When we think of the act of purging, I believe most people immediately go to the negative definitions, such as purging good people from a corrupt system or organisation so it can commit bad acts with impunity or purging food from your body in a vain attempt to lose weight or keep weight off. (As a side note, bulimia and anorexia are serious illnesses and purging for this reason is very harmful for multiple reasons, most of all the way you lose muscle mass and essential internal bodyfat over time which puts a potentially fatal strain on your heart and other internal organs; if you are concerned you might be suffering from either of these illnesses, please seek help from a medical professional immediately.) And of course there is even a successful series of horror thriller movies called The Purge that are a viciously cynical yet brutally honest take on the sociopathy (sometimes psychopathy) of modern society; because although one night a year the wealthy don’t go around hunting down and murdering the impoverished with impunity, when you add up the number of preventable deaths in so-called “civilised” society caused every year by poverty, really it amounts to the same thing (which is the film series’ entire point and why it makes for such impactful and effective social commentary.

But purging can be a good thing too. Purging corruption out of organisations so they can live up to their highest ideals and standards. Throwing out clutter and old possessions to make space for new things, or even just more space to live in. And sometimes, on the individual level, there are harmful things inside of us that we just need to expel – by whatever means necessary.

Currently I am almost fatter than I have been in my entire life. I think there may have been a period maybe a decade or so ago when I was this obese, but if I was, I’m not far off that low point again today. All of my attempts to get back in shape have collapsed under the pressure of my depression, and in the past couple of months I have descended into the brutal comfort eating of copious amounts of chocolate every day, and ballooned as a result. Now don’t let me exaggerate, I’m not a whale or anything, and when I wear loose-fitting clothing if you saw me walking down the street you might say I was stocky or chubby, as I have relatively broad shoulders and a little bit of muscle still under all that padding thanks to years of weight training off and on. But when I stand naked in front of the mirror, I am truly revolted by what I see.

I honestly don’t know how I’m going to get out of this situation. I am months away from even getting back to mediocre shape, and that would be if I was strict with my diet and was training hard week in, week out (with sufficient rest periods at regular intervals so as to maximise the results of all that effort and exertion). The chances of me achieving that in my current emotional and psychological state are pretty much zero, so that means… what? I have to work really hard just to maintain looking like total shit and feeling really bad about how I look? That is hardly a motivating prospect.

But what alternative is there? The only alternative is to keep getting fatter and fatter until I am so ashamed of how I look that I barely leave the house. And I barely leave the house as it is, not because of how I look but because of how I feel.

Accepting the reality of my situation, I am employing the only strategy that I can employ: have an aspirational framework and take it one day at a time. Each day is a clean slate, it doesn’t matter what happened the day before. And that goes both ways – it’s not just about forgetting about the failures of yesterday, but also acknowledging that the successes don’t necessarily have any bearing on today’s performance either. Each new day is a new battle within myself. Each new day I get up and argue within myself about whether or not I have what it takes to get the workout done, or have the discipline to eat healthily (which requires a lot more planning and effort than just eating whatever whenever), and most of all have the sheer force of will not to collapse into comfort eating. The conflict is real, and it is constant. Some days I will win, some days I will lose. But recognising that this is a war worth fighting is perhaps the most important thing, because then I can be philosophical about the skirmishes I lose and not get too big-headed about the battles I win. I need to play the long game, wherein I believe the best outlook I can have is as follows:

Something is always better than nothing. Missing workouts some days is better than not even trying. Inconsistent effort is better than consistent inactivity. Gaining fat more slowly is better than gaining fat at full speed. Working hard to stay in roughly the same place is better than laying down and going further and further in the wrong direction. The truth is that it is going to take a long time to get to where I want to be, possibly years, and the more I compound my defeats by lamenting them, the more I focus on a feeling of futility rather than a strategic patience and kindness, the more I increase my chances of never getting there again.

Sometimes, in order to win, you have to wave the white flag and surrender first. Because often in life, we are fighting the wrong battles. I can’t win against my depression by conducting myself like a normal person. I just can’t, not right now. It’s beyond me. To try to live normally and be consistent and all the rest of it, that is a war I will lose every time. But if I surrender completely to where I am and my current limitations, then I can reformulate a strategy to work within those limitations and start winning, even while recognising that winning doesn’t mean always winning, it just means small victories to begin with, and taking the losses gracefully, and hopefully over time winning more than losing.

