Train of Thought
What my depressive episodes looked like before medication and leaving a shitty job (2015)
There’s a freight train in my mind, reverberating thoughts so encapsulating it’s hard to remember experiencing anything else. Flagrant disdain to an apathy I wish would stick around long enough for the train to shut up.
Will I be able to get things done today? Am I a piece of shit or aren’t I? I wish my version of depression were served cold. If I really didn’t care, I wouldn’t be asking these questions.
“If I can’t do my work then I must be lazy. And a lazy person does not deserve this job or any job for that matter. What will be my calculated response be when they let me go? Of course I’d feign surprise and with a stupid smile, masking all my self-hatred and anger, politely walk away, like I always do.”.
The ambivalence agitates, making the pull toward my vices so apparently there. Driving around to smoke another cigarette. Picking at my skin to keep awake. A glass or five to fall asleep. I belong to the things I crave. The itch I can never reach. —Why did I smoke? If I keep relapsing due to periodic mood swings then I‘ll never quit. Oh! It’s because I am a piece of shit-visions of slashing my own arms, crashing my dirty car, choking my own neck. Where does the impulse to hurt myself come from? An attempt to scratch my wildest itch? An expression of how badly I want to remove myself from...it?
Funny that my mind feels of a place rather than a part of me. Me a part of it. I don’t think in terms of changing, I think in terms of leaving. As if the chemicals in my veins were the culprit, sending signals to my brain it’s time to leave.
Surviving
If I were talking to anyone else, I’d tell them it wasn’t their fault. But for some reason, maybe a feeble attempt to own what’s happened to me, I believed I did it to myself.
(Trigger warning: rape) If I were talking to anyone else, I’d tell them it wasn’t their fault. But for some reason, maybe a feeble attempt to own what’s happened to me, I believed I did it to myself. I knew he was angry and would be more dangerous that night; I went anyway. I’ve hated myself so vehemently that I chose the lion’s den over my lonely bed.
Like most things in my life that hurt and can’t be controlled, the rape still seems to me a grander form of self-harm. I tell myself I am over the rape. What lingers is the shame from my inability to numb the fear of abandonment when he chose to kick me out soon after. The fear taught me an important lesson that night. That I cared so little of myself; I’d rather be at the mercy of someone I loathed -at the hands of someone who had just assaulted me, in fear of being alone.
Over ten years later and that self-blame has shifted. I was responsible for the choices I made in seeing this person, yes, but not responsible for what he chose to do to me. And for that I have a right to be indignant. My hatred is justified and it is mine. Whether I choose to clutch or surrender it is up to me.
But what I feel toward him or my trauma is not as important as how I treat myself today. No longer blaming myself is a step up for now; It’s OK if I can’t say I love myself yet. It’s OK if I don’t even like myself. One day I will master self-love, but today I am content with self-compassion. I live a life worth living again. This is surviving.