I started to go down on 7 January, I went fully under somewhere in the weeks that followed, and I haven’t come back up since. That’s four months and counting, gone. Lost forever. Never coming back. Like most of my life so far. I’ve stopped doing everything I was doing. Everything I wanted to do and was motivated to do. Morning routine to get my day off to a good start. Working through all of those tasks on my list, many of which have been there for a long, long time. Working out. Eating as healthy as possible within the limitations of comfort eating. Being an integral part of the LMA self-development course and community that had made all of these positive changes possible. Beginning my new business. Working on getting my editing skills back into shape. Reading. Writing. Spending time on vid chat with my friends, and with my friends with benefits. All of it just ground to a halt. Some of it I let go of quickly, some of it I really tried to hold onto a while longer. But this insidious condition I suffer from, whatever it is (depression is such a nebulous term), pried my fingers off of those things that mattered most to me, one by one, until my final, tentative grip was loosed and I fell away from what I was holding onto and watched it recede into the distance above as I plummeted into the relentless gloom that lies beneath.
I have stopped replying to messages, sometimes taking over a week to do so. Only the most truly dedicated of my friends have not given up trying to get a response from me. They tell me that they miss me. I wish I could say I feel the same way, I truly do. But I don’t miss them. I don’t miss anything. Because you can’t miss someone else’s life. If I was still myself and it was me who had lost all of these things and people then I’m sure I would miss them terribly. But because I have lost myself and am now someone else – something else – I don’t miss them or me or anyone or anything. It’s like the real me has been hollowed out, all of the stuff that makes me me has been scooped out, and all that remains is a shell that sort of looks like me and on a very basic level moves like me and even kind of sounds like me, but isn’t me at all. It’s a shadow of me, a creature that cannot even begin to emulate being me, it simply doesn’t have the knowhow or capacity. All it can do is lumber through life and keep itself alive, until the real me comes back. It can’t even look after itself. It doesn’t eat properly, sleep properly, exercise, wash regularly, brush its teeth. It is an abomination, but a tragic and pitiable one. I know it’s doing its best, but it’s even worse at looking after me than Rimmer was when he got inside Lister’s body.
I call it ‘the dregs’, this thing I’ve become. This creature. It’s the crap that’s left at the bottom of the barrel when all the good stuff has been drained away. Almost all of me has been drained away. All of my positive emotions are gone. My desires, gone. My love, gone. My happiness, gone. My empathy, gone. All that’s left is pain. Suffering. Sadness. At least I seem to have cleared out some of the hatred and anger specific to people who have wronged me in my life, but there is plenty of rage and bile still in there. The one positive difference I notice is that I no longer hate myself like I used to, and I don’t punish myself for being a thing instead of a person. I accept that this is how it is at the moment – and it’s how it has to be, because if it didn’t have to be this way, it wouldn’t be. I would never deliberately choose this, even though I probably am doing it to myself at an unconscious level.
I wonder if it’s a defence mechanism of some sort, triggered by confronting my feelings about my father too directly or too soon, before I was ready. I imagine myself as a deserted bunker that looks like a whirlwind has swept through it, littered with trash and the remnants of belongings scattered across the corridors, beds empty of bedding, cupboards open and bare, like the former occupants didn’t just clear out – they had to flee for their lives. The red emergency lights flash mournfully, and all that can be heard is the generator spluttering in the distance, its fuel running low. There is no siren, the power for that ran out long ago. The place is as silent as it is desolate. How could such a place possibly function in the same way as when it was teeming with life and light and people and purpose? The answer, of course, is that it cannot – such an endeavour is absolutely impossible.
So here I sit, and will continue to for a while longer I suspect, not missing my life or my friends or all of the things I used to do and all of the things I used to have. I will have to settle, I suppose, for wanting to miss these things, for wishing that I did, and wanting to be alive again, to have my life back, to have my friends back, to have myself back. I don’t know how to escape this place. Or revive it, depending on whether the metaphor is the endless gloom beneath the cliff edge from which I fell, or the empty bunker, abandoned and deserted. I don’t know how to get myself back. But what I do know is that I didn’t plan to write this today, or to do a brief workout when I woke up. These things just happened. And in lieu of a plan or any concrete hope that my revival is about to begin, I will just appreciate that these things happened and focus on what I can do today, and deal with tomorrow when it comes, and keep on doing that until the red lights are replaced by white and the sound of life begins returning to the bunker.
Musings from the Imaginarium 