if anger turned inward is depression

then anguish turned inward is shame.

That's my new contention.

I was sitting here (lying here, actually) crying, working through some old stuff, and I felt my face going into that shape you see on small infants who are really howling their guts out. You know the face - little mouth stretched as wide as it can go, eyes scrunched, making as much sound as possible. Howling.

And then I felt my lower lip start to go into that shape that I think of as being beyond the howling phase, when the baby has been left to cry for too long and has begun to enter that stage of despair, of losing hope. Where she has no belief that her caretaker will ever return for her, she's been abandoned, left alone to die. The wolves will eat her. She is terrified, distraught, and so full of fear that she begins to shut down. This is when the exhaustion sets in; in self-defense, her little limbs curl up, all energy leaves her body, and she assumes that curled-inward fetal position so familiar to those witnessing someone in major self-protection mode.

There's nobody there for her; no one she can trust. So she does the only thing she has left to do: Retreats from the world into the safety of sleep, where these fears no longer overwhelm her.

Of course, there's always the lovely nightmares. Do infants have nightmares? I know I started having them around age three, and had them more or less continuously throughout my life until the brief period when I had a consistent partner to curl up with every night, and then, more recently, I've had some nightmare-free stretches as I seem to have released some of the old demons by creating a safe enough time and place in which to face them down and let them go.

But I still have bad patches. Since the panic attacks early last year, I've taken to falling asleep in the wee hours with the lights on, as if waiting til it's almost light out will keep me from falling down the black hole again.

It's worked, more or less - no more panic attacks, yay! But has also wreaked serious havoc with any semblance of a 'normal' sleep schedule. But, hey, I'm doing what I have to do, and it's not hurting anybody, and it sure as heck is helping me, so FUCK that 'normal' shit. Girl's gotta do what she's gotta do.