The Longest Journey

I spend my nighttime walking
Over flattened western plains
Time spent gently musing
On losses, and of gains

Try to calculate the cost
When you've nothing left to spend
Some pluses here, a minus there
Makes even in the end

Defeats and victories alike
Are written on the page
Contributes to the wisdom
That only comes with age

In this way I work towards
A cold and lonely truth
You cannot think your way back to
The innocence of youth

Why smile when you can cry instead, but don't cry for me because I'm not dead

Today I cried.

That's not a noteworthy event in most people's lives. I've always been a bit (a lot) of a crier. It seems to be my emotional self's way of responding whenever it is overwhelmed with emotional input, be it happy, sad, frustrated, angry, - it's especially an issue when arguing with a gaslighting boyfriend*. The words 'stop being so sensitive/you're just being crazy' still make my blood pressure jump 20 points instantaneously. But that's a story for another time, and it's not the kind of crying I'm talking about now.

The black dog has been my constant companion for six months now. Bipolar is a hell of a thing to have to deal with when suffering from a degenerative neurological illness. And vice versa. I named said canine hubris after foolishly boasting last year that I had not been seriously depressed since 2009. When I say seriously depressed, I mean the kind that persists for months (years) without an end in sight. The kind where every day, instead of a cute list of what you're thankful for, it's a list of all the reasons you shouldn't commit suicide. It becomes a list of the carefully considered reasons *to* commit suicide and the ways in which you could do it. Then it's a list of the things you have to get in order, the people you need to say goodbye to and the supplies you need to make it happen, depending on your method (plastic bag asphyxia was my go-to - it's how they do it in the psych ward). I came closer than I ever have been to that ultimate end point and it was terrifying. I think about it now with a thrill in my stomach like you would get from missing a fatal car accident by a hair's breadth. Or starting to slip while leaning out too far over a precipitous legde with no guard rail. I guess those are concrete manifestations of coming within spitting distance of self annhiliation. A situation no sane human being would choose to put themselves into. Because when you're that deep into it with the black dog, you don't feel like you have a choice. No longer content to to just dog your heels, you start going where he leads you. And it can lead to some pretty terrifying places. An event horizon of the soul.

People who know me might be surprised to hear how much I struggled these past 6 months. It cost me dearly to put on that mask every day, to pretend (rather poorly at times, I imagine) I was a functional if somewhat highly strung human being. But when no-one was looking, I cried. Every day. Multiple times. I cried with the tapping of a well so deep there was no bottom. An emotional aquifer so vast it subsumes the other parts of you. There is no relief from that kind of psychic pressure. All you feel, all you know, all you are is misery. There is no way out but one. David Foster Wallace sums it so beautifully I could not hope to top it so here it is: 

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

But today I cried with joy because for the first time in six months, I felt positive about the future. Optimistic. Like I had something to live for after all. I don't even know why, really. Depression is a capricious beast that way. Exhaustion responds well to a few good nights' rest. Iron deficiency you can cure by taking a pill every day. Depression you can do those things too, along with a boatload of therapy - which everyone should do at least once in their lives. But in the moment it can feel like it's not really helping. Until one day you feel a curious lightness in your heart, one that had been rendered foreign and peculiar by its absence. Something you'd almost forgotten the feeling of. It may only be a spark, but when you've been in the dark for so long, any light feels like it illuminates your whole world. More importantly, it lets you see that there is another way out after all. The black dog will still be around - when you have bipolar he'll never truly be gone - but he's not leading me anymore. I can reach the path ahead on my own.

*I say boyfriend because it usually (not always) is. It's a form of minimising and belittling women and telling them their feelings are wrong. It's insidious emotional abuse that the majority of women will face at some point, whether from partner, friend, coworker or family. This article explains it far better than I could ever hope to: Stop Labelling Women 'Crazy'

Manic confession

From out the blackest depths you've known
The depths of your depression
A light so bright it captivates
And holds your full attention

Finally your mind is free
The world is yours to capture
You cannot eat nor can you sleep
It doesn't seem to matter

Harder faster pushing so
It seems you'll surely break
You're not sure what you're doing
But you know there's much at stake

A million miles an hour goes
Your thoughts into your speech
It matters not how far you run
Your brain gives no relief

People shy away from you
Scared by what's in your eyes
Desperation, mania
A madness in disguise

But what goes up, it must come down
Come screeching to a halt
Every wrong you've ever known
You know it's all your fault

And so the cycle starts anew
It never seems to end
Beholden to your chemistry
It's pointless to pretend

Giving up or giving in
You know it's all the same
The sine wave carries you along
I guess I'll try again

What it's like to lose yourself, piece by piece

Every day is a new disaster. Each week brings some new challenge. Months go by with tragedy rolling into fresh tragedy and you wonder how it's possible for so many bad things to happen to one person. You're not sure you'll live to see another year if it keeps up like this. Your life is made up of one setback after another. It's not something anyone can truly understand if they have not lived it.

Your brain can't take this kind of repeated stress. Worry over specifics morphs into worry over everything, anxiety a suffocating blanket that smothers you until you want to cry out, make it stop, I can't breathe under the weight of this. Anxiety causes your brain to see everything as a threat and assume the worst outcome always. Every niggling feeling in your chest is a heart attack. Every headache is a brain tumour. Every mole is a melanoma. It's exhausting to live like this. We're not programmed for it. All you can hope for is the ensuing depression to make you want to sleep, to spend as much time as you can in a place where you're not like this, where the unrelenting doom brewing inside you will not manifest. It's the worst when you wake up. Because there's a moment, however fleeting, where you forget that you are who you are and that everything is in ruins. And then you remember. It's enough to make you choke. 

