These days, every morning I wake up, I am tired. I touch the top of my eyelids to see if my eyes have gotten better – nope, still sore. I look into the mirror – yup, still enlarged vessels.
I go through the motions everyday, trying my very best to not do anything strenuous to make things worse, and that includes limiting time to do what I love to do: write and read.
I am impatient, a lot of my strengths come from my impatience. I am good at solving problems because I cannot stand to have something unsolved. I lose sleep over answers I am trying to find.
That becomes terrible when the problem is me.
I am trying really hard not to see myself as a problem, but as a person who just needs a little nurturing, recovery and love. I go through my past scenarios every day, wondering if there was any point in time I could have done better, to have prevented this slow slide into forced paralysis. I think about what I have given up, and I still question if there was any chance in hell I could have not given them up.
I swing between blaming myself and being proud of myself, to be capable of taking this step.
But the swings are getting more infrequent, and I find myself in that place of pride a little more. I am actually grateful that my body has just simply given up, because I was forced to revaluate the life I was leading. The issue was the life I was leading was such a great life, I never had the opportunity to think whether it was what I truly wanted. It was hard to slowly discover that the life I really wanted to lead is a life that will be full of trials and tribulations, not a life that would give me enough to be left alone.
By left alone, I mean a life that would stop people and myself from questioning what the hell I was doing, if I was doing the right thing, if I was successful. Now, I am choosing a life that will be a lifetime of questioning, possibly starting with if I am sane.
Living at the edge, when sometimes it feels like death, ironically feels the most alive. Routine and comfort was paramount to stabilising my mental health, and yet it was also slowly killing me inside. How can I possibly find that delicate balance?
A lot of things are like muscles. The more we do it, the less difficult it becomes. People tell me I must be brave for talking about my depression openly, and it was terrifying when I started seven years ago, but now I am pretty comfortable about it. What is more terrifying to me now, is the realisation that to lead the life I truly want to lead, is that it will slowly diverge me from everything I am familiar with. I need to cross a chasm into a new world, letting go of everything that served and supported me. I will need to let go of any desire to be seen.
But that is what it will take to break new ground, to seek new territory. To live a life that only I myself am capable of creating. That means not giving a shit to the external world, and it also means having to endure concerned, quizzical looks in the eyes of people who care about me, because there wouldn’t be a framework of evaluation known to them, or even to myself. I can only know that I am on the right path by trusting my inner voice, my gut.
Someone once told me that if I continue to follow my gut, I will do amazing things. I am barely alive right now, so I find it tremendously challenging to believe that, but perhaps it is not amazing things that I want to do, but simply, authentic things. Things that I truly, deeply, care about, even if nobody else cares.
Maybe I just want to light a candle in a corner of darkness, even if that darkness is me.
That is what that will give myself the will to live again, to be painfully honest about who I am, even if it comes at the price of never, ever, being seen by anyone else again, in exchange for my capacity to see myself.