And within that framework, today I achieved a paradigm shift in my thinking on one of the biggest sticking points with my workouts. When I am feeling very bad inside, it takes a huge amount of effort (almost all of my energy and resources, in fact) to keep things under control enough to function. Otherwise I just would lie in bed and weep and sleep then weep some more and sleep some more. And yes I have tried “crying it out” until there are no more tears left, but there is always more to come, it never ends, that doesn’t work. Even if I somehow dry out, it regenerates within days, sometimes hours. The point is, it takes a lot of mental effort to keep my emotions under control – not suppressed in an unhealthy way, just controlled so they don’t completely overwhelm me and stop me from doing anything at all. And, unfortunately, whether you are doing a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) cardio workout or a resistance (weights and/or bands) workout, both are physically exhausting and mentally demanding.

So, what often happens to me when I’m working out is that as I push my body through what might be described as a physically traumatic experience where damage is done (but not lasting damage as long as you train safely), is that as I divert all of my mental focus to pushing myself up to and then past my perceived physical limits (because really it is your mind that you are training using the tool of your body), I lose the ability to control my emotions and they just come spilling out in spontaneous and random bouts of weeping. It used to happen when I went to the gym, and I would push it away as long as I could but routinely I would end up sitting in a cubicle or even lying on the floor and weeping as quietly as I could for the shame of being discovered, just like I did in the last couple of office jobs I had before my nervous breakdown all those years ago. It’s a brutal, humiliating experience that feels like I’m being violated, and whatever release or relief I experienced is no compensation for the feelings of being drained and exhausted emotionally afterwards.

It happened on Monday when I decided on the spur of the moment to do my first workout in over two months (abs and HIIT, the whole thing is done in under 30 minutes), within the first five minutes of abs I started crying. I just let it happen for a minute or so, then I controlled myself and got back to the workout so as not to lose momentum. It wasn’t so bad. Then in the second part, the HIIT, where I do 12 minutes of cycling between 40 seconds of moderate effort steady state running on the spot followed by a 20-second burst of high intensity running on the spot (alternated with jumping squats because when I am in good shape the running isn’t exerting enough), I pushed myself too far in the ninth minute with the fourth set of jumping squats. I’d already been feeling queasy, but after those 20 seconds of jumping squats, as soon as I’d finished, I knew I had gone past the point of no return and was going to puke from exertion.

I went into my bathroom and the feeling of nausea was overwhelming, but I couldn’t quite be sick yet. I knew it was coming though – it had to come at this point, and it was only a bit of water as I do cardio in a fasted state after waking in order to maximise the fat-burning effects – so I just stuck my fingers down my throat and forced it out. After a minute or two of retching and a tiny bit of puking, the nausea had passed and I felt relieved but exhausted. So I gave myself a couple more minutes then I finished the HIIT workout, as there was only a few more minutes to go.

Today, in my second workout (HIIT should not be done every day, it takes up to 48 hours to recover from its effects, three times per week or every other day is sufficient), I managed to avoid making myself puke again, but I did cry during abs, and this time I cried harder and longer. I let it happen for about 3 minutes, then I took a few breaths and composed myself and carried on, so I didn’t lose all momentum in the workout.

After it was over, lying down on the bed, utterly exhausted both physically and emotionally, I realised that I had been looking at this all wrong. I used to see it as an abusive act, to push myself so hard in training that I ended up weeping and going through a horrendously painful emotional experience. “Why should I do that to myself?” I used to ask. But now I view it as a good thing, as the emotional equivalent of sticking my fingers down my throat.

Viewing nausea as a symptom that I’m going to vomit and can’t get out of it because either something bad needs to come out or I have overexerted myself, and understanding that as dreadful as the actual experience of vomiting is, the experience of waves of nausea is almost as bad, and given the knowledge that I can’t choose whether or not to vomit but only when I’m going to vomit, sticking my fingers down my throat and accelerating the process is an act of self-care, because it gets me to the end of the process and minimises my suffering.

Taking this now as a very apt analogy for depression, where minutes of nausea is the equivalent of days of emotional anguish, and weeping for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours is the equivalent of a couple of minute of puking your guts up, working out becomes the metaphorical fingers down my throat. For whatever reason there is poison inside me that needs to be expelled every so often, and if it’s so close to the surface that is spills out when I divert my mental resources to focus on my workout, then it’s not just a necessary thing but a good thing. It’s better to get it out, because although there is that exhaustion, there is also relief as I mentioned earlier, and that bit of relief can make the difference between getting nothing done and getting something done.

