I haven’t being doing well lately. The trouble from a storytelling perspective is that it’s not even in any spectacularly dramatic or interesting way, either. I’ve just been unemployed post-redundancy for too long, devoid of a social life for too long, stuck at home feeling helplessly stuck and directionless for too long, and compulsively distracting myself from it all to cope for too long. Sometimes a part of me, in the back of my mind, has sat there watching the rest of me and yelling at the rest of me to do something, and getting no response. Why is it that you can know you’re in a situation you need to change and just… do nothing? What is that inertia?
I hypothesise that it’s a mix of depression, shame and
fatigue. Depression makes everything feel futile and does everything to tell
you that you’re worthless and beyond saving. Shame teaches you that you are a
terrible person who doesn’t deserve love, success, or purpose. The fatigue set
in a long time ago and now whole weeks blur together and disappear from my life
largely unnoticed as I remain half-awake, half-present, half-alive. It’s almost
frightening how little I take in anymore, like watching YouTube videos for
hours and then not remembering anything about them – ditto Formula 1, my
lifelong sport of choice; I’ve watched every race this year and can hardly tell
you what happened in any of them.
What do I do with all my time? Tune out and dive into
distraction. I’m someone who, long ago now, created a world inside my mind to inhabit
instead of the invariably unsatisfactory real one. When utilised healthily for
short periods, this daydreaming need not be a bad thing or be any different to
watching a movie (except I write it myself each day). Perhaps it can even offer creative inspiration. Sometimes, however, it
gets all-consuming and unhealthy if you rely on it more heavily as a coping mechanism. My brain will
decide that rather than do anything productive, we simply must work out every
little detail of how something I’m fantasising about would work instead – the logistics
of a road trip I’ll never go on in a car I’ll never own, or how a completely
different version of me would approach a creative project I’ll never actually
do. I know it’s pathetic, but sometimes it hijacks my attention and the
compulsion to hyper-focus on defining the fantasy feels almost out of my
control. Like I said, sometimes it gets unhealthy.
Then you start comparing your world with the real one and,
when it’s close but not the same, wanting the real one to line up more closely
with yours. This, of course, will never be the right way to think. In fact,
trying to make reality fit your invented world is a great way to end up with
some very twisted and ridiculous trains of thought. To my great shame and regret, this recently
led to me sending some truly idiotic messages on social media. No sooner were
they sent did I wish I’d never sent them. They were harmful in a truly pathetic
way, and were caused by the state of mind I'd habitually perpetuated.
The next day, my ‘escape world’ had vanished and I felt a weird combination of emotional absence and complete clarity. I felt so
sucker-punched by my own appalling act of insanity that I couldn’t hide from myself
anymore. “This is not right. This cannot continue. I need to change,” is all I
thought to myself, round and round, all day. I have taken this as a wake-up
call. Whilst I will forever wish that the moment of self-awareness about how
bad I’d become had arrived before and not after someone else had to see it, I
am grabbing hold of it like a lifeline. It’s high time I did. I’ve got to get a
grip and sort my shit out… and since I need some writing practice, I am
journaling it. I am going to start a regular series as a means of holding myself
accountable. I am going to catch up to who I could’ve been for a long time now,
one step at a time.
Step one is clear to me: process my shame. Sometimes I think
about depression as being more like a symptom than a condition all of its own,
because at the root of it is self-hatred… and what makes you hate yourself more
than a nice big dollop of shame? If I’m going to give myself permission to
change my life, then I have to let myself believe that I deserve to have a real-world life that's worth living first. This will not be easy, but it is vital work to do and I have never wanted to start more.
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