The Dark Side

I feel manic again, these last few days. I have not worked in over a week and know how much that contributes, but we had some friends over for dinner and since I have not been taking any pain medication (no need due to not working), find the overwhelming compulsion to majorly self-medicate. I passed it off well enough today at the pool and carried on well into dinner, but the truth of the matter is I am constantly looking for the stopping point and just can't ever seem to find it. Is it completely insane to say I have an overpowering and insatiable compulsion to explore? What, I don't know, but I am feeling that draw to the dark side of life that seldom rears its head, but when it does hits hard. Not the real bad side, no not that. But certainly not the middle-of-life self-imposed suburbia my sweet little house-wife ass is sitting in right now. The side of life I would have never even lived to see if not for the husband that has made me this sweet little house-wife ass.

I was not on a road to success when I graduated from college at 22. It may have appeared that way externally, but my self-destructive habits were going to kill me quickly, if not in body than at least in soul, of this I have no doubt. The small college town I lived in held me together with the accountability of taking daddy's cash and a wholesome facade of sorority-row, ivy-covered brick buildings and tree-lined streams. I was relatively controllable under those constraints, but was just getting to know the Las Vegas-San Francisco-Los Angeles-over 21-year-old wild-child that had recently been unleashed...and she was not a girl that was takin' it slow! Yet 1 month before graduating I made a conscious decision to start dating a man that had been my friend for a couple of years, and I let my guard down. I trusted him and it became easy to fall in love and believe in a great future of happily ever after. That was all it took, and we set off on the race-track of life together that has been a whirlwind entirely of its own. Meanwhile I laid these other thoughts and behaviors down, the deeper and darker places I have gone, and was heading toward, and flung myself into wifedom and respectability. But tonight, with surging chemicals, drunk on sweet-tea vodka at 3 o'clock in the morning, Eminem emanating rage and pain out of my computer speakers, scarily I am indulging and allowing myself to conjure these deeply buried babies up.

Oh my,
Leah