So from now on, rather than viewing it as abusive to push myself until I cry during a workout, I am going to view it as an act of self-care. If I wasn’t in so much pain, I wouldn’t be pushed to tears during a workout. It isn’t normal, for me or for anyone. Yes you might cry out in pain sometimes or end up with your eyes watering when you really push it, but not actual weeping. If it didn’t need to come out it wouldn’t be so close to the surface, and once it’s gone, the feelings of depression – just like that awful nausea when you know you’re doing to be sick – do usually subside, at least a little for a little while, enough to get something else done.

And when I am really in despair, when I am lying on the bed, or the floor, or the exercise mat, weeping my heart out, sometimes thrashing around as though I’m having a seizure, discovering new depths of agony just as I think it can’t possibly be any more painful than it already is, I try to make it a kind of out of body experience, so I’m not the one leaning over the toilet puking my guts out – I’m the one placing a comforting hand on that person’s shoulder, offering reassurance and care until the purging is over and the recovery can begin.

I’m having the best day I’ve had in ages. Weeks. Maybe even months. Definitely not years, but probably months. And I have no idea why. I wish I knew, because if I could figure it out then perhaps I could replicate it consistently. One day, maybe I will figure it out. But for now, I will just be thankful for it.

When I say I’m having the best day in ages, you might be inclined to ask what happened to make it that way. Something amazing must have happened, something went my way, someone did something for me or was extra special to me in some way. Nope. Nothing like that. Nothing happened at all. There is no external reason of any description to make this day any different from the humdrum monotony of any other day of the non-life I have been barely living for most of my adulthood. The difference is internal. I feel different. All of the pain is still there, but it’s really faint today, and in those moments when it has become pronounced, it hasn’t overwhelmed me like it usually does. It isn’t numbed or suppressed or being controlled, it’s genuinely faded and distant, like a shrieking gull you can barely hear. So why could that be? It’s worth exploring.

I feel, in a way, as though all of the previous weeks, perhaps months, when it seemed like I was getting nowhere and achieving nothing but survival (and only just surviving at that), I wasn’t achieving nothing because my unconscious mind was busy formulating a solution, amalgamating all of the new and old information I recently absorbed, working away tirelessly like only one’s unconscious can. And then today was the day that it presented that solution, like a page coming of a printer or (more modern) an object coming out of a 3D printer. It just arrived, fully formed, no instructions required, because implementing it was so intuitive as to be automatic. I wonder if that is what happened.

But what made today the day? Does this just happen to be the day that the design was ready to print and be brought into reality? Or has my emotional anguish just ebbed enough today for the solution that has been ready for some time to become accessible to me? In other words, was I just waiting for a day like today? Or is it the final, beyond final, last ditch, failure is not an option way past deadline that I imposed upon myself yesterday? It could be that, because that is really the only thing that makes today different from any other day. So let’s look at that.

Exactly a month ago I was sent a few articles to edit. About a decade ago I started working as a freelance copyeditor, primarily on academic journal articles. Having had extensive editing experience, I had to work hard for a long time to restrain myself enough to not make editorial changes and stick to copyediting changes, which is basically just making corrections with a view to also resolving bad grammar, poor sentence structure, ambiguity, sense, narrative flow, and so on. But authors – particularly some of those arrogant academics – really don’t like it when you change their wording, even if they aren’t half as good at writing as they are at whatever their academic specialism is. So there’s a constant battle within myself to make changes because they are a genuine improvement and not just a subjective improvement for my personal preferences.

Anyway, about two years ago I went through a particularly stressful period of my life personally and also professionally, working on moving house while working through some of the most God awful articles I’d ever read in a journal where I did have a full editing remit. So I ended up rewriting a lot of these articles, and because I’m paid by the word not the hour, my hourly rate was terrible and my stress levels were high. And gradually, I began to doubt and second guess myself until I became paralysed and unable to really process sentences, sitting reading the same sentence ten, twenty, thirty times, and not really making sense of it, paranoid that I had missed an error or if I made a change I would introduce an error without realising it, until I was missing deadline after deadline, and over a period of months I failed to complete literally dozens of articles that had been sent to me, that I had accepted and then failed to even start because of this paralysis.

