Nothing Is Poetic About Depression

I was never the person who enjoyed being sad, or alone. I enjoy nothing more than noise, laughter, crowds, lights, nights, pictures, everything that makes me feel alive.

My depression attacks are never welcomed. I mean, who would welcome depression, right?

But to me, it’s not just the hollow sadness that bothers me. Depression strips me off my entire identity. It pushes me into panic mode, because I really want to be me, but I can’t. My head won’t allow me. All I can think of is how much I want to laugh. My head becomes my own enemy, locking me up in an imaginary cage that I created for my own self.

For 18 years, depression has been the ugly, uninvited guest in my life. Walking in and out as it pleases, never knocking.

My lively soul shifts from wanting everything that’s loud and bright, to not wanting anything at all. To not wanting to wake up the next morning.

It kills me.

There’s nothing poetic about depression. There’s nothing romantic. It’s brutal. The pain is excruciating. The lack of control is unexplainable.

Depression is a real enemy. Except, there’s no easy way to defeat it because it’s a part of who you are. To fight yourself, is an excruciating battle, mixed with confusion and self-loathing.

Depression is life-threatening. Except, you’re the threat. You’re a threat and you can’t control it. The guilt trips are unbearable.

Depression is lonely. No one who hasn’t been through it can ever fully understand the struggle. You go back home, you hang up your phone, you go back to you room, and it’s you vs yourself one more time, behind a closed door.

But let me also tell you that, for 18 years, I’ve survived every single round. I’ve fought back. I got lucky. I won every single time, so far. I intend to keep doing so, for as long as life allows me to. I don’t want to lose.

My uninvited guest doesn’t visit me as much anymore. We’re finally breaking ties, slowly. I’ve never been more grateful for anything in my life.

Love carried me through it all. It still does. The people I love, the ones I’d die for, stand between me and every ugly decision I want to make so bad. They make me want to fight, so I can stick around, and be myself, for them, and for me.

I’ve been cursed with depression, and I’ve spent so many years thinking I was flawed, broken. But, I’m finally blessed with the clarity to recognize the unconditional love being offered to me, accept it, and allow it to save my life, over and over. Finding love in the darkest of times, seeing God in the dimmest of moments. Watching his grace save me, change me, and pull me out, time after time.

My on/off depression has taught me to count my blessings, and love everyone a little extra on their bad days. To appreciate the ups, and brace myself for the downs. While it’s forcing me to keep my guard up all the time, it’s also allowing me to try to make the best of every good moment. Always.

1 Step Forward, 2 Steps Back

I stare at the fan,

Spinning in an infinite loop.

Its rhythmic humming keeping me calm.

“Where have I gone wrong?”,

I wonder as I feel myself getting closer to a new breakdown,

The only thing holding me back is the consistent sound.

I feel my thoughts racing,

Slightly going out of control.

“Is this who I will have to be for the rest of my life?”,

The idea seemed terrifying.

The dependency,

The constant fears that never leave my side,

Always scared,

Always holding back,

Always thinking of the moment I will be abandoned,

Cold,

Stranded,

And alone.

I hate how it gets the best of me,

Every single time.

There’s no remedy for that,

There’s no running away.

It’s like all these fears,

Can eat up every beautiful thing you touch.

No love in the world has ever managed to save me,

And I instantly knew,

It’ll take more than the sweet humming of this overlying fan,

To avoid this one breakdown.

Your circus, your monkeys!

You can blame society,
You can blame your parents,
You can blame God,
But you need to understand that who you decide to be,
Who you are today,
Is merely your responsibility.
..
There’s no justification to hurting others,
To ruining them,
To ruining yourself.
Not God,
Not society,
Not your parents.
It’s all on you.
..
Contributing factors?
Yes.
Hardships?
Definitely.
Destructive?
100%.
But never justifications.
..
The minute you wake up and decide to do nothing about it,
Decide to throw blames and stand still,
Decide to never take full responsibility for your actions,
It’s all on you.
..
You think it’s predetermined,
You want to believe that the injustices that happened to you,
Define who you are,
Because it’s easier to be the victim,
The one who demands sympathy,
Who thinks they’ve earned it, somehow,
Than to be the survivor,
Who demands respect,
Who, despite everything,
Has turned out to be so full of love,
So full of love that it overflows to fill all the cups on their table.
..
It’s easier to be the victim,
And maybe, somehow, you are one.
But is this, really, who you want to be for the rest of your life?
Passive, pitied, unaccountable?
Because I know, for sure,
That my answer is no.
..
What will yours be?

