amw

Dirty little secret - every time i talk about being on meds those thoughts wash over me again. There can't really be anything wrong with me, i mean, i'm not on that high a dose anyway, surely it's not making any difference... I find those thoughts get reinforced a little bit by visiting talk therapists because they like to help you resolve issues internally; they try to get you to deal with your problems by changing your outlook on life. It works for some things, but it's not the whole solution.

Because sometimes i get a reminder. Something which i know i've dealt with, something i know i've accepted, it just opens up like a raw wound - with no trigger at all i can end up genuinely incapacitated. Suddenly i feel like the pain is going to kill me, like my whole life is meaningless because of a decision i made so long ago. The thing about life is you make these choices as a kid and some of them will define your life forever after that, you just need to deal. It's almost been 10 years. I think i've grieved long enough over the death of a boy most people in my life now never knew anyway. Life moves on - if you don't move with it then you die, on the inside at least. So many wonderful things have happened since then i can hardly complain. I have moved on, yet there it is.

This illness... it still takes me randomly, irrationally down paths of despair. It'll pluck anything out of my life - past or present, dealt-with or not - to feed the depression. A few weeks ago i came across something i wrote in 2000, and it was startling how black it was. The stupid shit i whine about these days is not even in the same ballpark. Perhaps being angsty and suicidal is just something everyone goes through in their youth... or perhaps the meds do work after all, they've helped improve things so now i just break down for a few hours before pulling my shit together enough to at least eat and shower and keep myself functioning. I mean, why take the risk, right? At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether i'm taking meds pointlessly or not, if things are relatively stable why fuck it up by de-diagnosing myself?

I think it's all part of me never wanting to be pigeonholed as anything. I've been on the edge of so many different worlds, i dip my toes in, but if i start going too deep i feel like i need to get out - i need to change everything up again. I never took anything quite as far as my friends did, was never quite as satisfied. I'd see it happening and want to give myself up to whatever it was as freely as they did, but then something would hold me back... perhaps because at the end of the day i knew it wasn't really me. So the me that has ended up sticking the longest is crazy me. Not exactly the most awesome pigeonhole to be in, so sometimes i do like to try withdraw from it, deny it. Of course you can't escape yourself like you can your friends.

That's when talk therapy comes back into play, to just accept what is. I might be nuts but it's cool. I am lots of other things too, things i keep discovering. It's worth staying alive to just see how all that turns out...