As my career and more importantly my reputation went down in flames, and as editing went from being easy to painfully difficult, and as my inner emotional turmoil intensified to the point that it became unbearable every time I diverted my full energy and focus from keeping it under control (i.e. by undertaking a fitness workout or trying to concentrate on editing an article), I began to be traumatised every time I tried to do anything, be it get physique or an article or any other aspect of my life into some kind of decent shape. Because those feelings would spill out uncontrollably, and the pain was extreme, like nothing I had ever experienced before. And believe me, I had experienced plenty of extreme emotional pain before that point.

Fast forward to today and I have one journal left where the very kind production editor hadn’t ditched me, despite missing every deadline (sometimes by weeks) and repeatedly breaking promises of when I could return assigned articles. I was honest about my “depression” (or whatever it is, my emotional problems such as they are), and she was very compassionate. I know the quality of my work is very high, but I can’t believe it’s anything other than kindness that kept those articles coming.

But that editor moved on recently, sending me five articles before she left, and they are now over three weeks overdue, and it’s been two weeks since the second email sent by the new production editor asking about the articles (in a very kind and unassuming manner), which I have yet to reply to.

So for the past month or so since I was assigned these articles, every day I’ve been tormenting myself, without meaning to. Trying to build up the fortitude necessary to sit at the keyboard and suffer through them. To endure the emotional agony that becomes so pronounced whenever I try to really concentrate on editing, and lose control of it so it comes to the surface, unrelenting and devastating. Some days I have tried and failed. Occasionally I have managed to get a couple of pages or just a few paragraphs done. Mostly I have failed altogether to even sit down at the keyboard. And I have kept telling myself, “today you either have to get an article done or send them back”. But I don’t want to send them back, and not just because this is the only money I’m currently bringing in.

Copyediting is the easiest gig I’ve ever had. Working from home, my one-step commute as I used to call it from my bed to my PC (now my bedroom is bigger so it’s more like ten steps). Choosing my own hours. Reading through generally well written articles that barely need any changes or corrections, some of which are dry and dull or technically difficult to understand but many of which are very interesting and educational. I’m so spoiled, and I worked very hard and smart to build up my career and reputation, that are both now in ruins.

So the truth is, if I send these articles back and ask for a break, that break will become permanent when I am forced to ask for the journal to be reassigned, and that will be the last journal gone, and my tenuous, fragile grasp on my final tiny shred of independence from this brutal emotional and psychological dysfunction that has wrecked me and my life for so many of years so far will be lost. Once it’s gone, I won’t get it back. I won’t have the will or the desire. And the easiest gig ever will be gone.

Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe it would give way to something else. But I don’t want it to end like that. If I move on from this, I want it to be because I’m giving it up for something better.

So, yesterday – despite having told myself at least a dozen times “today is breaking point”, this is it, you must do or die, you must return an article or ask for them to be reassigned – I told myself that this really is it this time, that I must have two articles done by this evening, and reply to the email by 10pm, which is 7am Monday morning in Melbourne where my new contact is based. I haven’t met that deadline, but I’m close. Close enough. I should be editing now, but I just had to get this out, get this recorded.

So I got up today, feeling very tired, and not at all like editing, but after an hour or so of waking up, instead of watching TV or playing videogames or going back to bed, I sat down at the keyboard and started working on the article I was about a third of the way through. The difference was though, I didn’t just sit down and force my way through it. I was very kind and caring and compassionate to myself. I went to the mirror and told myself “you can do this” and how proud I am of myself, and how it’s okay that these articles are so badly overdue, all that matters is where I go from here, that today I can turn things around. I reassured myself that I would figure out a way to take breaks without being away from the keyboard too long, and a way to manage the pain if it got really severe, that I wouldn’t just try to push through it like usual. And these reassuring words and this quiet resolve calmed my anxiety, not quelled it completely but calmed it to the point of it being easy to manage, and I let go of the guilt of having let things get so out of hand with this batch of work and making such a dreadful first impression with my new contact, and I just focused on the job at hand.

