Anxiety is a pretty shitty thing to deal with.
It brings you out of whatever moment you're in and shoves weird ideas into your head like, "HEY NOBODY LIKES YOU AND YOU FAIL AT EVERYTHING" and "Pssssst....if you REALLY want to engage people, why not try shutting the fuck up?"
My favorite is when anxiety gets in my head when I'm in public, or when I'm trying to go to sleep. "DREA, NUCLEAR BOMBS EXIST!" Yeah, so? "SOMEONE IS GOING TO NUCLEAR BOMB JUST YOU WHEN YOU'RE OUT IN THE CITY!"
"DREA. DREA, ARE YOU TRYING TO SLEEP?" Yes. "YOU'RE GOING TO DIE." ....When? "I DON'T KNOW, SOMETIME. MAYBE TONIGHT. DON'T GO TO SLEEP. STAY UP UNTIL YOU DIE." I'm tired. "YOU'RE GOING TO BE DEAD SOON." Fuck. Maybe this sounds like run of the mill paranoia, but it's not. I promise. I've done the legwork, and I've had the therapy and diagnoses. I know what I'm talking about.
Anxiety is almost all the fucking time. It's really bizarre to try and have a logical conversation with an illogical part of you. But once my heart starts racing and my thoughts start rushing in, I'm done. I lose to anxiety. I'm used to it now. It's been decades, and it's just this weird monkey on my back that feels like a desperately unwanted roommate. It's kind of the same with having Borderline Personality Disorder, which I have WAY more under control than my anxiety. Having BPD is like living with a roommate that you never, ever, EVER see, but comes out and does the worst shit EVER without warning, and then is just wildly belligerent about the mess they make. Having ADHD is rough, as well, but only because it fucks with my school. I hate that I put things off until the very last moment, and then have to rush through fifteen page papers, twenty page papers, in a day, sources and all. Don't get me wrong, I still have stellar grades, but I'm not sure I can make it through an entire Master's program like this. I'm going to get overwhelmed, and I'll fidget my entire way there. To my great pride, I've made it this far (hooray, BS!) with GREAT grades, save the "whoops, I got raped and stopped going to school" semester and the "whoops, I left the country and didn't have as much internet as America and couldn't do my work" (straight Cs and four Fs and one C, respectively) semester, and my other semesters are all As and Bs. I suppose the main story in this paragraph is, I manage my mental illnesses really well.
Except for my anxiety.
Nothing can ruin a good day like anxiety.
My anxiety is illness and death specific, so I spend a lot of time thinking about dying. I think about it VERY begrudgingly, because I don't really WANT to be thinking about it. It's just there. I wonder about what happens after we die, like the rest of us do (even though I think the thought of death is kind of like the non-baby version of object permanence, and instead of being frightened and confused when something isn't present, we're just like, WHELP, thank god that's not real! And then we go about our lives, forgetting that death is waiting for all of us at the end), but I think I wonder about it with far more frequency than other people. The thing is, while I love being alive, and I am in no hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, part of me hopes constantly that the afterlife is a peaceful kind of nothing.
I've been a ghost for the last nine years. For three years before that, I was a pretty persistent poltergeist. It sounds so melodramatic to define myself like that, but bear with me.
I left my daughter with her dad right before she turned two. The situation was rough, he was mentally abusive and domineering and controlling and AWFUL to me, though he loved our daughter, which, you know, cool. I was really young. 20. I had to bounce my way out of that life, because I knew I was drowning, and that made my ex happy, because he has his own host of problems, and at the end of the day, we were different people that had zero business being together. I couldn't bring my daughter with me, though. I had no money, and none of the people who would have opened up their homes to me would let me bring my daughter with me. For the record, this includes BOTH of my parents. Not my mother, or my father, would let me bring my daughter with me, despite making room for me. To my mom's credit, she wouldn't even let me stay with her, sans daughter or otherwise. Really, just my dad offered me a place to stay, but his wife wouldn't let me bring my daughter. Family is really cool. I had no idea what else to do, so I left, with the sole purpose of finding a job, finding an apartment, and bringing my daughter out to me, so I could do the whole young, single mom thing and not have to be without my daughter. To bring you up to speed, it didn't work out that way.
I think my daughter knows I exist, but I can't be sure. The last thing my daughter ever said to me was, "I hate you; goodbye means goodbye." She was five, and after she said that, I gave up fighting to share custody and visitation with her dad. She told me I wasn't her mom all the time, and in fairness to her, she wasn't raised to think I was. It dawned on me that as much as I wanted my daughter around and in my life and to be my family, she didn't. I've spoken about this at great length, with lots of moms and dads I know, and I almost always get the same reaction: "if it were MY kid....I would have kept fighting. Five is too young to know what's best." I get it. Parents think I'm a bad parent. It's cool. I think they're all ugly people with zero empathy, and probably weird genitals.
I have another biological kid now. He's turning ten this year. I tell him about his sister whenever he asks, but to him, she's a myth. This beautiful somebody that surely must exist out there, somewhere, but that he's pretty sure he's never going to be positive of her existence because he'll never get to meet her.
To her, her brother and I, her entire family, are a pack of ghosts. We exist. We are everywhere. Whether she wants us to exist or not, whether she knows about us or not, we're here. We check in on her. We do what we can to make sure she's happy and thriving, and it seems like she is. We follow her in the small ways we can, making sure nobody knows, making sure she doesn't know, because nobody likes ghosts. They're afraid of them, because it's scary to face something that you don't know anything about. None of us want her to be afraid of us. I don't want her to be afraid of me, but I lost that battle years ago (have you ever had to read about the horror stories other people tell your children about you, and how your children react? Nothing is quite as fun as finding out your child's step-parent and step-sibling told them that you, their biological parent, was going to steal them from their family. Nothing matches the joy of discovering that your kid is terrified to take her school bus because she thinks she's going to get kidnapped by you, or that she wets the bed when she has to talk to you. Not for anything you've done or said, either, but because the real monsters are sometimes the ones you're already living with, not the ones they warn you about).
We're here, lurking in the hard to find places, latching on to one person and silently watching her grow up, in leaps that span years. I've considered the fact that her dad and step-mom are my ghost. Perhaps even my daughter herself. I've noticed that in the years where we out ourselves as finding photos, finding tidbits, Facebook pages go private and dark, because we're not allowed to even silently access Rhyann's life. One, or all, of them, don't want us to (truly, we have been told this. During the custody proceedings, my daughter's father's step-dad let us know that when my daughter's dad and his wife...girlfriend...whatever...found out that he was sending my mother and myself photos of my daughter, he was no longer allowed in their home, so he couldn't share photo updates with us anymore) know what she looks like, or how she's doing. Part of me respects that. The other part of me knows that ghosts don't have to play by the rules. Ghosts have nothing but time, and are in no hurry. We can wait in the darkness forever.
I KNOW this is what being a ghost is like, because the last thirteen years have killed me. The weirdest part about being a ghost is, my daughter is the one haunting me. And I'm not quite sure how to reconcile that.
