Tsunamis

You know those weeks when there is palpable, anger-inciting tension between you and a family member? Or you have had a crushing misunderstanding with one of your friends? An incident that has had you mumbling obscenities under your breath or perhaps screaming at the top of your lungs?

As a result of some emotionally incendiary experience where you feel wronged, not valued, misunderstood, or crossed, you find yourself on one wild ride of emotions. Feelings spike to new highs, leaving you vibrating with anger, injustice and hurt at the maddening insensitivity, sheer stupidity, or blatant passivity. Suddenly you are careening down a roller coaster of painful feelings--swinging widely to the left, twisting up, crisscrossing to the right, up and down and zigzagging to a final, lurching stop. Just when you think it is safe, someone starts talking about it again and off you go, up, up and away in a fiery fury...

Sadly, there are multiple triggers, plural incidents. Some of them ancient history that haunt me in ghost-forms, patterns that I fall into without recognizing them, power struggles in places where there really isn't any conflict. The repeated abandonment and learned detachment puts me on a collision course with people who want to love me. Instead of feeling cared for, I am trapped by expectations that I care back in equal and expected ways.

Some of them are because I allowed myself to be railroaded. Instead of boundaries, I pretend I am flexible, tying my emotions into impossible knots and sandwiching myself between equally repulsive choices, neither of which results in a positive outcome and everyone ends up unhappy. I lack the emotional maturity to get off that high horse and to find common ground.

Some of them are fresh uncertainties as relationships around me shift and twist in sheer agony. Joyful events soiled by betrayal. Illusions give way to falsehoods and deceptions slice jagged lacerations into the soul. These do not necessarily have anything to do with *me*, but I feel the ache and am helpless to salve the hurts. Others are the direct result of my tough love stance, and while it is the truth, it isn't necessarily kind. I have been blind to the balance.

Some of them are internal miseries which I thrust out as excuses when they are really only compounding factors. Dythymia, hormones, insomnia, ghosts, repudiations. I have a circus of my very own issues that would perhaps fascinate a therapist if I weren't terrified of being restrained and locked away again. I might be able to commit myself in those shiny low spots, but mostly choose to roil in the imagined freedom of my own pain.

After building for weeks, the tsunami came crashing down last night...again. A three-way reflection became twisted in my ears. Grasping at spiteful and hateful retorts, I lashed out in front of everyone. Beloved and I rarely have screaming matches, but it descended to that base point. I am ashamed and embarrassed and at a lost for what reparations can be offered by any party. I have been round and round and round, and I am painfully spent. I am exhausted, drained, and totally depleted from the emotional highs and lows. All that is left is the crumbling, white-ashed embers of a fire gone dead.