No sky at all.

I’ve been thinking about death lately. Not in any sort of concrete terms, but it’s like this little cloud hanging over me, prodding and poking with the constant notion of “what if?” What if, for no particular reason other than extreme exhaustion with being alive, I just…stopped?

It’s always been hard to express the mindset of mental illness to someone who doesn’t struggle with it, but as someone who has known it since the age of 8, it’s hard to comprehend what it’s like to live without such a mindset. Some days, it’s no bother at all. Some days, I can laugh and dance and write and create art like it’s all I was meant to do. Other days, though, I can’t even get out of bed. It’s not that I’m sleepy or just don’t want to — every part of me is screaming to just “GET UP” — I just…can’t. I’m just stuck, staring at a computer screen, trying in vain to remember what it felt like to be properly alive, trying to in vain to remember what it’s like to miss something you can’t even convince yourself that you’re even capable of feeling — that you’ve EVER been capable of feeling, even if logically, you know you have, and you are.

I saw a quote recently from a poet called Neil Hilborn (whose work you should really check out if you get the chance), in which he asserts, “Depression wasn’t an endless grey sky. It was no sky at all.”

I haven’t been able to see the sky lately. I can recognize depression when it creeps up on me these days, but I still feel just as helpless in coping with it or handling it as I did when I was 16 and couldn’t remember what it was like to feel. I know that this is just a side effect of not taking my meds, which I can barely afford as is. I know that I need to find a doctor, but my god, is it fucking hard to muster up the energy to do anything when your job is sucking the life out of you, and it seems like every number in your insurance’s provider list is out of service anyway. I wish I could explain why I’m so tired all the time. Like, yeah, despite how much I genuinely love my coworkers, my job honestly sucks, and it’s definitely become more draining in the last six months — but the backwards progression of self I’ve been experiencing in the last month alone seems a little too much for that. And yeah, I’m a bit panicked because I’m costuming designing for a show, and I’ve never costume designed for anything before, and there are 50 costumes to put together (the last show I was involved in had nine costumes, for reference), and I was never sure I wanted the job in the first place, but I wanted to try something new and wanted to help a friend out, but now it just feels like I’m crashing and burning and doing a horrible job at it, despite the fact that everyone around me is perfectly willing to help — I just don’t know how to give voice to the help I need.

Because yes, the easy thing to do would be to step away from all responsibilities and curl up in a ball and watch Doctor Who reruns until I either learn how to feel again or just die of exhaustion over nothing — which, having just quit my job, I might sort of be doing — but I don’t want that to happen, so I don’t give up designing, I just stop responding to messages, hoping that I’ll have the energy to reply later. I just curl up in a ball and watch clips from Doctor Who episodes that I used to love when I was capable of feeling excitement, instead of dedicating myself to full episodes or seasons, hoping that these short bursts will prevent me from getting sucked into more despair than a three-day-long marathon will. I just wash my face and brush my hair in the morning before work instead of showering, because I can’t get out of bed on time because I’m just so exhausted, and showering is too much effort anyway.

I don’t really know what the solution is. I don’t know that this blog is necessarily looking for one, or that it’s even a cry for help. The truth is that I know, deep down, I can survive this, because I’ve survived this before. I know I can walk out to the overpass nearest my apartment, look over the edge, then walk back crying, because I know that it sucks now, but I’m too genuinely scared to cut things short. I know that I’m scared of dying, but I’m also starting to figure out that I’m scared of living in silence, like I’ve been doing — I guess I’m just trying to open up.

And the truth is, there’s more, lots more to what’s been going on with my general emotional state, and I want to write it down so bad, because just typing this out, I’m starting to feel that showering for the first time in a week actually sounds really nice. But there’s a time and a place, and I’m not necessarily ready to open up about absolutely everything just yet. I think it’s just important to talk about when we’re not alright. Even the times we’re not quite in recovery yet.

To put it this way, in another beautiful quote from Neil Hilborn: “Whatever you are feeling right now, there is a mathematical certainty that someone else is feeling that exact thing. This is not to say you aren’t special. This is to say thank god, you aren’t special.”