Hi there friends. It’s been a while.
It has been a hard, hard road these last few months. I made some big, weird decisions in my personal life – the kind of decisions that are so hard for those of us with depression and deeply ingrained guilt reflexes. Basically, I decided to choose my own well-being above anything else. Anything. My job, my parents, my financial security. It seemed so selfish at the time.
When you tell someone that they’re too sensitive for their own good, realize that you are insulting a person whom you’ve acknowledged is hyper-sensitive, about a character trait over which they have no control.
Cool observation, bro.
If you’re familiar with Alice Miller’s work on emotionally abused children, or if you yourself suspect that you may be dealing with the adult symptoms of emotional/verbal/physical child abuse, you’ll appreciate the video below. It starts off a little slow, but stick with it.
This is an excellent, simple explanation of what Alice Miller referred to in The Drama of the Gifted Child as the consequences of an early narcissistic disturbance in the developing child. Listen to what he mentions at the beginning of the video: Unexplained feelings of inadequacy, shame, being drawn to people who are more concerned with themselves than with you – these are all the adult symptoms of an emotionally traumatic childhood.
I’m a big old Batman fan, and I’ve been watching a lot of Gotham lately. Even though the writing is, well, sub-par…if it involves characters in Gotham City, then for some reason I can’t rip my eyes away. Except for the Arkham Asylum scenes.
Now, usually, I like my blogging to be a bit more refined than this. But this is going to be a rant. Because I’m fucking pissed off.
I am sick to fucking death of scrolling Facebook or Instagram and seeing those disgustingly ideal moments of everyone’s lives. Wedding pictures in sepia and “candid” shots of toddlers in perfect, unstained Sunday dresses with bows in their hair. Happy married couples my age – people I know – taking big smiling selfies out at the ballgame or their anniversary dinner. Every single post is just one instant in a million, but it’s done up with enough eyeliner and contour and filtering to make you actually believe, for a moment, that their life really is perfect, and that in comparison yours is a filthy shambles.
Well, fuck that.
You know that wonderful daydream you have sometimes, the one about just picking everything up and leaving your job forever? It’s the dream of packing all your crap together out of your cubicle, wiping your hard drive, and peacing out in the middle of the day. Well…two weeks ago…I did it.
I’m sitting here trying to come up with reasons not to die. I don’t have any yet, but at least I finally verbalized how I feel, and I wanted to share. If anyone understands this, I figure, it will be you.
Life feels as though I once spent a moment or two in a field, smelling flowers on the breeze, feeling sunshine on my skin, and hearing birds sing. But now and ever since, I’m permanently relegated to a closed room with a small window. I can see the field, I can appreciate it even, sometimes, but I can’t feel it. After a while, I’ve forgotten how the flowers smell or what birdsong sounds like, and just looking at a flower or bird is aggravating instead of uplifting. I’d rather nuke the entire field than have to keep sitting here, staring at it.
That’s how I feel, all the time, every day, every hour.
Here’s a slightly more positive addendum to my previous post. Being, you know, a girl, I’ve watched my fair share of makeup/clothing/random useless crap haul videos. Well, I had a haul of my own today.
A library haul.
Note: I don’t intend to disparage any practicing Christian, or anyone of another religion or faith, with this post. My anger and difficulties arise from my own individual experiences with faith institutions throughout my life. I think there’s probably not enough of a conversation happening concerning mental healthcare, personal faith, and their interactions. This is just my two cents into the jar.
I took a little step forward last night when I told an old friend (an old friend whom, like most of my old friends, I met at church camp) that I no longer consider myself a Christian. Being the curious – and compassionate – person she is, she grilled me for a quite a while on what had tangibly changed in my belief system. Maybe “grilled” isn’t the right word; she was just intensely curious to know what my thoughts are, without judgment. Thoughts being difficult to process at the moment, I don’t know if I really expressed myself very well, but we discussed something that I think is so relevant, and so important, to a person of faith (if you like that expression) who grapples with deep depression.
There are too many horrible paradoxes involved in clinical depression to list (effectively, anyway), but I’m stuck in one today. Being constructive, in whatever way, is one of the only things that I’ve found will really drag me out of a dark frame of mind, and almost trick me into focusing my energy outside myself, rather than on how awful I feel. Of course, if you feel awful and low enough, the impetus to simply stand up and put something in your hands seems to be beyond your reach. Stupid…freaking…paradox.
Tyger Lilly 