The skin I'm in.

It feels tight. Ill-fitting. Uncomfortable. Suffocating. I am so tired and yet I cannot sleep. My sleeping pills no longer work. My little brown pills have stopped being altogether effective at quelling the racing thoughts, or the voices in my head. It's exhausting to be this fucked up and not have a support structure.

Well, that's not entirely true. I do have support. I have a man in my life that loves me unconditionally and always does whatever he can to make my life easier, even at the cost of his own comfort. But I have no family support. Sometimes it doesn't even feel like I have a family. Which is, of course, partially my own doing. I walked out on them. But I've tried so hard to come back from that, come back around. My dad understood that, and appreciated the effort. My sisters won't ever let me forget (another entry or six will be required to explain the hypocritical nature of my siblings) that I walked away. But I had to. I truly _needed_ to. It's just sad that it's taken almost 15 years to find out why. To find out what's really wrong with me. To start to try to live my life armed with the knowledge of my disease and some tools to help me with it.

It's also sad because I'm a colossal coward and don't want to tell my mother what precisely is wrong with me. For one I doubt she'll believe me. For two, even if she did believe me, it would just be one more way that I've managed to screw up my life, and hers, and my dad's life, and the people around the corner and down the street and the guy that runs the Shopper's in Gander, et cetera.

How do you tell your mother that you're mentally ill to the point of disability? I don't even know where or how to begin. Of course, this is a family of secrets. My (now deceased) uncle is a prime example. So maybe I figure if she doesn't want me to know about that, why on earth would she want to know about this?

How do I stop caring, though? How do I stop looking for solace and support that can never come? How do I come to terms with the fact that I can't expect support for something that she doesn't know about? How do I tell her?

It's simple really. I don't tell her. I take the black sheep designation, I smile when appropriate, and I sit here inside my head screaming at the top of my lungs.