Compound

27th Apr, 2025

I can't sleep.

The entirety of today was spent deliberately isolating myself from... well, myself. Drowning my cognition in dissociation on purpose.

I waited until I was only just staying awake, hoping that I'd pass out as soon as I lay down, before I went to bed. Leaving myself as little time to think as possible.

It didn't work. I'm laying here listening to my thoughts scream, internal arguments I'm kept awake by but barely feel a part of.

It's hard to choose a course of action, let alone stick to it, when I feel like I'm so many different people.

Remorse. Resentment. Hope. Anger. Determination. Love. Despair. Numbness. Sorrow.

They feel like more than just emotions. They're entire entities, each one showing up and wiping away all the progress the previous one had made towards building a personality. And in the interim, we're not really anybody.

Sometimes they join forces, and on those occasions a certain state might last a little longer than usual. But most of the time I'm lucky if we get a solid 6 hours. Actions and choices from earlier in the same day no longer make sense, based on logic paths that don't exist anymore. I resolve to do something, and by the time the moment comes everything has shifted internally, and I barely remember my own intent.

Each time is like waking up from someone else's dream, and looking back I feel unable to dictate my choices while locked away in my own head.

It's frustrating, and scary, and also it probably sounds like a massive cop out. Which is fair enough.

I'm not trying to absolve responsibility for my actions. The collective is still held accountable for the actions of the individual.

Maybe I'm trying to explain my inconsistencies, though.

Tonight I am oscillating rapidly between shame and anger. In one moment I want to throw myself on the mercy of the friends that I've hurt, make amends and beg forgiviness so that I might work to set things right over time.

And then I remember how this situation escalated and came to be in the first place. All of the ways that I feel wronged, the weeks I've spent upset, in the dark. And then we're angry, and the anger washes away everything else. How are we meant to apologise when the only status quo it feels like we'll return to is one where we're forgotten again?

And then the rubber-band snaps and I return to the start of the cycle, determined to set myself aside and do what I have to do to make sure everyone else is okay.

(A third, quieter part is just resigned. At least I have a reason to feel ostracised now, right? That's something.)

It is... exhausting. Not least for me, but certainly also not just for me.

I wish I could be consistent for more than a conversation. At least then something solid and final would eventuate from all this, whichever way it goes.

I don't have the answers. It feels awful to look back on how much I'd improved over the last couple years, and then in the space of a month I've returned to being an empty, tar-stained pit of a person.

To reiterate, I'm not writing this to elicit pity, or forgiviness, or some shade of goodwill. I don't even expect this to be read, much less there be a constructive response.

But it's tired me out a little more.

Take what you can get.