but no one ever knows how to turn the panic button off

i brought a kitten in today to meet my cats and all day long afterwards they have been shifty, on edge and defensive. or maybe they have been picking up my mood.

[photo removed]

i am full of a ceaselessly rising panic. i don't know the cause. i am eating non-stop in an attempt to create a tangible panic, something to distract, something to blame the nameless panic on.

i'm going mad. i'm losing my words again and i'm taking klonopin in the daytime and i'm walking 9, 10 dogs a day and i'm going bat-shit crazy, peanuts, bananas, crackers, shifty-eyed, scuttlebug mad. tearing off my skin mad. rudyard kipling had it right, how the rhino got his skin and all that jazz. i feel like there's sand under my skin. in my brain, maybe.

i need explanations for these things. for everything. for that random dizziness i get on a run. for my inability to be in public. for the compulsive desire to rip off my body and try to live without it. for the insane rationale that i can. for the nameless fear and the panic and the culmination of the fear and the panic in the night.

for the way my head just goes empty sometimes and no words come. and i lose all sense of purpose except to smoke and eat and read and starve.