Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Shatter Me

I figured it out.

You know how a windshield for a car is made? It's a sheet of glass sandwiched between two pieces of very strong plastic. If a rock hits your windshield while you're going 80 mph, even if it punches through, the plastic will hold the shattered glass in place until you get it replaced. (Which you had better do soon if the rock actually made it through the windshield rather than just shattering the glass.)

This keeps the glass from flying inward, in deadly shards, at you. It keeps you safe.

But no matter what you do, you can't fix the glass afterwards. You have to replace it. If you keep driving with it (say it's only a star-pattern crack in the glass) the glass will continue to break. Worse, it'll wear at the plastic from the inside, scrape scrape scrape.

People aren't windshields. They're supposed to heal.

I don't know how.

Pippin's death shattered me. All through and through. But the "plastic" kept me looking mostly intact. I mean, people could tell I was hurting, but nobody could see just how bad the damage was. Nobody understood that only a thin shell kept me together.

Since then things just kept getting worse. Daddy had a seizure. Scary, terrifying, to see him in the hospital afterwards, unable to remember from moment to moment, and certainly not the strong, capable, emotion-rock of my life he had been.

One of my uncles died, rather unexpectedly. I really liked him, too. He was one of the ones that was "friends" with me (if you can call us friends when we didn't see each other for years at a time).

My company decides to sell my part of it to someone else. Now we're in the middle of the transition to the other company and everything's changing and nobody's communicating. (We found out the hard way that the new badges will only let you in the door during a certain time period around your "schedule." Luckily it wasn't me personally that got locked out, but I add this so you realize just how badly nobody's communicating.)

I develop a lovely eating disorder where I can't just eat more (because it's not anorexia) and I can't just eat normally (because I don't know--apparently, I've been doing a mild version of this eating disorder all along).

And I get "burning tongue syndrome" on top of it, a condition where they don't know what causes it, what makes it go away, or if it will ever go away short of my death. So I'm now in constant physical pain, too.

I think the plastic's wearing thin. I'm starting to feel the shards.

And I don't know how to heal. I don't know what I'm doing wrong that I'm not healing.

All I know how to do is put my head down and keep going forward, in the hopes that something, somewhere, will be better. Easier.

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