sit in the corner. It shoves me when I get stuck in one place.

As a writer, I love it and hate it all at once, so much so that I kind of explode inside every now and again because the feelings, I'm sure, are mutual.

So for the past week, I have been trying to figure out what crazy stunt my head is trying to pull, and why it is trying to waltz its way into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps to wake me up to something I am not seeing or maybe to assure me that everything is OK despite how much I worry. Maybe it just got bored and is trying to prove to both of us that I am not quite right, and therefore should take everything I tell myself with a grain of salt. Even possibly, it's having fun and asking me to join along.

It's just that I don't think this is fun, being unable to walk through the mall without having a panic attack about that thing I said to that relative that day or that promise I didn't carry out or that look I exchanged or that time I didn't play in the snow.

What about the good things? They're there. I know they are because I remember everything, but I don't seem to dwell on them as much, even though I wish I could. I have found, as a writer and as Melissa, that I get my best ideas from all those things that aren't quite right during the day.

So maybe I'm asking to not have ideas anymore - to just be content with being something today and the same thing tomorrow and the next and so on. What worries me is that this week-long feeling of dreaded exasperation might come back, and I guess as a writer whose wheels are always frantically spinning, I shouldn't be surprised when just that happens.

On the plus side, I wrote the first chapter to an entirely new novel last night. I am about to start on the second one which, as per usual, is already... all in my head...

Damnit.