It’s Time To Let Go

I know you want to stay.

I know that you want to believe that the pain will stop.

I know that all the voices in your head are convincing you that staying is the safer option.

I also know that love is blind,

And so very stupid sometimes.

Your gut feeling is right.

It was right all along.

Nothing is going to change.

You will still cry yourself to sleep.

You will still live bearing the threat of being abandoned if you do not follow the rules.

You will still wake up every morning next to someone who’s constantly reminding you that you’re not enough,

Like choosing you is a favor.

I know you want to believe they’ll change,

See your worth,

Suddenly realize you’re the best thing they’ve ever had,

Finally give you the love that you deserve.

It. Will. Not. Happen.

People change, yes.

But never into a whole different person.

Toxicity is in the blood.

It will mutate and change its face,

It will manipulate you into believing your judgement was wrong,

Unfair,

But it will still be there.

Growing,

Evolving,

Engulfing you until you become a shadow of the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Is this what you deserve?

Is this your actual worth?

Why are you selling yourself cheap?

Aren’t all the people who love you and respect you enough to let you know how precious you are?

Why are you lowering the bar,

So low,

That literally anyone can step over it?

It’s time to finally understand that what you’re in,

What you’re holding on to,

Is not love.

It’s the idea of it.

You’re so consumed and blinded by the idea of finding love that you’ve forgotten to try and figure out what it should be like.

And THIS is where you went wrong.

The rush to find your soulmate,

The paralyzing fear of ending up alone,

The peer pressure,

Believing you had a task with a deadline to finish,

All of this has led you to accept whatever came your way.

You lost yourself in the process.

But is that what you really want?

Is this who you really want to be?

Isn’t it, finally,

The right time to leave?

Once bitten, twice shy.

‘Was I good enough?’

I wonder as your shadow dances somewhere in the back of my mind.

I have lost.

I have lost this battle between everything I wanted and everything I needed.

It was an inevitable loss both ways, anyway.

I walked in unprepared.

I brought all the wrong weapons to a war that should have been with no weapons at all.

‘Where did we go wrong?’

I contemplate all the options and all the answers.

I wonder if it went wrong at all.

It felt like I was constantly trying to earn validation from the sorry excuse of a mess that you’ve always been,

That I’ve always been, too.

It was a wild goose chase,

That went on forever.

But deep inside, 

I knew that nothing was more doomed to failure than hoping to catch a wild goose.

And we were,

As doomed as they came.

It wasn’t rocket science,

Someone had to bite the bullet.

So I did.

And it tasted as bitter as anything ever had.

To admit your absolute failure,

To admit that you’ve been chasing your own tail for a very long time,

It crushes you.

It makes you doubt every thought you have, 

And every decision you’ll ever make.

It holds you down for a very, very long time.

You’re constantly in a grey zone,

Not knowing much about anything.

It’s always the calm before the storm for you, 

Never knowing when the storm will strike,

Never knowing when you’ll make another decision that will suck away the rest of the life you have in you.

You see,

The problem is that you always believe that you know better than everyone else.

That you are smarter than all.

Until you realize that no, you’re really not.

Next time,

May be you should just acknowledge that you don’t know it all.

Maybe that would save you,

For once.

On Time Wasted

Is there a greater sin than wasting your time in things that degrade you and pull you down?

Because I don’t think there is.

We procrastinate a lot.

Delay taking decisions that we know we will have to take one day.

We’d rather stay the same than change.

Because change is scary.

We keep spiralling down because we’re too afraid to claw at the walls and start climbing back up.

And time passes. Bitter, irreplaceable time.

Time is the only thing you can never reverse or fix. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

When you finally open your eyes, you realise that you lost precious moments that you can never bring back.

You were so consumed in yourself that you missed all the things that were happening around you, eventually losing yourself too.

And now, you’re a stranger.

Yet, one question will always remain: Is it too late now?

Life’s Little Illusions

We survive.

We fall, we break, then we get up and heal.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday we will.

Sometimes we need a strong blow, an electrifying shock to dislodge us from the illusions we live in.

We tend to believe, a lot and unconditionally.

But life lies.

The world tells you what you want to hear, what it takes to keep you sane.

Then it lies.

Then you mourn and mourn until you snap out of it.

And see everything from a different perspective.

You go back and relive all the signs you’ve missed.

