Yup, this is my life now : slumping into my computer chair, breathing hard and aching all over. just from being to the kitchen to make myself a PB&J and grab stuff from the fridge so I can have lunch.
Once more, I was tempted to skip the trip and just graze on the trail mix I keep here in the bedroom with me, and once more I did the healthy thing and got myself up and on my feet and moving instead, and once more I am being punished for it.
Such is the nature of my worsening existence on this burning lifeboat of a life.
I guess I am just too crazy to live. That will be my epitaph. And the obituary will read,
“He was a great guy, but his mental illness kept him from taking care of himself physically and ultimately that’s what killed him. ”
God, it’s 20 minutes later and my breathing and heart rate still haven’t gone back to normal yet. That’s not good.
That’s not good at ALL.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to end up helpless and full of tubes in a hospital bed somewhere. I don’t want to become so weak and feeble that I can’t even get out of bed any more and all I do is sleep all day because that’s all I CAN do.
I feel like I am drowning in quicksand while my friends watch helplessly on dry land. I know that I am sinking and I know there are dozens of things I know I “should” be doing to help myself get out of this deadly predicament and I can’t do any of them because I have this terribly painful wound deep within my mind and until I finish dealing with that massive trauma, everything else will have to wait.
Even if it can’t.
Even if I can’t.
Even if I am sure to die way before I get over myself.
And that will be the ultimate victory for my demons of mental illness. They couldn’t get me to kill myself outright – I’ve gotten too good at shutting those thoughts down before they start for that.
And anyhow, fuck suicide, I ain’t done yet.
Arguably I haven’t even started.
So if outright suicide isn’t a possibility then neglecting myself to death will have to do.
But that’s not really it. That’s just a smokescreen for the real problem : I am deeply broken on the inside and I have no idea how to fix it.
When I try to gather my energies to accomplish anything of substance, the energy just flows right back out again. My system rejects.it, saying it has no room to take on new tasks what with all it has to deal with already.
Too many chainsaws to juggle, sorry.
Ergo, all I can manage is to limp ineffectually along as my doom bears down on me like a runaway steam train and I am not even tied to the tracks.
I am just too crazy to get out of the way.
More after the break.
I don’t want to be up
And yet here I am.
I feel so very fragile and shaky and weak. All I really want to do is lie down in the dark and whimper. But I got my words to do.
Got to do the words.
After all, this 1K words a day thing is my only link to the world of productivity, and a thin and tenuous link at that.
As long as I do my words, my life means….. something. I have done something with my time. My life is not entirely just a series of wasted moments poured out of a broken bucket into the vast latrine of time.
I paint pictures with words.
I can’t imagine what life was like way back in 2010, before I launched the Million Word Year project to kickstart my life as a writer.
Wrote my millionth word 11 months later, in early December 2011. How could I get it done in only 11 months, you ask?
By being awesome. Duh.
Seriously though, by writing more like 2K words a day when to get those Million Words in a year, I only needed to write 1,667 a day.
Turned out that once I got started writing, I had a lot to day.
And here it is 12 years later and I still haven’t run out.
Not even close.
Before that wacky project. my days truly were wasted. One bled into the next till they all ran together and life meant nothing at all.
Was a lot more suicidal back then too. Not a coincidence.
So I am glad I managed to dig myself out of that hole. But I have felt like I needed to take things to the next level for a long time now.
I need to level up my writing but I have not come up with the right idea to inspire me yet.
Lots of possibilities, of course. As always. A creative mind like mine can always generate a ton of possible answers.
But they are always “other people” kind of answers. The sort of things that sound sensible and plausible as things other people could totally do…. but not me.
Because I’m broken, remember? Crazy. And the heart of my craziness is a massive cold steel wall that keeps motivation from getting into even the same area code as action.
Until that is resolved, nothing will happen, and all the best ideas in the world are like trying to get your car’s engine to start by replacing the spark plugs when the problem is that the fuel line has been cut.
I use weird metaphors.
I have tried to get that across to my therapist. He, understandably, keeps trying to goad me into action and I keep trying to explain to him why that does nothing but hurt me.
He has been my therapist for well over a decade now, and I have made extremely little verifiable progress in that time, so his desire for concrete results makes sense.
But if he doesn’t even understand the basic nature of the problem, we will keep talking past one another and getting nowhere.
And speaking of going nowhere, time to rest.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.