[More like most of the time, but I like to carry on as as though I'm all stable and Maslow-y.]
Now is definitely one of those times. There's a shitload of factors contributing to my current state, both immediate and historical, but I find myself incapable of forming those factors into coherency right now.
[an attempt from an earlier post]
I hate this shit. It makes me feel lost and and weak and out-of-control, and as a HUGE control-freak, this is more that a teensy issue.
It makes me feel whiny and trivial.
I carry a lot of of sadness and grief within me. A lot of pain. I've been through a lot of horrific shit.
I've been decried as liar, and and pretty much all of my history has been denied, but it's the truth. A whole lotta ugly, ugly, complicated truth.
As true as it may be, I feel like a cliche. A ridiculous, Lifetime-Movie-variety whelpish, sad-girl.
Gross.
But I am a sad girl. A deeply fucking sad girl/woman/human. And frankly, I lose the capacity to handle it properly on certain days.
It PAINS me to admit that. And if we're honest with ourselves? It pains most people to hear it. They don't want sorrow and pain and scars that won't close.
They want healing and positivity and triumph and smiles.
You and me both, world. As such?
I acknowledge it occasionally, and sometimes put my self-awareness hat on, and of COURSE I went to therapy (I mean, obviously) for it, but for the most part?
I just try to keep that shit in quarantine, away from the rest of my metal processes and emotions....
Because it scares the fuck out of me. It's never-ending. It has a profundity that even I can't fathom, and intensity that I cannot control.
Yep, I know what you are thinking: "Gosh, it sounds like you may have depression!" I do! The clinical kind, even! Fun!
In order to compensate for the sads, I tend to turn to anger. Mostly at myself for not being able to cope, sometimes-more often than I ever wanted- at my husband for being terrified/powerless at the depth of it all, and at the "world" I live in for not often giving the struggle any real validity.
Anger is less daunting for me. I'm familiar with anger- it's strangely comforting because at least I've had practice at it...mostly with in being hurled and spit in my direction, but you get the gist...anger and I are on a first name basis.
I can control it. [Right?]
It doesn't run away with my sanity as sadness is so prone to do. I am not to well-versed in sadness. Not in any healthy way. Sadness was not allowed in the environment that I grew up in.
It was mocked and the cause for wrath. No one had the right or reason to be sad except for my Mother. Her sadness was the only genuine and respected sadness. She was the only one whose sadness was warranted and needed to be cared for.
[That was pretty much the Gold Standard for all of her emotions, btw.]
The rest of the world was selfish, putting on, grasping for attention, or being overly dramatic.
Sadness cost too damned much, so I learned "not" to be. Anger was safer. It was easier. I could internalize that shit and externalize a scowl with the best of 'em....it took me a long time to learn it, but once I did, Oh, boy! Did I have the world fooled!
Pssshhh.
Look at me! I'm together! I am a rock. No one is going to break me again! Fuck being sad! Sadness is for quitters! I am beyond my childhood, my abuses, my scars, my traumas, my brain chemistry [Hello?]. I am so completely above that now! I am now well-rounded because I know that!
Oh, Depression, you have such the sardonic sense of humor.....
Therapy, Medication, Religion, Education, True Love, Motherhood--Nothing has cured it. All, at one time or another have eased it, some continually, some superficially, some earnestly, but nothing has wholly absorbed it.
I know that it will never be. That it will ebb and flow through my life forever.
In the stillness of 2am, on more nights than I care to count, I fear that someday I will be flooded and completely taken over by it.
Not in a suicidal way (though I'd be a liar if I said it didn't bring me dangerously close to the dizzying edge more than once in my youth), because suicide is selfish bullshit that leaves your friends/family holding your bag of pain and confusion while trying to deal with their OWN, [so put the phone down] but in that way that depression works best-
APATHY.
When it's done drowning you in sorrow, it just takes everything else. You don't care-no, it's not that you don't care, or won't care, it's that you can't care. It takes away your ability to feel anything but the hollowness of nothing. I have been there for brief (and some not so brief) periods of my life, and it is not pretty.
Being a mother has made depression all the more terrifying for me. I don't want it to affect my son, and I fight like hell to shield him from it, but it would be naive of me to think that I can keep it from touching him at all. It frustrates me as a wife because I am a caretaker, and all I want to do is be the pillar of strength and comfort in my husband's life, and that role is robbed from me during bouts...
That makes me feel like a failure. Which is all part of the tapes running in my head, and the powerful hold of depression in the first fucking place, which I know from a logical pov, but it feels true emotionally.
Failure.
Such an insidious word. It carries so much power. It is personified as the Boogey Man in my closet, under my bed.
And tonight?
Well tonight, it is all I can see.
Depression is a cunning bastard.
Nighttime is when he sidles up the closest. Strokes my fears and breathes the past into my present.
Some nights we dance more than others, but he's always on my card*...
Haunting the Dancehall
In a symphony of things you cannot changebut will not forgive
Rage builds slowly, toward a crescendo in Hate.
(The Chorus Begins)
Anger croons about the smallest of injustices
waltzing with the skeletons in your closet
They sway, taunting, down a macabre lane of memories
fleshing out your demons, giving substance to their grip-
so begins their deceitful dance
Watch, as the dead whirl around the floor…
1 and,
2 and,
3 and,
4.
Mistrust is rhythmic, lulling you into a fury
and as you accept a spectral invitation to the ball,
you forget that the dead can dance Forever…
1 and,
2 and,
3 and,
4.
Listen, as the band keeps playing the same
old
familiar
song.
*For those of you who have never been ravaged by a depressive disorder, here's a tidbit to note:
Depressed people are always depressed. Always. It's just a question of to what degree.
I've spent many of my years with it turned up to ELEVEN.
Because as I intro'd with:
I am emotionally compromised the fuck up.
