I sat and tried to block out my feelings while going through my day as usual. Nothing worked. I couldn’t keep my mind from returning to where it shouldn’t be. The days of waking up and simply turning a dial in my brain then pushing “select” when I reached the emotion I wanted were over now. I thought I’d mastered Addiction, but now my old friend was close to mastering me again.

No one would guess that about me of all people, though. If there’s one thing that I hadn’t lost control over, it was my appearance. I never broke stride when something came along and threatened to tear my life apart, never failed to crack a smile when it was expected of me.
The mask I put on every day was highly limiting when the dial I controlled my emotions with was broken. I mean, sure, it was great when I was trying to get through a day at work. Professionalism was always a good thing if the goal was hoarding up money by working forty hours a week and moving out of your parents house the minute you turned eighteen. There’s a fine line between maintaining that healthy level of professionalism and crippling yourself to the point that you can’t ask for help. I crossed that.
I tried, really I did, but I could never quite get the right words out. Keeping up the façade for so long had required me to learn how to downplay serious issues, and somehow I couldn’t flip the switch and be honest anymore. Multiple escapes were offered to me, but as of yet I haven’t taken any of them.
Why?
Because I couldn’t.
Why couldn’t I?
Because it was hopeless. I would either suffer through life quietly, hating myself and using my self-damaging coping mechanisms as always to get through one day after another, or I would be forced to give up both my mask and the small things that made me feel better until I really thought about the consequences of my actions.
This life, this constant ducking around and hiding as I alternated between the various band-aid solutions I discovered to spike the desired neurotransmitters in my brain and send me on an ecstatic rush, this constant cramp in my stomach as I knew that what I was doing was hurting me and the small handful of people who knew about my suffering, THIS was familiar. It had become the comfortable kind of pain that’s now simply a part of life.
I don’t know how to live without this kind of pain anymore. Who would I be without it?
A stranger.