The long dark cloud’ll getcha down.
Had that rolling around in my head for a while. It’s a song lyric, I know that. In my head, it’s done in a mournful country-rock style, maybe a bit bluesy, with close harmony.
Who know, maybe I will be inspired to write the rest of it one day.
Prolly not, though.
My point is, I woke up feeling really depressed. I feel pretty damn low right now. A heavy shadow weighs on my soul and makes me want to find a nice cozy grave somewhere and curl up for a nice long nap.
A dirt nap, if you will.
I can’t handle anything right now. It took a lot of spoons just to get out of bed, and then I spent a long time in my classic “sitting on the edge of my bed feeling lost” mode.
It’s like I lose all momentum and drive and just sit there lost in my own little world, at equilibrium, in stasis, at rest.
It would actually be pleasant if I wasn’t so sad at the time.
Still, maybe I should learn to just go with it. Let it happen. Release all pressures to go do stuff and let the experience play out at its own pace while trying my best to relax and just enjoy the feeling.
After all, I know from experience that it will end naturally if I let it. Eventually I will just get up on my own without having to force it.
Seems less stressful and more efficient to me.
And at least it’s sadness and not numbness. I am way past the point of wanting to feel damn near anything rather than feeling nothing, and all the bad stuff that comes with it.
Numbness is death. It brings isolation, alienation, paranoia, and madness. My mind knows what inputs it should be getting and when it doesn’t get them, it hurts.
Worse than that, it feels just plain wrong. And with that sense of wrongness comes a kind of biological panic.
Like when your hand or your foot falls asleep, and you just HAVE to wake it up again right away because anything is better than the feeling of it being…. missing.
Maybe that’s just me.
But I am way past the point where I would rather feel even pretty negative emotions than to feel nothing. And when something does manage to trigger strong emotions in me, even negative ones, there is always a part of me that is practically weeping with relief at being alive and warm again, at least for a little while.
It’s a mind divided against itself, really. Part of my mind is generating the numbness that makes the rest of my mind suffer. Presumably it does so in response to that big Wound of mine just like my physical body would pump out endorphins in response to a physical wound of that magnitude.
So once more, we arrive back at that big Wound of mine. All my problems flow from it. The road forward always leads to it and I will continue to get nowhere in life until I heal it and get it out of my way.
And I am working on it. Every day I thaw it out a little more and reclaim a little more of myself. Maybe one of these days, the ice dam will crack and all the aqua vitae it’s been holding back will flood into my beings and I will be whole and safe and alive again.
I’m ready for my Springtime, Mother Nature.
It’s only a matter of time.
More after the break.
OYID (Oh Yeah, I’m Dying) Episode One Million
Super depressed again.
I was doing okay there for a while. Managed to get myself out of bed and into the shower and into clothes before heading out for the usual Sunday shopping etc.
This despite still feeling pretty depressed and therefore really not wanting to go anywhere or do anything. The temptation to skip going out this week was strong. Would have been so easy to just say I felt sick and stay home.
Would have been true, too. Being depressed is a kind of sickness.
A really bad kind, in fact.
But no, I made myself do it. I am sick and tired of giving up all the time. Of just collapsing whenever I feel down and thus letting depression rule me.
So fuck how I felt, I made myself do it anyhow.
And it’s not like I was miserable as a result. Granted, I felt tired and down when I was shopping with Joe and Julian, but not intolerably so. And I was pretty grateful when I finally got to sit when we got back to the car with my stuff.
But my mood was still pretty good. And as always, I loved talking with my friends as tout le gang (Joe, Julian, Felicity, and I) hung out in the McD’s parking lot.
Oh, the privations of Covid. I would rather be at Denny’s.
But then, as we were chatting, I noticed what seemed like a harmless little skin tag on my left hand, smack dab in the middle of the heel of the palm.
So like I have done thousands of times before, I peeled it off. Normally, that removes it harmlessly. But not this time.
This time it hurt. And bled.
And I am sitting there bleeding and feeling bewildered and depressed. Yet another way my body has found a new way to fail and betray me and make me feel feeble and fragile like I was made of pipe cleaners and wet Kleenex.
So now I am quite depressed again, and feeling morbid and sad. My world has become treacherous and disturbing and gross. I feel like something truly awful is going to happen at any moment and that it is far too late for me to prevent it.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want my life to be over before it ever began.
I don’t want to never get to be a grownup.
I don’t want to end up bedridden and full of tubes and living a disgusting and humiliating lifestyle where I can’t do even the most basic things for myself and any hope I had for even the tiniest shred of dignity is gone.
I am so scared right now. I wish I could slip this life of mine off like clothes and run naked into the twilight in search of another home.
But I am stuck with the consequences of a long term illness that I was too sick to fight.
I am scared, and depressed, and feel like there is no hope for me.
But you know what?
This is still better than feeling nothing.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.