Dancer In The Dark Vs. When The Wind Blows

9-22-14

Off and on in my life I fight these bouts with just unfathomable sadness. I find myself with this bottomless pit in my insides; it is like a gaping maw that swallows all the joy and energy around me leaving me with a profound feeling of emptiness. I don’t know when they’ll come, I don’t know how long they’ll stay, and I don’t ever know how I’ll deal with them. They just sort of erupt like a silent volcano, and they scorch the Earth around me.

I’m going through this right now, and have been for about a month or so. The thing is when this occurs I get to a place mentally where I see everything through a skewed prism. I seem to want things, but the reality is I don’t. I surround myself with people to armor myself against what I feel, but honestly it is a temporary band aid, and in the end I’m left alone with that black hole in my guts. I can do a good job during this time focusing on the needs of others, throwing myself at problems that only affect me peripherally, and just trying to wrap myself up in other people.

When left to my own devices I just want to retreat to the bed room or to the basement and hide in mundane tasks. It always feels like if I don’t I will literally curl up into myself and disappear entirely. There are all these small inconsequential things that usually just nip at the edges of my confidence, my emotional state, and my mind but when I’m struggling with this I feel like they are literally chomping chunks away of who I am.

These things tend to pass after a while. I stumble through them and eventually grasp tightly onto some coping strategy and get back to who I am. I think the thing that makes each one of these stretches of depression so terrifying for me is I start to wonder if this is it. Will this be the one I don’t come out of? Is this where it started for my Father? Is this what every day of the rest of my life is going to be like?

I wake up every day during these periods with a horrible fear and dreadful anxiety that I will never find my way out of this maze of melancholy. I feel rundown, my brain runs slow, I have less than zero motivation for anything, I am hard to be around, and I can’t seem to find joy in much of anything. Seriously, when you lose your appetite for food, for sex, for most meaningful interactions it is frustrating. It is frustrating for me, and then in turn becomes frustrating for everyone in my immediate sphere.

The thing is it is just as if not MORE so frustrating for me. I know this irrational. I know that I don’t have any issues that should be bringing me low. I am well aware how I can become this absolute wellspring of negativity literally sucking the joy out of a ten mile radius. The fact that I’m fighting this internal struggle with myself essentially doesn’t make any sense. People who have never dealt with that self-doubt, self-loathing, and the loss of self into an abyss of bleakness have no point of reference. Their ‘help’, their misperception, and their notions of what I should do and how I should feel only add to the feelings of worthlessness.

It is just a never ending cycle of anxiety, stress, and depression. I can’t figure it out and that makes me feel like crap. The ‘help’ of others can’t help and that makes us all feel worse. And that ends up feeding into more frustration, more anxiety, then more stress over that anxiety, and eventually just more feelings of hopelessness as I wallow in the confusion, sadness, and low grad anger about feeling any and all of this. I end up just swallowing it all down and trying to put on a good ‘face’. That way I don’t have to share that part of me or bring anybody along with me on that journey.

The reality is I do a pretty good job of faking my way through these times with most people. I just try to feed off of their moods and do what they do. Last night was a L.E.W.G.I. event and I laughed long and hard about a great deal of very funny comments, and yet the moment that they all left the veneer comes off. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy that time, hell it isn’t like I don’t on some level enjoy any of the time I get to enjoy with any of my Friends it is just so F’Ning fleeting.

Everything feels so fleeting. I don’t know why I can’t talk about it, why when I’m asked about it I either lie through my teeth that everything is ‘fine’, or that I’m just ‘tired’. I just find it so hard to express myself verbally about this. Even these words feel paltry and pathetic as opposed to the actual feeling of it all, or in some cases the lack of feeling about everything. All I can do is put my head down, push forward, and keep trying to find some coping mechanism that will help me shake off this current stretch of this ‘thing’. And hope. I can hope that this isn’t the time that it never goes away.

I don’t even have any RANDOM CRAP(!) for you, honestly I just don’t care enough to write anything more…