I’m a paramedic. I don’t deal with my feelings, I just get angry at everyone and everything else for forcing me to have to have them. Transcendence achieved, problem solved.

Except that I’m not exactly a paramedic anymore. The papers still say I am and the uniform I’m trying to get used to wearing again says I am but paper and clothes can say a lot of things, kind of like this internet I’m on. This part is proving terribly hard. If you’ve never understood why a drug addict can’t stop putting shit up their nose or in their veins despite the consequences try disengaging from your professional identity or being outwardly okay with the not working disability thing and see how that leaves you feeling emotionally. Vulnerable? Scared? Lost? Isolated? Dismissed? Forgotten?

So here I am, feeling ripped-raw and unreliable again, over-emotional and having those near-uncontrollable “I’m too overwhelmed by everything” emo watery-eye moments all the time that start to give it away. They say it’s called “crying” and that it’s actually normal and it’s supposed to happen. What do “they” know?

Anyway, it does happen. The frequency and intensity is on one of them spectrums but it happens shopping, reading, driving, innocently spending time in my head, watering the lawn, cooking dinner, cleaning. Definately at the OT appointments. Oh, and the ambulance last night that just had to ‘light it up’ as I was driving through the intersection perpendicularly? Yup. That too. I haven’t ‘yelped’ in surprise in a while either so that helped round out the internal intensity that caused.

Sometimes I feel great and I can do all the chores and make the house look like I don’t have mental health problems, or I can run errands or repair something or make jokes and be sociable. Other times it’s not that simple. Like now. Either way I have come to learn that it’s not the results that make me feel like a failure, it’s not making the attempt. Not trying will always be a self-fulfilling prophecy I’m better off avoiding.