I just want to breathe

I feel like I have an iron band around my chest. I want to breathe in deeply and flex everything that I can to burst the band. It is oppressive and causes me to feel like I cannot properly catch my breath. I desperately want to shed it, like sloughing off dead skin. But I don’t know how to do this.

There is a part of me that reasons that completely changing my life could break me out. Turning my back on it all – walking out with not so much as a goodbye and certainly no explanations. Move town. Get a new phone number. Change my hair. Leave behind all responsibilities and hurts and disappointments and unmet expectations. Stop all the things that constitute my life now, including the medication and therapy and efforts to change myself. Morph into any personality I want – outgoing and vivacious and funny, without a care in the world perhaps. Have no past and no connections. Have no guilt. I can paint myself as anything I want. No-one would be any the wiser.

But what of the days when the past comes slinking in the back door when your guard is down? A coping mechanism will be required of course. What though? Something that obliterates with immediate effect would be best. Alcohol has worked before. Maybe mix it up with some drugs. I have never tried any of them, so perhaps I would find a happy mix that would shut my mind down. Take up some new activity – an adrenaline-filled one to focus the mind on the present. To feel, just for a while, that I am free. That I don’t have to care about anyone or anything. I don’t need to be myself. I can make myself believe that none of this life happened.

Maybe that would be the catalyst for a new and better life. The one without depression. The one without worries or anxieties. The one where I don’t care what people think about what I do and how I do it. And do not let anyone in – casual friendships only. Superficial. Be friendly, mind, but have no chink in the wall of self-preservation and protection. Make it the ultimate barrier and boundary. It makes it so much easier to walk away when you don’t care for someone. Sounds idyllic.

There is always the option of exiting the planet altogether. I am in two minds as to whether it would be preferable to try running away first. That could just be postponing the inevitable. Death comes to us all eventually, whether at the end of a long life (urgh – imagine another 40 years of an iron band on my chest) or at the discretion of “fate” – being in an accident or having an illness, or just merely by one’s own hand. If the every day is just about taking another step further towards the ultimate end, what difference does it make if it happens tomorrow or at 96? You are going to be in the same place, either way. It would be slightly inconvenient if death came knocking tomorrow though, as I haven’t updated my will. Oh well, some things will work out in the wash.