Write Through It
Expressing myself through the written word is the art that gets me through my darkest days
I’m writing this, in the aftermath of an awful five day period.
Throughout those five days, I was hardly able to bring myself to get out of bed.
An internal sadness topped off with an extreme lack of energy plagued me practically out of nowhere, after feeling better than I maybe ever had, the previous two months.
This is not a piece about the prior two months, how good I felt or the therapy and antidepressant that helped me get to that point.
This, is instead me writing through and about the darkness I endured over the past five days, that I thankfully seem to finally be approaching the other side of.
My logic in doing so, is if I can write about the good, which I have, then to not write about the bad would be to not tell the whole story.
During five of the most mentally painful days that I can recall in quite some time, all of the old depressed feelings and thoughts came back exponentially exemplified.
I wanted to sleep the days away but couldn’t, yet I could hardly bring myself to get out of bed. The anxiety, irrational fear, and recurring thoughts.
I, like so many others, have always been my own worst enemy.
Sometimes I isolate and it takes me too long to realize, I’m in bad company.
During this most recent dark stretch, I had no appetite and no food seemed appealing. I’d force myself to eat something light a few times a day — but it was very much forced.
Just getting up to shower and perform basic daily functions seemed like a chore. The thought of answering texts and phone calls seemed unbearable, for reasons I couldn’t justify or put into words. It just seemed like too much.
Missed call after missed call, from people who were likely only calling to see if I was okay. I couldn’t bring myself to answer and pretend I was okay — nor burden them with the truth that I very much wasn’t.
I was not able to let go of anxious thoughts, at times they interrupted my sleep and certainly robbed me of any inner peace. It was anxiety and depression hitting me with everything they collectively had, after a two-month hiatus.
Almost as if to remind me, no matter how long they may remain at bay for, they are always right there with me and likely always will be. Where I go, they go — and they can find a problem to just about any solution.
We are 9 days into the new year and until now I haven’t been able to bring myself to write in 2020. I physically felt incapable of opening my laptop and doing the one thing that has always come natural to me, which is writing.
Even at this seemingly transitional moment, it is still a forced action. This is my way of fighting back against a major depressive disorder, after five days of not being able to find the fight inside myself.
There is no worse feeling than being continually hit, and not being able to find the energy within you to defend yourself.
Except perhaps, when those hits are coming from within yourself, from your own irrational fears, anxieties, thoughts, feelings, and mind.
What is the proper defense against your own negative and fearful internal dialogue, when it just won’t let up?
What do you do when you feel physically incapable of feeling joy?
When you are so weighed down by your own unhappiness, you feel unable to perform basic daily functions.
I am painfully self-aware and overly sensitive to my own thoughts and feelings, even the ones I know to be irrational and untrue, unfortunately.
I refer to the total sum of all my conditions that were likely passed down to me genetically, from anxiety to depression, addiction and alcoholism as the disease of me. They are conditions I and millions of others have learned time and time again, there is no absolute cure for or solution to.
They are simply a part of me and are things I have to learn to live with to the best of my ability on any given day.
I have to be as proactive as I can on good days, knowing I may not be able to do much of anything on the really bad ones.
I have to relentlessly work towards having more good days than bad ones. Whatever it takes. By any means necessary. If I don’t do this for me, I won’t be able to do much of anything for anyone else.
Therapy and honest conversations with my Doctors and as well as with myself and all of you via writing, help in a way nothing else does — it is without parallel and I’m eternally grateful for this outlet and platform.
I have to put my physical and mental health and well being over every other thing in my life. Without it, I have nothing else — including the hope of having any kind of life at all. Existing and living are very different ball games.
I have to love myself unconditionally and show it through action and continuous deep inner self-work.
My only real goal in life is to simply live a life worth living.
Because what I do know is the previous five days I endured didn’t qualify as living at all. I was merely existing, barely surviving — and that is not a life I’ll ever settle for.