I edited slowly. It was still relatively painful. I still read some sentences dozens of times in anxiety. But it was quicker than usual. And less painful. And I managed to break out of the cycle of repeat reading more quickly. And I trusted my judgement to change or not change something better. It was still tedious work. I had a number of author queries to raise. The article is perfectly well written and the topic is interesting but the writing style is dry and tiresome. So that has not helped. There are a lot of lengthy tables, also a chore to work through (but anything is better than the actual text, where I keep coming unstuck through this anxiety spiral I get stuck in). But the article is almost done. As soon as I submit it I’ll send the email, not by 10pm but definitely before 11pm. And I’ve already started work on the next article, and I managed to send one back the other week. So that will be two down, another one underway, and three to go after that, with the one I’m working on now being the longest one.

It’s such a massive victory, but it’s the reverse to most people, who feel good because something goes right or they achieve something. For me, something goes right or I achieve something because I feel good (or at least, like today, don’t feel too bad). As soon as I’m free to achieve, because this indescribable emotional pain I’m afflicted with isn’t entirely crippling me, I get straight to work without delay. That’s what happened today.

Was it that I really made a decision and that caused me to control my feelings better or gave me more hope or strength to counter them? Was it just a coincidence? Was it my unconscious printing out the design it had been working on for months? Or a combination of all of the above? There is no way for me to know, but I can at least say this: I am fucking glad it happened, because the stress is subsiding, I am regaining some semblance of control over a challenging situation, and I now have a foothold and a decent shot and climbing out of this pit and having these articles done by the end of this week.

I walked to the shops earlier, through a beautiful park that I’m blessed to have right by my house. And for the first time in ages, I was actually glad to be outdoors, in nature, on a sunny summer evening slowly fading to twilight. I was enjoying it. It was astonishing, because I haven’t had the capacity to enjoy anything like that for pretty much this entire year so far. It’s such a great sign. On the way back from the shops, weighed down by two heavy bags, working up a sweat, the handles digging into my palms, I was grateful to be breathing harder and doing some exercise, and I began to think about starting exercising again.

I am so badly out of shape now, and it’s incredibly disheartening, but sitting around being disheartened and eating yet more junk food isn’t going to get me fitter. And I was thinking that even if I can’t maintain it because my emotions cripple me again, something is still better than nothing. Even with a lack of consistency, even if I’m backsliding, just exercising sometimes will mean I am slightly more fit and backsliding slower. And that is better than nothing at all. Something is almost always better than nothing.

And as I returned to the house, I thought of something cool that I wanted to share with you, something that I am going to try to remember as I work to get out of this shitty situation that I’m in. And it is this:

Whatever state you’re in, however you have ended up, whatever you don’t like about yourself or your life, whatever is going wrong, just remember that although this is where life has taken you or where you have allowed yourself to end up (probably a combination of the two, part choice and part fate), who you are and where you are now is not permanent. Who you are now isn’t who you really are, it’s just how life has shaped you for now. Damage has been done. Wounds have been suffered. But there is yet hope, not of changing yourself, but of changing back to your true self, who you have always been since birth, who you tried to be during childhood but then were steered away from by both well-meaning and malevolent people and influences in your formative years and beyond.

So when you’re working on yourself, whatever the work is, don’t think of it as change. Think of it as restoration.

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.

As a long-term sufferer of depression, I’ve used a lot of metaphors to try to describe a state of being that people who have never experienced it simply cannot comprehend. I’m glad they can’t. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Well, hardly anyone. Usually the metaphors involve a force far greater than myself, an essential element of the description that at least begins to convey the sense of scale and helplessness – that when depression comes crashing down like a rockslide, when it roars in like a tsunami, when hurtles towards me like a ten-thousand-ton freight train, I really am powerless to resist it. It crushes me under its terrible weight. It wipes me out like I’m nothing. It drowns me. It drains me. It obliterates me. It shuts me down. All positive emotion gone, replaced with a pervasive, all-consuming terrible sadness, an agonising anguish that devours everything good like a swarm of locusts, leaving only waste and devastation in its wake.

But it used to do more than that. It used to warp my thinking too. It used to make me hate everyone and everything. All of the people who didn’t give a fuck about me. All of the people who let me down and didn’t come to help me or support me or just keep me company. All of the people out in the world living their lives, making it look easy. All of the people out in the world suffering worse than me, making me feel bad for feeling bad when I’m so privileged compared to so many – the majority I would argue. All of my failures, haunting me. All of my dreams, taunting me. It made me hate myself. It made me want to end everything, which of course is just a sanitised euphemism for murdering myself. It made me a victim.

