I got a text today.  Not an auspicious event in my life, as lots of people text me. I tend not to respond often, or when I do my responses are one to two words that perfectly states what exactly I am thinking.  But today’s text threw me literally for a loop.  What was a pleasant question from a friend, asking how I was doing, led to a bomb of epic size exploding right in front of my eyes.

It always amazes me when emotions especially, sneak up on me.  For heaven’s sake, I am bipolar; how can an emotion sneak.  I feel happiness from the top of my toes to the bottom of my hair follicles.  I play in happiness like it is bubbles in a bath. And I have so much fear there are times that I can’t move. My emotions tend to be big, loud and on good days, the life of the party.  They are rarely hidden.

And why do emotions hide? Why do they sneak up on unsuspecting fools like myself as if to one day wake up and decide today’s the day? What made today different than the other 364 this year, what made it possible for my emotions to come to the forefront of my life? And what ultimately is the price I am going to pay for these dormant little suckers?

When I thought about what I was going to respond to that innocent little text, I realized I am extremely angry and devastatingly hurt.

Did my psyche protect myself in order to keep from responding to these life changing emotions? Technically what I am angry about and what hurts me so much, is probably not much in the scheme of things. Many people, not living in this moment, would probably even say to get over it, the problem was not that bad.  Even you, dear reader, would say something similar, this I can almost promise. It is the kind of issue that isn’t an understandable issue. It isn’t noticeable when looking from the outside. It isn’t something that can be put into actions that are as readily seen as the latest blockbuster movie.  But it is there.

At first, I did what I always do.  I went to the internet.  I looked up the problem, the anger, in a quest to mitigate the damage before I did something regrettable (although I don’t know what that is).  The problem with anger, as many of us know, is that it doesn’t go away; it either festers and explodes like Mt. Edna, or it pops as loudly as fireworks in July.  Hurt, hurt is a little harder. It destroys the fabric of the self until one isn’t able to even recognize themselves in a house of mirrors.  Hurt destroys slowly, silently until one literally buckles. It may be a fist in the face hurt, or a jab in the back, but hurt kills more softly than the greatest cancers alive.

The internet, of course, had many suggestions.  First, there was the popular exercise.  My problem with exercise, beyond the fact that I am lazy, is that it certainly gives me those celebrated endorphins, but only for a brief moment. Don’t get me wrong, it may last a day but after that the high is gone and I am in the same place and even sometimes a worse place. Plus, I tend to get obsessive about things, and the one thing I can’t afford to really get obsessive about is exercise.

Then of course, the internet encouraged talking about it.  Problem with that.  I don’t have many friends; I am pretty much a loner.  And it is difficult for me to call upon the friends I have just to talk about this one thing.  I didn’t call last month just to see how they are, is it fair to call them for something like this?  I don’t have insurance so therapy is out.  And my family is not the type I tell anything to; various reasons really, but compelling all the same.  So talking to anybody other that you, dear reader, was out.

I can write about it. That tends to put things in perspective.  Of course, I fear that I would be writing a chapter book that ultimately would defeat the purpose of entertainment.  Where is the time? Where is the will to write this long and this hard about something that is so sneaky as to surprise the dickens out of me?

If you are a fellow Pintrest fan, than you might be yelling at your screen right now, the popular sayings regarding ridding oneself of the things that are making me feel this way.  And yet we come to another problem…I am an adult, I can’t.  The things that are making me angry and hurt are not things that can be easily trashed or recycled in the compost bin. The things that are bringing these emotions right to the front are not something that I can easily walk away from; nor should I.  Instead they are a part of life that is sometimes unfair, and most often completely wrong.  They are the demons that have voice and they are the diseases that ravage one to their ultimate death.

So let’s recap.  I have something that makes me angry and hurt, yet I can’t exercise it away. I can’t talk or write about it until it goes away, and because I have the misfortune of living until adulthood, I can’t walk away from it.  I am stuck. I am stuck understanding that I am angry and even why I am hurt; but I am stuck with those emotions as surely as I am stuck with the freckle on my nose.

Angry and hurt will one day take all of my being.  It will become the large monster in the corner of the room and it will become the inescapable necessity of the rest of my life.  It will grow and fester, and it will end of destroying that which is precious to me.  And I will sit here years from now, rereading this post and nodding my head in the knowledge I knew the moment I read that innocent text.