Depression is endemic in people with chronic illness. It's not hard to see why. You're trapped in a body that betrays you constantly. You take your fistful of pills, you endure the infusions and injections and blood tests and hospital stays and still it seems to make no difference. You become your problems. Your illness suffuses your identity and the hopelessness of your struggle turns you bitter and angry. If you're lucky you'll know when to withdraw from people before you completely exhaust their goodwill towards you. There's only so many times you can break plans with people and complain while you turn into a shell of your former self. Gradually you stop hearing from them, at about the same rate you withdraw. It's not like you can even blame them. Nobody wants to invite negativity into their life. Who wants to haul an oar on a sinking ship? By getting close to people, I'm only ensuring they will go through pain, a lot of it, watching me die and being helpless to assist me in any way. And so it goes until you're alone and it's just you and your problems that have no solutions. Still you struggle on. Your reward for not killing yourself today is getting the chance to not kill yourself again tomorrow. The irony is not lost on you.

Bit by bit, my body is failing. Each relapse of my neurodegenerative illness takes something from me. Always there is pain. Some days, and they are getting more frequent, my legs don't want to obey me. You sit inside all day, watching the sunset through the window. Remembering when you used to chase it, vowing you'd never lose it. And now you see it go down at one remove, watching it leave you behind. And you wonder how many more you're going to see. Will you know the last one when it happens? I just hope it's beautiful.

Sorry Stephen King, chronic illness is the real 'IT'

Saturday afternoon. You've got tickets to go see a band tonight, bought several weeks ago. You've been feeling a bit down all week and looking forward to the chance to do something fun, see friends, take a break from the usual repetitive ennui of weekends. You're still really tired from a long week at work, a nap seems like the sensible thing to do - they're not just for kids and nannas after all. Wake up - why is it so dark - shit. The 5.30pm alarm came and went. Not much time to get ready. You don't think you can do this. It's hard, so hard when you ache right down to the bone and you feel like you haven't slept in years. But as you haul yourself out of bed to trudge down to the bathroom, there's only one thought on your mind. IT is back.

IT never truly leaves you, of course. Just long enough to trick you into thinking maybe real life isn't so hard, you've gotten stronger and got your shit on lockdown. Then you hear that slow heavy knock at the door - IT's here. IT climbs on your back, inside you, weighs you down so that each  bone feels like it weighs a hundred kilos, every step takes more effort than you feel  you can muster and each day becomes such a herculean effort that even making a toasted sandwich for dinner is beyond you because your desk-based job has destroyed you. And that's if you're even able to make it to work in the first place, which you nonetheless have to do if you want to be able to pay your bills. Sick leave runs out very quickly when IT comes to stay. And here's the real kick in the teeth about this whole deal: IT is invisible. You're the only one who knows it's there, who can feel that dread weight pushing down on you, crushing you. Like a reverse Pilgrim's Progress, you get up every day and slip on that invisible burden that is at once ephemeral and incapacitating. One foot in front of the other until you're ready to fall down where you stand.

You give embarrassed apologies to your friends because you're cancelling dinner plans. Again. Turning down yet another invitation for Friday night drinks, because the thought of drinking in a loud bar that will take you 40 minutes to get home from makes you feel ill and all you want to do is lie on the couch while struggling to exist. Work colleagues stop asking if you're feeling ok when you come back to work because pretty much every other day is a sick day. Or week. You can feel them watching you, evaluating you, wondering how sick could you really be anyway. The event invitations and inquiries into your wellbeing dry up, replaced by the conversational equivalent of the almost thoughtless half-nod you give to seeing someone you know in the street who you can't be bothered talking to. Oh it's you. You're sick again. That's unfortunate. Sure is a lot of weather out there. People start writing you out of the equation. The isolation is compounded until you've spent your 30th night in a row at home alone in a dimly lit bedroom, wondering when this will ever end.

It will end of course, as does everything. Life will go back to normal, or it will settle into a new normal. You learn to make a lot of concessions when you're chronically ill. Some things change irrevocably, and that's ok, because it has to be. You make do with what you've got - a humbling lesson, one of many you will learn. Some days are a write-off and some are so regular you could almost forget the truth. But you will always be looking over your shoulder, in the corner of your eye, at the end of the day and the back of your mind. Because IT is lurking there and if you don't pay your dues, IT will come and take them whether you're ready or not.

musings

Too late. It was always too late. That feeling in the pit of 

your stomach when you've missed the train by 20 seconds 

despite running for the station as hard as you can, believing 

that if you exert enough force, run hard enough, just 

*believe* enough, you can make it. Only it's not the train you 

missed, but the last opportunity you had to make things right, 

to try and repair the gigantic fucking mess you made of your 

own life. When this chance to fix it was your driving force, 

even your main reason for continuing your existence against 

rapidly diminishing returns. The need for the situation to be 

something other than it is, is so acute that you start making 

decisions based on an imaginary relationship to a real 

situation. And when you finally make it to the platform to see 

the last of your hopes disappearing like a mirage, your breath 

knocked out of you as you start to choke. All the doubts you 

held, the denial, the anger, anguish. The fear. Kept balled 

into a knot in your stomach that is now unwinding and creeping 

up your neck to strangle you where you stand.