What changed?

What happens when you feel like you're trapped in a silent prison? Like, you have so much to say, you have so many racing thoughts, but your anxiety is forcing you to lock them all away. You can't find the right words to convey what you are feeling? You can't calm your racing heart long enough to make sense of what's going on in your brain. You can't slow the thoughts racing through your mind long enough to focus on any single one at a time. What do you do then?
I find myself scrolling through Facebook and twitter, refreshing the pages over and over and over, like, literally every few seconds, desperately searching for the answers, or waiting for someone to notice how completely stir crazy I am going. Only the answers aren't there, they never are, and no one notices either, because when they ask "Are you ok?" My mouth automatically kicks into a big smile and answers "yeah I'm great thanks" or the infamous "I'm fine". And the exchange is pretty much over before it even began. And so the cycle continues, and I continue, and "I'm fine" and I smile, and I get on with life, and I go through the motions every day, only, I'm not fine, and I wish I could stop lying and saying that I am and pretending that I'm the same person I was a year ago. You see, I had a taste of what it was like to feel 'normal' to feel confident, and happy, and to actually like myself, and I loved it.
So what changed? Was it me? How did I change? What changed me? And more importantly, how do I get that me back? Or is she a write off now? You know, like the 14 year old me, the one who had never been raped, the girl I spent 18 years trying to piece back together, constantly punishing myself for failing miserably at the task in hand before realising that it wasn't all about being the old me anymore, it was actually about loving, nurturing and creating a new me, one born out of the trauma in much the same way that a Phoenix rises out of the ashes. And I managed it too, I nurtured the new me, I cared for her and I learned how to love her and life was pretty amazing for quite a while.
Then it started to change, and I started to question my abilities, and I started to realise that I wasn't actually this fantastic inspirational person that people kept telling me I was. I was winging it, I didn't know how to be confident, or accept compliments, and the more the compliments came, the more they battered at my suddenly fragile confidence, eventually smashing through it completely. Maybe because I stopped trusting in my own abilities, maybe because I stopped believing in myself, maybe because being told I was looking fab, was suddenly just too overwhelmingly terrifying to me. The compliments that had built me up, were suddenly tearing me down, yet the only thing that had changed was me, because I was so scared of looking good, I was terrified of failing to live up to everyone's expectations, because I didn't realise that the only expectations of me were actually only my own. Because I felt under so much pressure to achieve that I crumbled under the pressure. Because a couple of people said and did things that made me feel like I was inadequate and I let myself believe that, that I wasn't good enough, I wasn't worthy, clearly I was a bad person. So my mind ran with these thoughts, it reinforced the feelings constantly, and bam, here I am, a mere shell again, trapped in the belief that I'll never be good enough, terrified of everything, and yet maintaining the sense of complete normalcy to the outside world. A world that doesn't see the hand that shakes as it types these words, that sees only a smile and chirpy attitude, a world that doesn't hear my heart pound when the phone rings, nor do they realise that my silence isn't ignorance, my lack of calls are not born of rudeness but simply an irrational drive to protect myself from accidentally letting the mask slip. The past few months for me, have been all about protection, protecting myself from getting hurt by people, be it physically or emotionally, but I'm beginning to feel like the one person I truly need protection from is actually myself, or I might just self combust.