Shattered Glass

          So, what's it feel like? Like you're a piece of glass, and if you bend you'll shatter.  Hell, I imagine. If hell is worse, I can't even begin to comprehend it.  You reach out to others, hoping they'll say or do something to make "it" go away. "It", the emotional pit of despair that no one can see or begin to understand unless they've lived it.  When all you can do is curl up in a ball and cry, which you have no energy to do, so you just stare and wait to be able to move without breaking.  You know time is ticking by and there's so much to be done, but you just can't move.  Physical pain is easier, so you cause that to mask "it", just so you can function until you start all over.  Smiling feels like a hot knife thrust into your gut, but you do it so no one knows. Sometimes you do it too much, smile, make people laugh, over compensate so the most important people in your life are kept from the knowledge that you're dying inside. You tell people, "I'm fine." You're smiling on the outside and screaming on the inside, hoping they hear the scream...so maybe they'll say or do something to, again, make "it" go away.  Faking it becomes second nature. You smile, you laugh, it cuts. At the end of the day you hate yourself for being fake. Why couldn't you just tell someone? Because you know they can't do anything to stop it.  You've fallen into that trap of false hope before, and at least this way they were happy. If anything their happiness lessens the pain a bit more than it would if it were they that were trying to make you happy, because you know that wouldn't have worked anyway.  You go to bed telling yourself, "Tomorrow will be better. I'll wake up, get up, feel whole, go on about my day, and everything will be fine." You wake up paralyzed.  You tell yourself to "Snap out of it." You wonder why life seems so hard for you when really it's no different than anyone else's.  You have infinite blessings, no reason to be down.  So why does it feel like you physically have an elephant on your back? Your body is heavy, it's hard to breath, it takes too much energy to do anything.  Anything life sustaining is not only too much work, but going to prolong your hell. You pray and beg for help, and when you don't start to feel better you start to pray to die.  You wake up in the morning thinking, "Again? Really?" Then have to repent for being so incredibly unappreciative of His hand in your life. You know He's there, you see it with your eyes, but your heart didn't get the memo.  It never ends.  "It" never ends.