BEDA 8: This Too Shall Pass... I Think

Greetings!

So, as of late, I've been spending more and more time inside of my own head.

I don't write so much in my journal anymore. I find myself venting about things that in the grand scheme of it all are minute and insignificant. And randomly, I get filled with the urge to cry for absolutely no reason. All of this could mean only one thing.

I'm about to have a mental snap.

I'm used to it happening. It happens when I find myself in a place where I can't express myself properly or I'm afraid to express myself so I hold all of my emotions in and months and months will pass and then at one point something small and stupid will just make my snap and all of my emotions will just start spilling out and I'll end up locked in my room for a week crying for, what seems like to other people, no reason.

I'm the one always saying my life isn't that hard. People have it worse than I do. I'm fortunate to have everything I have right now and that should be good enough.

So why does this happen to me every year or so?

The first time it happened I was in 9th grade.  It was finals week at school and crazily enough it had nothing to do with me losing my mind. I say it often enough but my family drives me crazy and had been driving me crazy. I felt like I was a black sheep. At school I felt like I didn't have many friends and days were passing by in a blur of review for exams and going home to a bunch of people that irritated me.

So one day, I was at school and I probably looked like I was a mess because my theology teacher who is pretty much the most amazing person on the planet, just kind of asked me how I was doing and I said I was okay but then I went home and ended up sitting in my room crying.

I still don't think I would've survived being a freshman if it weren't for my theology teacher making an effort to see how I was doing daily, to offer his help, to help me make me feel good about myself again.

But since 9th grade, it's happened many more times. When I was in 10th grade I snapped again in January--that snap landed me in stress and anger management at school though.

I don't recall snapping in 11th grade but in 12th grade at the very beginning of the school year I lost it.

And now, weeks before I begin my third semester of college, I feel that familiar feeling creeping up on me again. Days are buzzing by hazily. I feel like I'm despairing over nothing. Things suck without having a reason to suck. Myself esteem is in the pits. I'm spiraling downward into a suffocating pit of depression and I don't know how to escape it.

People tell me I'm normal. That's it's normal to feel like this, but I don't think it is. How can feeling helpless and miserable be normal when what's normal for me is being happy and glad and optimistic.

When I'm happy, I'm so, so happy. Every once in a blue moon I feel like the world has gone to shit and it's scary for me. I don't know how to handle feeling like this and I don't know how to properly articulate my feelings without sounding shallow and petty and selfish.

I'm fairly certain the universe doesn't hate me, so why do I feel like it does?

Fare thee well,
April