The End of February
A Messy Recovery
It’s been another difficult week. The hours passed slowly, painfully. Some days felt like water, the morning there, then gone, the hours, nothing I could remember. But most days, it hardly moved at all. I drifted in and out of despair,. One minute I’d be gone and lying in a bed of self-pity and rage, stuck in the dark places my pain would take me too where life is nothing more than a blur I want to re-enter and cannot. Other times I am standing knee-deep in work, handling a project like it was the only thing standing between my happiness and the possibility, that is always far easier to imagine, of a long life of depression, loneliness, and failure.
But why is it that some days are kinder than others? Especially Sundays, when little is expected of me, and I allow myself the chance to wander and lose time and think of little, insignificant things. It’s for days like these that we live, isn’t it? For days when everything appears just fine and there’s not a thing you would change or do differently. When where you are seems right for reasons you can’t explain, when hope feels just far enough to be difficult but not impossible. And suddenly, the possibility of recovery, of “getting better,” whatever that means, isn’t so far off. It’s not something reserved for others more stronger and resilient, but something small and near enough for you to walk to, put in your pocket and enjoy for as long as you can keep it.
But, if there are good days, then what makes the others so awful, so frightening and unbearable? What triggers hope and what kills it? It’s like some sort of mystery that, taken from someone else’s perspective, might look nothing like a mystery at all but more like a series of destructive habits that are plain and obvious.
And there are the obvious things like loneliness and too much time spent alone and indoors. Then, sometimes it’s the inability to focus, the awful thoughts that flood my mind when the hours are passing too quickly and I can’t make anything work right. And it’s the way I try to work that makes me miserable. I treat it like it’s the military, like I need to be punitive, rigid and unyielding. I follow a strict schedule when it’s already proven too many times that it simply doesn’t work with me anymore. I use old, long obsolete ways of working that I should have given them up a long time ago.
The thing that troubles me the most if that for all my longing to be an artist in every sense, I pull myself in the direction of everything that defies and dirties it. Instead of letting go and surrendering to the process, I act more like a dictator who refuses to yield power. Instead of cutting out the world, I bring it closer and wait for praise and encouragement every step of the way. Instead of allowing my hands to experiment, to be messy, to spend hours on something with no obvious outcome, I force them to follow a schedule that demands they have something to show for themselves at the end of the day, something tangible and complete and adult-like.
And it’s strange how I’ve fought for this life, only to drag in the voices of those whom I fought against in order to have it.
But, I want to keep this entry short, and clear. I don’t want to lose myself in the repetition of all that I’ve done wrong, all that I wish I could do differently. It’s the talking I love, it keeps me far enough from acting against the things I can’t stop obsessing about. But maybe it’s as simple as saying I’ve had enough. If I can’t stand the idea of having more days like the ones that have passed, then I better get busy doing all that I can to make sure there’s not much more of them to come. And sometimes, the bad days will come just because, and there’s not much I could do. But most of the time, there’s a reason, and it’s my job to figure out what it is, and how to handle it before it handles me. It’s a precarious balance of things within your control and not, and it’s never as obvious as it sounds, but here I am, on the last day of February, declaring my will to fight, if not for me and my happiness, than for the sake of my art that begs for freedom, for unharnessed time, and, more than anything, for kindness.
