I Wanna Be Dead, In Bed Please Kill Me, 'Cause That Would Thrill Me

She hadn’t texted, and I was melting down.
My mind ran in little circles, like a hamster in a wheel.  She hadn’t said she’d text me.  But she normally would have by now, right?  Except it was Thanksgiving weekend, and things were crazy.  But she hadn’t texted me.  I’d clearly done something stupid, and she wasn’t talking to me any more.  Why would she?  I’m arrogant, I’m needy, I’m neurotic, I say stupid things, why would anyone talk to me?
I listed all the things I could have said wrong.  I listed all the reasons why she wouldn’t want to talk to me.  I stayed away from the cell phone, trying not to explode in terror at anyone.
There is one advantage in living with a broken brain for twenty years, and that is the practical feedback from decades of mistakes.  A tiny voice said, You can survive all of this, if you only keep this inside.  I know from a long string of shattered friendships and lovers that bugging them whenever I feel insecure leads to never hearing from them again.  People say, “Oh, you can talk to me whenever,” but this is a lie; they don’t know the volcanic levels of crazy churning within me.  I damn near broke Gini, the love of my life, by asking for reassurance on demand.  I’ve learned to smile and nod and say, “Yes, of course I’ll text,” and then clamp all of that down in a tight can and never ever let it out.
So I hugged my knees and rocked, because I’d clearly done something terrible and I didn’t know what and maybe I should just give it all up and never talk to anyone again and Gini asked me what was wrong and I said it was nothing because it was nothing, my stupid brain was making crazy out of nothing like Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold from straw and oh my God I am insane.
Then she texted.  And we were cool.  Maybe better than.
And I broke down in tears to Gini, asking, “How do you put up with me?”  Because I’d been low-grade shivering miserable all day, and now I was happy, and now I was miserable again because fuck, this was just one text from one person and I do this all the fucking time and why can’t I learn?
I suppose, on some level, I have learned.  I didn’t go crazy spamming people with texts (or worse, calling out of panic), I turned it into a semi-breakdown where I still managed to write and get work done (instead of the full-stop crazy of my twenties), and I didn’t make Gini bear the full weight of things.  On the inside, I was a hurricane; on the outside, I was a summer storm, and I guess I should be glad those shieldings have held.
But it is exhausting.  I wish I could stop it.  But I’ve come to the conclusion as a constant depressive that I cannot control my emotions; all I can do is control how I react to them.  And that helps by not making things worse, because back when I didn’t have a rein on them I was involved in a constant string of psychodrama after psychodrama.  Now I only have occasional drama, when my shields fail.
Still.  I’m tired.  I’m strung out.  And I wish to fucking God I wasn’t this stupid and sensitive, and that I could have a rooted trust in anyone’s care for me, and that I wasn’t a goddamned idiot.
That’s the trick of the depressive: you spend so much time and energy passing for normal. And it sucks.