I'm blogging because I can not talk. My voice is gone. It vanished. I don't know what else to say. I'm terrified if I open my mouth, the sound of my voice will shatter this delusion. I said earlier that I've been fine for days. Weeks, even. I have been. It's all been a delusion created to escape reality, even if just for a little while. I didn't even know I was doing it. Now it's falling apart, and I want want the delusion back. I want to be okay, to smile and laugh and be the teenage girl I really am. I don't know how.

As soon as I realized I couldn't open my mouth, I realized why. I don't know how many of you reading this have the same experiences that I do. I know at least some of you do. And I ask this question rhetorically. Have you ever felt like you needed to react as though the trauma just happened, simply bc you never had that chance when it did happen? In my case, it went on for years, and I took the denial route of survival. I never reacted in any negative way for any period if time. If I felt like it was taking me over, I got drunk, or high, or whatever. And now here I am, some 12 years after it stopped, some 19 years after it started, with a tightness in my chest, feeling as though it just happened. I'm laying here on the bed, incapable of speaking and all I can hear are the thoughts in my head. 'I can't speak, I want to die, I am vulnerable, small, broken, I need to hide, I want to shut down'. It's one in the morning. I'm exhausted. I just needed to blog, I can't let my voice vanish completely.