Roadblocks

It has taken me many years to feel quite how much writing means to me. The release it gives to the jumbled tangled inner me.

Let’s not go into quite how many years…am kinda feeling my age at the moment and wondering where time has gone.

Anyway back to the writing…

The thing that has made me really understand its importance is how fragile I feel when at times like this I haven’t written anything for a while. Like I can barely hold it all within me.

I haven’t written here or in my ‘daily’ writing (which maybe should be renamed my occasionally-when-I-feel-like-it writing) for nearly 3 weeks. And I don’t like it,

So why am I doing this to myself?

Sometimes it is because I have too many ideas, too many things that I need to get out. One thing you don’t give me is choice. My anxiety makes me question everything. Which idea do I write about? Will I do a better post on this idea or that one? And so it goes on until I choose nothing. I run away from the tight feeling in my bones.

You see. This is one of my skills. I build up roadblocks because I am scared. Because life seems so damn tough and against me that I hide. I do nothing so I don’t fail. So I don’t have to face up to the effort and vulnerability that my choices may bring.

It is a skill I could do without.

My new blog has become one of these blocks. Yep that new site I started talking about way back in May. I was so excited at the idea of having a new blog, my very own self-hosted blog. And then this depressive episode hit. Along with so many things, my enthusiasm for my new site vanished. Progress has been painful. And it has stopped me writing. I want to save my ideas for it. So I do not move on with the blog and I do not write. I am stuck.

So I do nothing. My pen has stopped moving, my fingers no longer tapping.

It needs to stop. I cannot lose this. I refuse to lose this. Where is my sledgehammer? There are some roadblocks to be taken down.

1 week to 1 new website. Fact.

.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

 

This is not sadness

Photo by Nic Low on Unsplash

The words ‘depressed’ and ‘depression’ get used too much. And at the same time not enough. Mental health is still not talked about enough, the support provided is still not enough and the understanding from society is still not enough.

These words though have been accepted better than any person with a mental illness. They have become part of our everyday language, become something less than what these words truly stand for.

People use them for when they are sad.

Depression is not sadness.

It does not go away after a good night’s sleep. You cannot make it disappear by ‘thinking positive or happy thoughts’. It is not a choice or someone just being miserable. It is not the feeling when your football team is not doing well or there is not enough money to go out for the night. It is not solved by ice cream, a big engulfing hug or the smiles of friends.

It is not sadness.

It will not simply go away tomorrow. It is bone crushing weight. A low that never leaves. Something that saps all things happy, positive or worthwhile out of you. It is emptiness. It is bleakness. It is despair. It is wondering whether you will ever feel that lightness in your body again. If you will wake up in the morning without that weight deep inside. It is loneliness. It is not being alone. It is not caring enough or seeing the point in bothering. It is questioning everything in your life. It is wanting to be out of your own skin. It is desperately seeking something, someone that will save you from feeling like this.

It is not an emotion. It is an illness.

Be careful using these words. Don’t take away from the weight they carry.

Everyone gets sad.

This is not sadness.

 

And we change.

Photo by Redd Angelo on Unsplash

We feel as if we stay the same. Yet we change. We change all the time. Often in little ways. Changes so small they pass unnoticed. Life is change. 

Sometimes the change is so big, it blindsides us. Makes us question who we are, have been and will be. Rocks us to our very core, shattering and knocking us off balance.

We change.

Sometimes behind a big change lies a big reason. A big loss be it death, heartbreak, work or any other of the multitude of ways in which loss makes its presence in our lives. Forcing us to revaluate, rebuild, renew.

And we change.

Sometimes it is the little things that do us in. We are undone in the whisper of a moment. The lyrics of a song, a scene in a film, a spoken conversation about nothing and everything, a caught glimpse, a stray thought. We may not even know it at the time. Until we unravel.

And we change.

Sometimes the answer for what or why is unknown. It just happens.

The question is – what are we going to do about it?

Walking the black dog

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

I have started walking. Almost every day. I pull on my boots and head out the door. Almost in any weather.

It takes much more determination than a simple walk really ought to. As much as every sinew in my body pulls me to stay where I am, as much as my mind says ‘what is the point in doing anything’, some part of me digs deep and gets putting one foot in front of the other.

Why give so much effort?

Why do I walk?

I do it because I need to. Because otherwise I would sit here day after day never leaving these walls around me. Because I have more walls around me than the stone ones of my house. Because I need to escape.

Read about dealing with depression or anxiety and you will see exercise mentioned as a-good-thing-to-do. And it does work. It connects me to the world outside. Reminds me that there is more than the narrowed existence in my head. The world breathes with me and I with it. I live. I move. Ideas pop and songs repeat in my head.

And it does work.

Until it doesn’t

I seek escape yet my feet tread the same path over and over again. Taking me back to where I started. Nothing has changed. I walk and I want to keep walking almost as if I feel that I can out walk myself. But I can’t. What troubles me is not within the walls of my house, it is within my own walls.

I walk and the black dog walks with me.

Getting the words out

Photo by Thomas Martinsen on Unsplash

I need a blog post.

I need to write.

I have ideas in my head, scribbled down on what is to hand when the thoughts occur. Yet I am stuck. Again. The words are there, I can feel them. Thrumming away under my skin in a need-to-get-out-but-I-don’t-know-how kinda way.

Where does this come from? This need to write. I suppose words on paper, on screen, have always been my way of communicating.

Ask me to speak to someone and words flee from me like I have asked them to face their worst fears. I stutter, stumble over my words. Spending my time in my head overthinking every word I say. Wondering why I cannot be more interesting, more funny, more full of words.

Written down though it feels like my words come alive. Like I can actually get out the me that lives inside. The one that needs to speak. The one that usually hides because it is too shy, too scared, too doubtful.

It is the one thing that I have always felt I can do. That deep down I know I am good at even if the doubter in me sometimes disagrees.

I am always telling people with mental health issues to talk to someone, to share what they are going through. Yet I know how difficult this feels to do. I know that feeling far too well. The fear of what the reaction might be, the worry that you will lay yourself bare only to be let down or rejected, the knowledge that no one can fix you. The impossibility of putting it into words.

This is only part of what stops me talking to others. I find when I try to speak about how I feel that the words simply don’t come out right. That what I say fails time and time. That I can’t get out of me what it really feels like to be me. That I end either saying nothing or only scratch the surface. Passing off how I am really feeling as something much more superficial.

I can’t do that with writing.

I have to be honest. I type without pause, without censor. I am honest even if sometimes it feels brutal. I can ‘speak’ this way because no one is watching, I am not watching them. People can read or not read. They can respond if they want or they can ignore it and carry on as they were. I don’t feel the rejection and the words in the end always come out.