0 
0 By Shirley Davis
This is how I feel today. Hold onto your hats! This is true emotion, and I’m not a bit afraid to tell you about it. Yes, I am human and yes, I fail.
Having been traumatized in my childhood, I have a fear of being trapped. Not just physically trapped, but a deep-seated terror of not being able to think my way out a situation. These horrifying feelings of no escape make me want to scream. Sometimes I do, even if it is internally.
Unfortunately, life is full of situations you can’t easily resolve.
Again!
As many of you know, I have been attending college and doing very well. This past spring semester I was forced to drop a fifth class. Because I wasn’t performing as well as I should, due to the stress that having five classes put me under. Unfortunately, I had already received my financial aid reimbursement and spent it on living expenses.
Now they want the some of the money back.
Almost $800 in fact.
I live on a fixed income and support four people with it. No one in the house works except for me due to some critical mental health issues among the other two adults in our home. They have attempted to get social security to help, but it is almost impossible to get help in the current political climate.
So, I will not be able to return to college, AGAIN! I had just gotten myself out of this trap last year.
My debts
One of my alters had attended college back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and I was not aware until I began to attempt to enter college again. Then I was told of the three outstanding bills with three different universities. They had to be paid before I could even apply to any other universities and totalled around $2,000. I got lucky and finally settled it and started classes the fall semester of 2017.
Now, here I am again. Only this time I know what happened. I feel so depressed and lost right now.
Sometimes it’s just too difficult
Some days I feel like life is just too difficult to win. I sit here with tears in my eyes and wonder what will become of me. I’m pushing sixty and have little to show for it.
I own nothing; I have no partner or children. And I have no home I can call my own.
The most significant thing that hurts is I can’t shake the feeling that had my abusers not mistreated me, I could have made an enormous splash in the world.
I know what you may be thinking: she’s wallowing in self-pity. Maybe, but it is worse than that. I feel trapped again. Trapped in a situation where I don’t have a clue what to do.
Illusions
When I was a child, I had a sense that I knew what was going to happen next. Even though the things I expected were horrendous, I still had a feeling that I was going to go on and do fine.
That illusion is gone entirely now.
I am terrified of many things, but the main one is that I’ll go to my grave and no one will remember me. That I’ll be lost in history. Let’s face it, most of us do. We’re put in graveyards or placed in urns, and in ten or twenty years our names are forgotten. It’s as though we never lived at all.
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I get such a forlorn feeling when I see a graveyard. I read the names and wonder about the person’s story. Who were they? What did they think about their lives? Did they enjoy life? Who did they love?
What will happen after I’m gone?
When I worked as an aide in a nursing home, I was often faced with the loss of the people who lived there. Their lives and deaths made an indelible impression on my life. I’ve always said that so long as I’m alive, they live on. But what will happen after I’m gone?
You see, there is a horrible feeling in my gut that I’ll die before I get the opportunity to finish what I want to do in life. I know no one has a guarantee on how long they will be around. But as I get older these horrible thoughts plague me day and night.
I feel like I need to run!
I feel like I need to escape!
But there’s nowhere to go!
I feel panicked!
I feel so, so, so, lost!
These are my feelings
Man!
In times past, I would have blamed another alter for those emotions. But, you know what? They are my emotions because they are all me. I am feeling these frightening things.
My sleep is messed up again. I’m sleeping around four hours per night. I know I’ll be better, but man!
I sure hope something helps me soon. Maybe I’m precipitating my death by worrying and being panicked.
Sigh.
This is me
Well, now you have met Shirley J. Davis motivational speaker and freelance writer on one of her terrible days. Just because I’ve been in therapy for three decades and talked in my blog posts about hope and health doesn’t mean I don’t have days where I am in despair.
My therapist Paula once said to me on such a day, “Welcome to the human race, Shirley.”
Gee, thanks, Paula.
Beam me up, Scotty!
Stop, I want to get off this crazy ride!
Holy shit!
Life goes on
The good news is I know I am resilient. I have survived much worse days than these and I will now too. Tomorrow the sun will shine, and life will go on. That’s the way it is you know.
Life goes on.
I will defeat this horrible feeling of fruitless fighting eventually. But for now, I’m trapped in fear and inactivity.
So, don’t worry about me, I’m good. Or at least, I will be.
“Fear can be good when you’re walking past an alley at night or when you need to check the locks on your doors before you go to bed, but it’s not good when you have a goal, and you’re fearful of obstacles. We often get trapped by our fears, but anyone who has had success has failed before.” Queen Latifah
Reproduced with permission, originally posted on morgan6062.blog
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