2023-01-20 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Shit. The anxiety is back. Took a train ride yesterday. The sound seemed so loud. Someone brought a screaming young human onboard. At the mall I could feel my skin sort of prickly, like having low electric current run through my arms. Today feeling deflated and out of breath. Been sleeping horribly and felt like my chest is being constricted when in bed. Also feeling itchy and my face feels hot. I think it must be because I have come to a hard limit with processing whatever it was that happened with my break up. I can't really tell anyone the whole story. Everyone I could open up to is somehow involved too much, or would not be able to contain the story, or telling them would not be fair since they are friends with both sides. I also contemplated on writing a long mail to my ex, letting her hear the whole story, but I don't really know what would be the point in that, considering she has clamped on to a world view where there is no space for hearing my side. I don't want to give her more material for her story of me. On top of that I still feel like I don't really know how serious her suicidal thoughts were, and this unknowing is keeping me from really just giving it to her raw. So in that sense I feel like her narrative is still controlling me. That suicide threat was really like a lid on a pressure cooker for me. From that day I was always watchful of what I say. Like she was some fragile thing that could just dissolve at any point. At the same time, the pressure in me was slowly growing. And even now, I am techically free of her influence, but at the same time stuck and unable to go forward of backward, as there is no proper outlet for some kind of expression of the mixture of emotions I feel. The containment is taking so much of my energy. That's the anxiety. It's the act of trying to control it. Keep the outside out and the inside in. I have really worked hard to not make waves. I have just absorbed it all. I feel full of it. There is that line about when your partner or someone close to you has died, that since they are gone, you are unable to clear anything bad between you. It feels like that to me, sort of. Since she has put herself to the position potentially killing herself, I can't clear the bad air with her, since I can't know she won't kill herself. I think this is the worst grudge I have with her. She killed the relationship with that threat. I am almost sure she didn't mean it but I can't ever know. I never realised it properly, until after the fact, but it's like this: She was unable to talk about emotions as emotions, so she always said them in some story form. What I mean is that she wouldn't say "I feel depressed and uncertain of the future" but instead she said "Why did you bring me into this country". The formula always had to include someone who "did something". It was never that there is a feeling, and it needs to be seen and dealt with. So, she would say these cruel things and they just stay with me. Most often I am the person "responsible" for her negative feelings. Or the lack of positive feelings. It seems there was a lot I didn't understand while I was inside all of it. I feel this ball of energy moving through my body. It's rage. It moves from my arms into my spine and up to my forehead. When I feel it in public I tap my fingers against each other to keep myself focused on the activity and not the feeling. I really don't want to have some meltdown in public. And it wasn't long I ago I thought I am getting over this episode in my life. I think it's connected to my overall stress levels. After I survived the work bout before christmas, I thought I can take it easier at work, but the start of this week I got a load of unexpected jobs and been tapping away at them the whole week without much time for reflection. ------------------------------------------------------------------