Prisoner Within Myself.

I’m exhausted within myself. For the best part of the last ten days I’ve done nothing but work and sleep, or think about work, or read training articles to do with work. I’m sat at my computer in my office with a bed in it, trying to even summon the energy to put something down ‘on paper’ as it were for you. The Royal You, whoever you are – thank you for your time in advance, even if when you scan to the last word you feel the time could’ve been better spent…

I’m ill, and I don’t think it’s just physically either. Anxiety. Depression. They are disabilities that don’t come signposted for the world with a crutch or a chair or a carer. They’re insidious invisible diseases that eat at one from the inside – leprous. I don’t want to leave the house – ever. Right now the ridiculous unfounded fear of everything has taken me over. The sheer amplitude it takes me to even get out of bed, dress and then go out into the grown up world? I head out each morning  wearing my confident dynamic personable face, when inside I’m a shaking petrified child – rendered so by my anxiety shredded nerves – is beyond words to articulately describe. This mask is slowly developing cracks, visible cracks. By shift’s end yesterday I was barely holding it together and the management noticed I think. I got a friendly clamp on the shoulder from one of them. I’m not doing as well as I should be on the course, and that makes me even more anxious about failure. The more anxious I get the worse I perform. The company are really really nice people. I’m working with young folks half my age but they have all been nothing but supportive and warm, friendly. No one’s told me I’m in danger of being cut from the training program, yet. But I ‘feel’ so bloody lost, in myself. So why, then, do I feel as though I stick out among them like a sore thumb? Possibly it’s because I didn’t expect to have to start over in a new trade, after twenty years ‘out there’ again. I know my hang ups are all in my head, I know! Yet I can’t see past them. My own worst enemy – as fucking usual. Nobody who meets me believes I’m a mess. I hide it so well. I’m an able bodied man crippled by his own lack of faith in himself to do anything but this – write about it. Today I haven’t even accomplished that.