waking from a long dream

That's what I feel like. As if I'm waking from a long slumber. Coming out of the fog, back into the light. I've been so numb for so many years that didn't even realize it anymore. Suddenly, a voice from the past wakes me up and brings so many things into focus. Suddenly I'm wondering, what took so long. What is it I've been doing for the last almost 10 years? Hiding.

Hiding from life, from feeling, from thinking. It's damn near killed me. I quit enjoying life, hell, I quit living. I've simply been surviving, for most of my life. And what has that got me? Fat, nearly dead, depressed, on medication, in therapy and most of all, quite miserable. In the last 5 years I have gained over 200 pounds trying to fill a void in my life. Trying to enjoy something. Instead it's made me unhealthy and unable to do many of the things I want to do. It's made me even more miserable.

It's so easy to be numb, to not care, to just go with it. Easy to a point. Going with the flow is all well and good until the flow takes you over a waterfall. My waterfall makes niagra look like a leaky faucet. Being emotionally numb has kept me alive, except now it's killing me. Feeling nothing is not a way to live, it's a way to survive. It's a way to hide. It's a way to avoid. I felt something tonight I have not felt in a very long time. Hope. Something suddenly changed inside me. I suddenly feel so many different emotions that I have locked away for so many years. Emotions I haven't dealt with, haven't let out.

I'm very practiced at being negative. Very good at it. Very good at convincing myself I just don't care, or that there is no point or that it just doesn't matter. Tonight I realized that it does matter. If I am miserable and hate my life, how is that affecting my children? When I am so tired of my life, of my body, of everything around me that I regularly contemplate suicide, what is that doing to me, what is that doing to my daughter. While I may not be putting a gun to my head, I have been working on slowly killing myself for many years now. With the food, with the lack of exercise, with the lack of feeling about anything. I've been sitting here on my ass waiting for death to come knocking and not really caring if he did. Suddenly I care.

I have so many things to figure out, to think about, to do. I have to figure out just how to start, where to start. I feel some life altering decisions are coming soon and that scares the hell out of me. But I know, without a doubt, that I can not continue the way I have. I don't want to continue the way I have. I want to be happy. I want to want to live. I want to enjoy life again. It's scary to me, to feel these things after so long.

So now comes choices, decisions, actions. Should be fun.