The new groove

Still working on cutting a new channel for myself, a new container for my ever so liquid self.

After all, if a liquid takes the shape of it’s container, the only way for the liquid to change its shape is to change the container. Right?

I have been passive for too long, and while I do not expect to be able to make myself into a new person by sheer force of will (that way madness lies), I do feel that by working at it a little bit, all the time, I can change the shape I am in.

That shape being “round”. Ha ha ha.

But I am staying positive and fighting off the demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. It;s tough going sometimes. It would be so easy to let go and resume my previous passive, self-hating shape.

Because that’s the thing about all that self-loathing nonsense : it’s easier. After all, I have been pacing back and forth in the same groove for a bloody long time. My tireless treads have worn away at the floor of my psyche until this groove of mine is mighty tall and steep on the sides.

And I spent a long time thinking that I had to climb those sheer steep sides in order to be well, and that was clearly impossible, so I figured I was fucked.

But that is the classic kind of all-or-nothing thinking that depression uses to defend itself, and I am not my depression. I am a wonderful, talented, intelligent, sweet-natured fellow who happens to have let an unwelcome house guest called depression vastly overstay its welcome and take over the whole household, and I am damned good and ready to kick it out no matter what it takes.

Even if it can only be done by steady, focused erosion, rather than the earth-shattering volcanic explosion that part of me would prefer.

Just get it the fuck over with already! Yank that Band-aid off, scream like a motherfucker, then get on with your life.

But no. While there might be small landslides like my recent fox based emotional meltdown, for the most part it will a process of filling myself with the good and thereby displacing the bad, pushing it to the borders where it belongs, and then out of myself entirely, never to return.

It’s about letting in the good things. Look around your life for the things that are good. Friends and family that care about you. The music, television shows, and so on that you like. All the good parts of your personality and your abilities. Reach out across depression’s chilly void and touch them. Defy the little voice in your head that says it is dangerous to embrace the good in life, that everything that brings you up will only lead to a bigger, harder fall, that to do this is to change everything in a frighteningly unpredictable and uncontrollable way. Better the devil you know, right?

Wrong. That voice is the voice of depression and it is not you. That voice is a cheater and a liar and does not have your best interests at heart. It merely wants to maintain the current fascist state of your soul, with depression and fear in total command of your capital city.

So reach. Stretch. Connect with the good things in your life. Let their warmth fill up that dark and terrible voice inside. Ignore all other voices. Let the goodness push the bad stuff into the darkness beyond where it belongs.

And it might take some doing. You might have to drill through a lot of layers of habit and lassitude and fear of change before you truly reach the mother lode.

That is why it is so important to reach and stretch towards it. Once you can feel the warmth of these things, even if it is very faint, it will provide the motivation needed to keep on drilling. Every inch closer becomes another inch warmer. The activity becomes inherently rewarding.

That is how I feel about what I am doing now inside my head. Filling myself with as much of the warm pure light as I can, and letting it illuminate the path out, the path I must make myself, but which beckons me ever onward toward a better, brighter future.

A future without depression, where I am free to simply live my life joyously and freely, unencumbered, able to translate all of my inner energies into outer action on the world without the constant deadening echo chamber of self-doubt and hesitation caused by the eye that tries to see all directions at the same time. A future where I accept whatever comes along, and accept both the intensity of my personal power and the limits of it.

You are not responsible for every single thing that happens to you. That is a naive and ill thought out New Age notion that sounds good and empowering at first but is actually a recipe for insanity.

Some things, in fact, a lot of things, you can control. But there is a whole big bad world out there with its own idea of what to do, and you only control your little piece of it, and that, imperfectly.

Accept that there are a lot of things that have happened to you that were not your fault and that you could not have possibly done anything to prevent with what you knew then.

The past is over. It cannot be changed. You do not live there and never will. Life cannot go backwards. It can only go ever forwards and choosing to look backwards all the time merely makes it much harder to avoid the obstacles in your path.

And that is as true for dwelling on the bad things as it is for dwelling on the good. Nostalgia or trauma, both can be easier than facing the uncertainty of the future.

The past, after all, is quite certain and entirely predictable.

But it’s over. Time to wake up, and move on.

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