Drowning

Humans are not meant to live in water; we’re meant to live on land. My funks are when I’m under the water, drowning, sometimes without a will to surface, but required by the need for oxygen to fight to get my head above the waterline, to fight to want to get my head above.

There is a state where I am treading water, so I am not under the water, I can breathe, but it takes constant effort, and I am well aware of the potential to be under the water, and a wave can send me back under easily, or my legs can get tired of treading and I could go back under.

When I am doing well, it is like I am lying on my back floating on a raft, and I don’t see the water or feel it, I breathe air naturally and easily, and I can rest some, and I can generally float about unharmed, until a wave submerges me, sometimes with warning, sometimes without. But I am out in the middle of this vast ocean, far, far from land, and even if I knew which direction to take (which I don’t), I don’t have the means to get there, and I probably also lack the will, because the undertaking would be mind-bogglingly huge.

Meanwhile, I know there are hundreds of thousands of folks on land, dancing and partying and eating and building buildings and developing computer networks and raising families and feeling a sense of identity, contentment, belonging, growth, community. People that are fulfilling their potential.

Me, I’m trying not to drown.

On Being Alone

I do not do well alone. Partly extraversion. But part of it is that when I’m alone, I spiral down more quickly, my thinking gets more confused, gets more black and white. I feel grounded only in conversation sometimes. Part of why I’m afraid of getting a job is because, at least for a while, you don’t know anybody there but you have to act professional and to me that feels like hiding and that makes me feel more isolated and alone.

Potential

Sometimes I think I am capable of so much more, of being so much more. Sometimes I feel like a bundle of greatness trapped inside a warped person. Sometimes I feel the surge of potential pressing against the seams and I purpose to let it burst out and it hits the air and the air stings and burns and scalds and I can only retreat, so defenseless against this acid sky. And then I just sit, and feel just a warped self trapped inside a warped person.

And sometimes I just get caught up in metaphors, and find I’m sitting in the exact same place.

Waiting On Death

I gave up on life several years ago. I descended into a Waiting On Death.

Most of my life over the past six years or so has been waiting on death. It is a warm place where it is easy to float on your back and numb your mind. It feels less like hell then keeping the mind turned on. Though there is a nagging. An irritating nagging. Tap, tap. “This analgesic is only superficial. The infection is real and great.” Too great for healing is my great fear. That is my motivation for so much mental Lidocaine.  

Depression Scene

I took a hiatus for a little while there. Not a good thing to do in the blogging world. But I get absorbed with something for a bit, then quit, then eventually come back around. Not sure how much of that is mood disorder related and how much is my ENFP personality.

Yesterday I tried describing my depression to my husband. I always seem to resort to pictures and analogy when describing depression. I described how failure was the overriding sense of my despair this week. It is filter through which I view and experience everything.

Failure. It colors absolutely everything, the way a gel filter on a stage light saturates the scene with its color. My life is that scene, my brain is the furniture, my memory the floor. My hope is darkened, dissolved into despair.

I sit on this stage the only actor, bathed in brazen red light. The house is dark, no partakers of this story, no one to be moved but me. But I am not moved. Exhausted by the red heat, I slump in this chair, wondering when the light will go out. 

The analogy is dramatic. So in this moment is the reading of it, but that is only because now I am not under that lamp. For today at least, house lights are up, there are a few others in the scene, and I am working on my blocking.