All the things you believed when everything around you screamed that they were not true.

Day by day, you wake up a little more.

You feel sorry for yourself a little more.

You become confused a little more.

Can life be so unfair? Or is it saving you from yourself, somehow?

All the things you’ve lost, did they define you? Or was it you who added something to their definition?

Were you so foolish to keep hurting yourself the way you did? Or were you very smart to keep going until the end?

Is there a moral for all the pain you put yourself through? Or was it all in vain?

Questions you’ll never understand.

Answers you’ll never find.

A soul that you’ll forever try to heal.

And the journey of life keeps going, even when you stop midway.

Fear.. among other things

It takes courage to spill your heart on a page that might be read by someone on the other side of the globe.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t have my life together.

I feel no shame in realising that I’m still a long way from figuring out how to deal with my insecurities.

I grew up with an anxiety disorder, one that not many people who know me actually know about.

It’s exhausting to fight a war inside your head every single day.
– Mickie Ann

My body was not created to withstand the same amount of stress as everyone else nor to deal with it in a rational way.

To be honest, I’ve never seen myself as a fragile person. In fact, I would bet that most of the people who had any contact with me would rather say I have a strong, determined personality. Which I might, or might not.

I’ve beaten myself down much more than I pulled myself up. Once my stress goes out of control, I switch to self destruction mode immediately. I then start to lash at myself, thinking of every mistake, bad decision, miscalculation I’ve ever made in my life.

I feel inferior to everyone and everything. I wouldn’t go near the mirror for days. I feel like I don’t belong to anything around me. I start losing my confidence, my self esteem. In these moments, my whole world seems to be cracking. 

I have yet to mention the panic attacks, the certainty that something was going to happen to me or to someone I love this very moment. A feeling that intense is capable of shattering your mental state in seconds. 

The feeling that my head is about to explode with the million scenarios going on inside and the demons racing all around it.

The nights I spend crying when I truly and deeply know that it is uncalled for and that if I had to say a reasonable reason for all this, I wouldn’t be able to.I tried to open up to closed ones about it, but no one seems to actually get a grip on what exactly is going on in my head. I can’t blame them, to be honest. If I hadn’t been through this and someone came and told me about it, I would think they’re probably being very dramatic, or just going through a phase. 

Let alone the times I would be too embarrassed to speak about it out of fear that they would think I’m a whiner, complaining all the time for nothing.

I’m writing this, to whom it may concern, because I’m convinced that the first step to deal with something is to acknowledge its presence.

I’m not ashamed to finally admit, that my head is not the way everyone else’s is.

I know I’m not alone and I’m certain that there are many people out there going through the exact same thing I’m going through.

Seek help, and keep your faith going.

You deserve some peace of mind, no matter how impossible it seems to achieve.

The Absence of the Present

I wake up to the restless noise of the fan spinning in a never ending pattern. I slowly open my eyes feeling like they’ve only been closed for a minute. I check my phone, which is my morning routine, only to find out that I slept for much less than I should.

No alarm was set, nothing scheduled for the morning, just the fact that my brain refuses to shut down for a few more hours.

I drag my still sleeping legs out of bed with puffy eyes, a sore throat and no idea of what to do next.

The fact that something still doesn’t feel right strikes me like an ice cold rock in the face.

I’m back to this dark hole of spiralling thoughts and mixed feelings. I’ve never been pulled out of it, always got stuck there for days and days.

It will make no sense to anyone. It’s my misery and would only make sense to me.

I’m still standing in my door with half open eyes and shaky legs staring into the opposite wall hoping that a graceful shadow that once merged with it would reappear to help me and lend me a helping hand.

The sound of my phone ringing physically pulls me out of this haze, but my brain and heart are still stuck there..

Imperfect But Complete

Let’s first agree that “perfection” doesn’t exist and fairytales are not real.

If your life is perfect, then something is not right.

We all spend way too much time seeking perfection that we actually miss enjoying the beautiful imperfections that we have in our lives.

Look within your hearts and find the spot that feels most comfortable, whether it is a place, a person, a memory, a feeling, a melody, a picture, anything! This spot exists in every heart. The spot that could take you far away and draw a smile on your face at any given time. That spot is everything you need. It is the spot that makes you feel complete.

You don’t have to try to change the world around you to be satisfied.

Cherish the things you have.

Fall in love with the imperfect.

Hold onto me, always and forever.

Always be my tender spot.

For only you can complete all the missing parts of me.