Emotional Trainwreck Am I

I'm struggling with my emotions today. This happens fairly often to me these days, where I feel my emotions deeply, yet I am unable to separate the strands. Happiness is twisted up  with sorrow. Excitement is twisted up with fear. Anticipation and anxiety wraps the whole into a bundle, seemingly inseparable, lumped up in my core, threatening tears, bending me without breaking me.

Times like this are the worst. Usually they happen when something good comes into my life. I have so little to be joyful about that I fear any good thing will only be temporary, taken from me when I most have it settled within. I feel like I can't trust anything, that everything will be taken from me, just as it has been so far.

Right now the good thing happening is Shelby. So far she has fit right into my life, my lifestyle, my care, even my need for order and organisation. There has to be something wrong here. How can I trust something which seems to have worked so well, so quickly? I'm afraid she will decide that caring for me is too much, that I will have to start searching all over again. It was phenomenally difficult the first time; I doubt I could do it a second time.

My brother says I can find a cloud for every silver lining. He's right. I seem to be able to find anxiety, fear, sadness in almost every corner of my life. I've always been kind of this way, never truly trusting that I deserved anything good which might happen to me, never believing my worthiness for any upside, seeing only the lack of worth, seeing the downside, what bad thing could happen.

This whole emotional construct has been amplified by ALS. This is the worst dark cloud you can imagine. Every day I have something taken away from me. Every day this disease proves I am not worthy of any good thing. Every day this madness descends upon me in the form of pain, sorrow, almost perpetual loss. It's just too hard to deal with sometimes.

So I drink. I self-medicate. I work so hard to hide from these feelings, to chase away the clouds notwithstanding any silver linings there may be. To acknowledge what ALS has done to me is complete failure. I am not prepared to let it take hold of me, yet I am ill-prepared to do battle. There is little or no joy in this, with me so fearful of losing any joy I might find.