The Session

Insurmountable emotions

An understanding of brokenness

Loneliness incumbent

Death’s hollow emptiness

Resident of the heart

Purveyor of ills

Torturer of minds

Master of thrills

Words of wisdom

Depression’s deaf ears

Killer’s instinct

Life’s endless fears

Brittle life, brittle bones

Fragile mind, hefty tomes

Suggestible demeanor

Ever, always, kill the dreamer

Empty threats, obscure desires

Hold your breath, extinguish fires

Fear and wanting, all the same

Listen closely, you know my name

A calling in my heart, insurrection

A battle of the mind for my protection

Insistent with its claws, this my depression

Hold your peace; we’re now in session

The Descent of Awakening

When you get a pit in your stomach and a feeling of nausea, the kind with weight that you feel slowly over a long period of time, and you think without much sense that you must be going numb.

When you lose yourself in a myriad of emotions, you cry, you run to the toilet to be sick, and you worry about the people you love with a keen sense of loss and grief as if they are already gone, and you realize you have been numb for some time.

This is not when you go numb. This is when you begin to wake, when you begin to feel again. And in the midst of the bitterest feelings of sorrow, you think this must be the beginning and that things must get better from here.

But you’re not sure you really believe it.

Perceptions of an Especially Sepulchral Mind

Some people have such certainty in things. They are sure of what they will do and who they will be and where they will go and how their lives will end up. I’ve never had that. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to believe I’ll even live through the day. I could never envision myself as married, even when the date was set and it was all I wanted. And yet here I am. I can’t envision myself having children and a family. And yet that’s what I want. Hell, I can’t even imagine myself making it through this mandatory overtime.

When I was in college, I didn’t try to picture the future. Sure, I’d imagine graduating and getting a nice job (isn’t that a laugh?), but I couldn’t picture it. There’s a difference between a daydream and what you actually think your future will be like. But honestly, it never bothered me. The future was an unknown: unknowable and potentially unattainable. And I was okay with that. I was happy to live in the moment, to love the days I did have as I lived them. At points I was sure I would die, and somehow that was okay too.

Now I feel perpetually caught in the future: a visionless, empty place. I can’t foresee anything happening as I plan for it to or even as I want it to. I am consistently and almost constantly aware that I will die one day. Of course, that’s a knowledge we all have. But I didn’t used to think about it daily. I didn’t used to wonder what all I wouldn’t finish, what all I wouldn’t get to experience before I left this life.

I am a soul too-well-acquainted with my own mortality. I am a mind adrift in a sea of understanding.

Equal parts certainty and uncertainty govern my thoughts, both negative sensations. Like the knowledge that I will die mixed with the knowledge that I can never know when. The knowledge that I have so many things I’d like to achieve and the understanding that I can never know if I will.

Hopefulness diluted with hopelessness, like the joy of a thought, of a dream, drowned out by the crushing weight of finiteness and the unknowability of my own future, by a nightmare of each instance that could determine my hopes unwarranted.

“How do people make it through life knowing that one day it will end?” Maybe that sounds ludicrous to you, the idea that death could be preferable than the uncertainty that comes along with life. It’s a paradox that only makes sense in my “especially sepulchral mind.” And even then it still isn’t an entirely satisfactory solution, because the end result is ultimately the same.

The thought of my own death is foreign to me and yet familiar. Like the way you know a good friend and still learn new things about them. Except morbid thoughts are less of a friend and more of a plague, a disease in an already diseased mind. And yet somehow still comfortable. Like the bad relationship you just can’t seem to leave behind even when it’s at its worst, because the uncertainty of life on your own outweighs the negative outcomes you deal with every day.

Thoughts of life are regularly tainted by the idea that it will not be how it appears in my mind. And yet I don’t want it to be completely predictable. I remember when I used to enjoy the unpredictability of life, the spontaneity that came with it.

Would that I could enjoy it again.

Would that I could appreciate the nuances of life.

Would that I could break this cycle of depression.

Spirals

Spiralling:
The downward circles sapping energy,
Extracting wakefulness.
Plummeting:
The circles of slow descent abandoned,
All but forgotten.
Settling:
The stasis of hopelessness weighing down,
Breaking resolve.
Acclimating:
The knowledge of placement accepted,
Resigned to.
Stirring:
The spirals of activation gaining momentum,
Rising faster.
Rocketing:
The circles of slow ascent ignored,
Determined useless.

The Unforseen and Entirely Inevitable

The Unforeseen and the Entirely Inevitable

    Have you ever been excited about something, when over time what you thought was going to happen changed into something very different that was going to happen? Something that you weren't entirely thrilled about? But you already knew it needed to be done, so you are you going to do it anyway, deciding to make the best of it. You assume that once it is happening, once this change has occurred and you are in this new situation, that you will be happier about it than you were when you were looking ahead to something that had not yet happened.  At first, it is exactly as you had planned. The change is great, but so much is going on that you don't have time to miss the way things used to be. Life goes on. You think, "It is just like I said: I really am fine now that I am here."

     But you are not actually fine. For a short time you are fine. You had thought it would stay that way, but the feeling of contentment fades with time and you do miss the way it used to be. And yet you don't. You don't really want it to go back to exactly the way it was before, because you love some things about this new life. But at the same time as you feel this love, you feel pain about other things that you do not love about this new life. Things such as the loneliness. Those are the things that you do want to go back to how they used to be. But you know that nothing will ever be the same - nothing. It will never go back to what used to be normal. This is the new normal. And it kills you to think of it that way. You feel as though depression is waiting at the doorstep. Every once in a while, it actually makes its way into your life - into your heart and mind and you sit down and cry out your pain until the tears no longer come and you sit in silence, with the same amount off pain as before, because the tears do nothing to console your hurting heart. And so instead, you look to other things besides tears.

     You begin to compose. You compose a string of words that does not in any way truly express the way you feel, and yet it is the closest you can get to it. And still it does not do your pain justice. It does not do your loneliness justice. You wonder as you come up with these words and record them, if all of this is your own fault. It is your personality and your own choices that caused you to be in this position in the first place, is it not? Surely it must be. For no one else put you here. And so you blame yourself. Who else's fault could it be? None but your own. So you come to the end of your composition, feeling alone and having no one to blame and hating yourself and who you have become and who you have been in the past. You don't want things to go back to how they were and you don't want things to stay the same. You are a selfish, undeserving person. Of course you do not have what you want - you are never happy with what you do have. And so you end, understanding better your problem, feeling worse about yourself, with your depression intact but less overwhelming, with no solution whatsoever.

September 18