It isn’t the first time. My brain, background, and situation frequently lead me to such moments.
When I was very young (probably no more than six; before Kindergarten, anyway), I had a shiny mylar He-Man balloon on a stick. Loved it. Then I got mad. Don’t even remember what about. So I popped it.
I remember feeling a savage sort of glee as I popped it, then shredded it, then twisted the stick until I could break it into small pieces. I remember a sensation not unlike grief when I calmed down and realized what I’d done.
It didn’t get any better. Later, furious at a teacher who had determined that my book review of Stephen King’s It wasn’t appropriate and made me redo the assignment (on Bunnicula, if memory serves), I yanked a model X-Wing from the fishing line that held it on the ceiling and shattered it into as many pieces as I possibly could. I’d worked very hard putting it together (I was never very good at doing models, especially those that involved glue; even as a child my hands didn’t work right, and the smell of the glue aggravated my asthma), and adored it even though it wasn’t quite right. Again, didn’t care in that moment. I wanted to hurt something or someone, and the more treasured the object, the better I felt. The sorrow, regret, and self-loathing came after.
Later still, wounded by the betrayal of the woman I was in a relationship with at the time, I took a Commodore 64, a Color Computer 2, an Atari 2600, an NES, and a Pikachu Nintendo 64 (and probably would have added the PS2 and PS3 to the pile, if they weren’t already broken) and destroyed them. There was glee as I pried off the keys, tore the wood panelling apart, cracked the RAM chips and shoved chunks of the motherboard into the garbage disposal. I haven’t really collected games since. I usually try to have current hardware, and my game shelf has a small array of whatever I’m playing at the time or haven’t finished yet. But an entertainment center with a carefully curated collection designed for display and a number of retro consoles/computers? Nope. Never again.
All of those (and other events) were before official diagnosis and medication. But last night, I succumbed to it once again.
I’m not going to say why, because it makes me feel and sound like even more of a whiny bitch than I already am, but I opened up Pages and deleted all my manuscripts. Then went to iCloud and flushed them from there, too. I don’t have backups. I don’t have hardcopies. They’re just gone, except for anything on Wattpad or here, which is nowhere near all of it (or even most of it.)
I don’t know if I’ll come back to it. I signed up for NaNoWriMo, but don’t think I can handle it. Don’t know if I want to. The grief hasn’t really hit yet; I’m still in the rage mode and fighting the urge to delete myself from the internet entirely. This blog, my Twitter, my Twitch, the books that are still in KDP. Just poof. My computer is in lockdown – thanks to depression and COPD, I am not physically or emotionally motivated enough to hook it up to commit such a purge – and the options to do so are not available from most mobile apps or the mobile versions of sites, so they’re safe for right now. But the urge is strong.
I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. If I suddenly disappear from your feed, you’ll know. I’m sorry.
Insomniac Nightmares 
Recent Thoughts