This is why I have a problem with evenings.

The night-time comes, and I’m usually chirpy to start with. But something (in this case grades and tests, grr) triggers it, and suddenly I’m not happy any more. Its like this heavy cloud of nothingness descends, and I can feel myself trapped beneath it, struggling to get out. I become unresponsive, finding it hard to muster up emotion of any description, let alone respond appropriately to the world around me. I can’t make a single decision, as I remain completely and utterly convinced that any decision I make will result in me being ridiculed, proved wrong or just generally coming across as stupid. When I’m down I feel insignificant, the butt of all jokes. At some point I cry, the type of crying that involves tears slipping out of my eyes and plopping lazily onto the floor, without any passion. And following that, I cry about the fact that I’m crying, and because I don’t know why I am crying, and because I feel stupid. This crying is more of a release, I shake lots and can’t breathe, and for some reason only feel safe if I cover my eyes. I screw my eyes up tight against my palms and can feel myself all tightened in, a tucked up ball of safety in a sea of total uncertainty. For a while after this I feel very fragile. My eyes well up at any supposed slight, and if something reminds me of the trigger event, or something else negative, then I can be sent spiralling down into that black black pit again.

And then, just like that, I’m fine again. I usually end up crumpled in a pile on the floor, in hysterical laughter about something that wasn’t even funny, creasing up and cackling like the Snow Queen on acid. I wiggle around, poke Ben and tease him, and then eventually settle down into something resembling my normal, silly self.

Because don’t get me wrong. Don’t read this and think “What a miserable bugger”. I’m a girl with a good sense of humour, an appreciation of the world in all it’s glory, and a barrel-full of empathy. I’m naturally silly, a joker with a self-deprecating nature and an unnatural liking for puns. Just sometimes it seems like my emotion slips, and I’m plunged literally into a bottomless pit from which I temporarily assume I will never escape. Which always makes me ask whether it’s better to sob and sob and sob, feeling emotion rubbed raw inside of you, or is it better to have that terrifying blankness, that vast void where you heart used to be? Sometimes I feel both, and I don’t like either.

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