Ouch.

 

I went to lunch with a friend earlier this week.  She checked in on how I’ve been doing and before I could even rearrange the words in my head to be funny or at least less brutal, I blurted out that I am frustrated that I’m not improving.  I hadn’t even considered that mentally, which is odd, since my brain is a hyper moron who won’t shut up.  I then mentioned that what continues to catch me off guard is that my long history of depression and addiction didn’t prepare me at all for this grief, like I had been practicing my whole life to be a starting pitcher but I was assigned to guard a hockey goal instead.

I’ve been thinking about it since.  

I’ve drafted so many paragraphs for this and all of them have tried to make sense of feeling lost, of my skills and methods of coping not working as well as I feel they should.  Why would they?  I’ve trained for so long to stave off suicidal ideation, to get myself up to walk, to bike, to cook actual healthy food, to drink water, to find work worth doing and do, at the very least, a good enough job.  I’m not saying these didn’t and haven’t helped, they have.  It’s remarkable how much worse my mental health is when I am not able to ride a bike.  

I have not trained, however, on how to deal with a wound so real.  The ugly truth about the misery that comes from depression is that it’s made up.  It’s a lie told by the brain because some of the wiring up there is faulty and the brain fights this realization every chance it can get.  All of my methods to fight it are essentially countering the lie with truth: despair will not take hold against palpable, even if small, steps towards progress and improvement.  If depression is a waste, I have to fill every gap it leaves with substance.  And to prevent you from getting the wrong idea, half the time I’m not very successful.

But this grief, it just hurts, and it hasn’t let up, and I have no idea what help to ask for.  There’s no talking through it, no unpacking all the intellectualization and justification and guilt that comes with depression.  It’s taken me weeks to write even this (barely a page long!), any other talking about it just turns the volume up on the hurt.  

It’s been like this for months and I’m no better at dealing with it.  I’m still prone to losing my shit over tiny things (like accidentally dropping my keys in the trash bin).  The nightmares are nightly, sometimes more than one.  The imagery of my reliable sources of unconditional love in total physical deterioration, with all of the biological grossness that comes with it continues to haunt me.  I joke that the reason I don’t do horror is because my subconscious doesn’t need new material with which to torment me while I sleep, and, well, my subconscious got new material anyway.

Somehow the laundry has continued to get done.  I haven’t eaten too much trash.  I flirted with drinking too much over the holidays and paid for it.  I haven’t smoked despite desperately wanting to.  I’m functioning, I suppose.  I guess I just needed to purge, to moan into the void.  I get so frustrated with complainers so I resist doing so as much as possible and go into self-loathing loops when I catch myself doing it.  I still haven’t even decided if I’m going to post this or if just writing it out is the important thing.  But this just hurts and when something hurts you say ouch.

I guess I could’ve just said that, huh?