I’m doing much better than I was, but I’m still very vulnerable to this terrible, all-consuming, debilitating force. Particularly as I continue to grapple with the issues that have caused me to be paralysed in suffering for so many years: my feelings surrounding my father, and the many ways in which he has been neglectful and abusive and cruel, even into adulthood – even now. And then he casts himself as the victim if I ever call him out on his callousness, and he complains about how he did his best and I should be grateful and did he do anything right and was it all bad? No it wasn’t all bad and yes he did some things right, but he got it wrong more often than not, and it wasn’t – and isn’t – that he was and is incapable of doing any better or getting it right more often. The problem is his sheer arrogance and immature defensiveness that causes him to refuse to take any responsibility, even as he projects this out onto others and accuses them of not taking responsibility for their situation.

Well, I do take responsibility for my situation. And I am working very hard to heal all of my wounds. Because I’m not ever going to be like him. I learned to be a victim from him. I learned to be depressed from him. I could have ended up like him. But I fought it, and I choose something better. I choose not to be a victim. I’m a survivor, and a fighter, and I will keep surviving and keep fighting until I am thriving, and don’t need to fight quite so much or quite so hard any more.

So even as I sit here, crushed, barely functioning, because my dad chose to lash out at me and stick the knife in deep – and probably didn’t even realise he was doing it, because it’s so easy and familiar and habitual, the habit of a lifetime from a few years after I was born – I choose not to hate everyone and everything. I choose not to hate myself and want to kill myself. I choose to want to live. I choose to face the suffering head on, and endure it. I choose to fight to just do my basic daily routine if nothing else while I feel like this – more if possible, but if not I will rest, and be kind to myself, and understand that self-love is the quickest route back to feeling good. I’m still reading and writing every day, coming up to three weeks now. I’m still doing my daily activities that are designed for all aspects of my well-being – physical, mental, emotional, creative, spiritual, social. Today is not the day I stop. That’s what I did in the past. It may be a brutally hard day. I may be suffering badly. But today I choose life, and I choose myself, and I choose getting the balance right between keeping my momentum and healing this latest wound.

And, most importantly, I choose to recognise that whereas before I was just suffering, now I’m suffering with purpose. Each incident, each relapse, gets me one step closer to the point when finally I will be ready to confront all of this, to resolve it all, and to let it all go. My father’s power to hurt himself I’m sure he’ll retain until the day he dies, and there’s nothing I can do about that – he’s beyond my ability to help, and believe me, I’ve tried many times, for both of our sakes. But his power to hurt me will soon come to an end, because I’m going to take it away from him. I will reclaim that lost power and bring it back into myself, so I can move forward as a whole person and live the life I truly want to live and deserve to live and am meant to live. Today isn’t one step back. It’s just another step forward.

Although the lack of new posts might suggest that it’s time to try Plan C, in actual fact I’ve been writing every single day… this is no less than Day 12! So Plan B is working, I just ended up doing what I normally do: turning something that should be quick and simple into something a lot more involved.

Someone suggested I should write some reviews, and I thought, “yeah, that’s a great idea, just rattle off a quick review of something I’ve watched recently”. I just watched Star Trek: Discovery for the first time and I absolutely hate the two-part pilot, it’s so bad in so many ways that I couldn’t possibly list them all here, so I started working on that and I’ve been writing much longer than 10 minutes some days, yet still it isn’t quite finished. It’s gone from a brief critique to a lengthy diatribe in which I dissect the whole plot to demonstrate why it’s so awful, so I’ve been having to go back and rewatch scenes (sucker for punishment!) and generally check my facts about this new show and a few things I’ve referenced from past shows (I believe in due diligence and not relying on my memory!).

The draft is finally completed now, just a quick run through and a bit of time to finalise my scoring system and it’ll actually be ready to publish. However, as it’s been 10 days or so, I figured today I’d better just write a quick update post, to let everyone who’s waiting with bated breath for my next post (all three of you) that I’m still working on stuff. And I wanted to also report that the new plan is actually working really well. Apart from, you know, the problem of aiming to write something brief that can quickly be finished and posted that turns into a much more involved and time-consuming mini-project. And of course the other problem that’s been a pattern of mine in the past too – that of not finishing something before moving onto the next thing, and then not finishing that either. After all, it’s now been weeks since I published the last part of my metafiction experiment, and the prologue to My Abundant Life is gathering dust with no sign of the first part on the horizon. But for now I’ll just focus on the win that I’m actually writing every day and have been for the last 12 days. One problem at a time.

