I realize now that pretty much for the entirety of 2019, I struggled with a nasty spell of depression. My emotional and mental health was trash. To make matters worse, nothing about the world helped to improve my state of mind. Each time I tried to pick myself up a little, it seemed something horrible would happen in the media. Or I’d get into a revealing argument with a person I cared about that gave me insight to their true nature, which would lower my spirit and remind me just how messed up everything is right now (or has always been and I’m just now realizing it).
I tried to remind myself that the things I can’t do anything about didn’t need to have any bearing on me personally, or what I do in the course of a day. So, I got really good at keeping my head down; staying busy all the time; telling myself I was just fine when I was really tossing my emotions aside, like coins in a really deep well. Even if they sink away out of sight, they’re still down there somewhere… waiting for the right current to surface again unexpectedly.
This had a huge impact on my energy and my ability to execute new projects… which is a problem because my quality of life is more or less dependent on my willingness to wake up every morning and decide which direction I’m steering the ship. That and I’m also paddling the ship too. After the first few months of the year, I started to feel dead in side. I couldn’t navigate or paddle my boat. I was stuck adrift.
But that’s burnout, right? I may have experienced little spurts of exhaustion in the past, but I eventually bounced back from them with resilience. Those were nothing like this. What I felt last year was probably my first encounter with a completely empty gas tank, stranded on the side of the freeway… with no cell phone.
I don’t have health insurance really… because I’m technically homeless and unemployed. I can hardly afford to go to a dentist to sort out my mouth, let alone a therapist to help me sort out my mind. Writing helps though. It’s probably the best self care I can enact. Sitting down and forcing my emotions and thoughts to take the shape of words and sentences that I can look at and make sense of helps me understand me.
So this is what I’ll do. I’m going to become a shameless milking of thoughts. They may not all be good thoughts, or developed thoughts… or thoughts that have finished fermenting in my head to become a refined wine of personal opinion, but they wont be unspoken, clogging up my headspace. It will be like sucking venom out of a wound, through the act of bleeding out.
I realize that there was a previous time in my life when I use to write about my thoughts quite regularly in a public space. It was on a site called “Live Journal”. This site was big right before MySpace became a thing, and later FaceBook. It was popular while I was in high school because us kids could put our developing thoughts in writing and share them with our peers. The only way others got to know what those thoughts were, was if they cared enough to read them. Your friends could then formulate their own thoughts about what you had written and respond to you. Of course, this was a spawning ground for a lot of drama… but it was better than everyone being on Zoloft… or killing themselves… or shutting themselves away from other human interaction.
What I pose in this category should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m working through things. What I think right now might not necessarily be what I think in a month from now. This is a place where I can work stuff out, collect thoughts from others who wish to weigh in, and banish some of those demons chilling at the bottom of my dark and fathomful well.
Cheers!
Be brave, miss Sarah. You rock!