I feel out of synch. Like my world is rotating on a different axis to usual. Everything is off balance and I feel I'm grasping for something solid to hold onto but I just get air. Empty. I feel empty. There is nothing left inside of me and I've got nothing else to give. Everything is moving too fast, it's all moving around me and I cannot hold onto any of it.
I'm trying to find some semblance of order to my thoughts. Rapid cycling moods are something I thought I'd gotten used to, and then they come along and sweep me off my feet, I can't catch my breath, I can't still myself enough to catch my breath.
Did you ever do that thing when you were a kid, where you put your arms out and just spun around in circles until you got dizzy and just fell to the floor? Then you'd giggle and get back up, and everything around you was swirling all over the place, but it gave you a high, so you'd put your arms back out and spin again, faster and faster. Bang. You'd hit the floor again. There was a dizzy adrenaline rush that made you feel so warm inside that anything felt possible. I could lie there for what felt like forever, dizzy, breathless, but I felt like I'd been flying, and my landing heightened every single one of my senses.
Now imagine that again, you're an adult, the setting has changed; instead of holding your arms out by your sides, they are rigid and stuck, you are moving, walking through a menial every day task. But then out of nowhere, you start spinning, that dizzy adrenaline rushing through your blood stream, everything is swirling around you and no matter how hard you try, you cannot find a point of stillness amongst all of the dizzy chaos. Everything is just moving and moving and you're going faster and faster, but there's no landing, there's no stopping. That is what rapid cycling moods feel like.
I cannot find a still point amongst the chaos. I can't slow down. I can't control anything, my moods are moving so quickly that I can't concentrate, I can't focus on anything, it's near enough impossible. It's like I'm on a carousel, but I can't get off. I want to, but I can't. That same adrenaline rush is sweeping through my system and I'm flying high, so high. I want everything to stop, I want to get off, I want to find a still point to focus on a slow it all down, to bring me down, but before I can even think about how much I want to find that still point, my mind is already bringing up a hundred other things.
Those are the highs. When you're flying so high, at some point, you have to land. The carousel eventually has to stop and you eventually have to get off. The lows are bleak, black, an infinite abyss. Emptiness overwhelms me. I feel the absence of everything I've lost in each and every one of my pores. Sadness seeps out of me, from every little crevice, every little part of me. It evaporates out of my skin, it pours out of me every time I exhale.
I try. I try so hard to battle it, I try so hard to fight it and not let it paralyse me. I try so hard. But I'm not tough, I'm not a warrior. So sometimes I fail. Sometimes I give into it. I let it consume me, inch by inch, muscle by muscle, thought by thought.
I cry. I cry until my head hurts and my eyes ache. Sometimes I just want those tears to drown me, to take me under and hold me underneath them until I'm lost completely in their power. I pick at my skin, at my lips, at any part of me that I can grasp onto. I pick at them to break myself apart. To strip pieces of me off, bit by bit. To break myself to my very core, so that I can start again. Self loathing doesn't come with a care manual, it doesn't tell you to stop, it doesn't tell you that you don't deserve to be broken apart; that you are already whole enough to live through a day, a minute, an hour without pain. I lose all sight of hope, I'm trapped in my own little purgatory of bleakness, I'm wading through misery and I can't see an end in sight. I'm drowning in it. I let it into my lungs, I breathe it into my system. It's filling me up from the inside out and nothing can stop it. I can see the sand of an hourglass moving slowly, as I try and scream and fight my way out of this glass case of despair that has trapped me inside myself.
People try and break me out, they tell me nice things, they give me pretty words of hope and promise and encouragement. But they don't reach their intended target, they never do. I absorb them as much as the despair allows me to, I try to inhale them deeply enough to reach my core, to reach the nucleus of the self loathing, to break it apart and shatter it into so many pieces that it will never be able to form itself again. But they can never reach deep enough.
Criticism, on the other hand, reaches right inside of the central nervous system of the misery and self loathing, and gives it life, it gives it energy and fuels it to carry on; to keep feasting on my spirit.
"At 24, I would have hoped you would have grown out of staying in bed all day"
Simple words of disgust, veiled with self righteousness, thrown my way, directing themselves at the very heart and soul of the depression, fuelling it with enough energy to consume me further and further.
You are a failure. You couldn't fight me today and she judged you for that. She thinks you are a failure because in that moment you weren't stronger than me. You were a failure, you are a failure. You're fat and you're pathetic and you're never going to be free of me.
Depression has been feasting on me, I can feel it taking me back under it's sweeping tide, swallowing me whole.
I hope I'm strong enough to fight it.
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