Well, it’s been nearly a month since I posted. Does that mean Plan B is out and it’s time to think up Plan C? Not just yet.

The reason why I’ve been out of action for nearly a month is very simple; I took a sabbatical from my newfound life of enjoyment and abundance, and headed back to Hell for a while. I didn’t do it on purpose, it just happened when I confronted my deepest-rooted issue (please Santa let this be my deepest-rooted issue, because I don’t know if I can withstand anything more painful than this one), namely my feelings about my father, and all the baggage I’m carrying around because of the way he has (mis)treated me and (mis)guided me through my whole life. I guess I’ve known for a long time on some level that he’s a major part of the pain and suffering I’ve experienced throughout my life through all those years of depression, but I have now isolated him and his attitude towards me and his EasterBunnydamn (I’m mixing it up and interchanging “God” with other fictional characters) religion as the source of everything. Literally everything that has gone wrong in my life – every bad decision I’ve made, every bad experience I’ve had that I’ve brought upon myself rather than being the result of genuine misfortune – leads back to him. He didn’t do it on purpose of course, and if I wasn’t a highly sensitive person I might have weathered it better… but he did, and I am, so I didn’t.

I triggered this episode by taking myself way, way, waaaaayyy out of my comfort zone and sitting down with my dad for a long heart to heart, which I expect he found overall enjoyable and positive, where I filled him in on all the things I’d been doing in the second half of last year, such as the online course that enabled me to get out of depression, this blog, my new business, and other things. I explained I was feeling a lot better and making real progress with my depression (ironically I was unaware that I was about to go back in, triggered by that very conversation, but it still holds true as I’m handling this severe episode far better than I have done in the past), and feeling confident about getting back on my feet financially in the near future, one way or another. I apologised for the series of outbursts of rage I’ve had over the past few years, where I’ve totally lost my temper and just let rip with almost no restraint and torn strips out of him and my mum, deservedly so particularly in his case, but still it wasn’t justified to say how I felt and what I thought in the way that I did. He seemed to be heartened and said how pleased he was that I’m doing better. He managed to accept my apology and only needled me a little. It was all very pleasant and civilised. I went all the way and actually said the words “I love you” and gave him a hug, something I haven’t done for many years as we don’t say those words or hug in our family. My Tooth Fairy, it was so uncomfortable for me, and I think that part probably was for him too. But that was my aim and I achieved it.

After the talk had ended, I felt really bad. The next day I felt even worse. My functioning began to wind down. I stopped working out. I let go of the idea of writing and reading for a few days. I stopped doing anything with my business. Healthy eating went out the window and a tsunami of chocolate bars and biscuits poured in. I stopped doing my daily challenges on my course. Within a few short days I had collapsed into deep suffering, sinking into that place of terrible anguish, and it was absolutely clear that my dad had triggered it. It was totally familiar. It was the same pain I’ve felt for over twenty years in and out (mostly in, sometimes for years without respite) of depression. And that was when I realised. It’s all caused by my dad. He is the root of it all.

I had thought I’d gotten to the root of it when I finally stopped abusing myself and then made peace with myself for just how horrifically cruel I had been to myself for many years. But now I realise that my dad is the one who taught me to be hard on myself and critical of myself and judgemental of myself, which was the foundation upon which I built my self-torture chamber. So now, hopefully, I’m at the source of all of my pain and misery and suffering, and it’s caused by all that I’m holding onto concerning my dad, all the hate and anger and bitterness and resentment and disappointment and sadness and despair and rage and envy (of other men who have warm, kind, loving fathers who want to know them and truly believe they can do anything they set their minds to).

I have a plan to work through and let go of all of this baggage that has been weighing me down my whole life, and I improvised and implemented a part of it yesterday, which has freed me up enough to function again today – so although I’m still in depression, I’m not as deep, I’m coming back up nearer the surface. This is the first day since my last post that I’ve felt like I could function in a proactive way, and here I am, writing this entry.

So Plan C isn’t necessary just yet. There’s a reason for the long pause between posts, and it’s an actual reason and not an excuse. As I work through these issues and get back to full strength, I’ll see how my discipline is with daily reading and writing, which may be sporadic this week and perhaps the next, as I face the horrendous pain inside me and attempt to release it. My hope is that once I’m out the other side of this, Plan B will be successful.

And If not, I will carry on through the alphabet until I find the letter that works…