On contrast & depression

MattLeave a comment

If you wish to feel comfortable, you should first seek discomfort.

If at all it could be said that there is a key to life, it is on simple thing: Contrast.

Contrast is the only way we can have good things, so we must endure the bad.

But what is most painful about depression is not the contrast between your worst and best days, it’s the indifference that is torturous. A prolonged indifference that can go on for days, weeks, months and even years. Or rather it is an indifference to the good things, the silver linings, the comforts. A sense of pointlessness overwhelming the senses.

Contrast is like oxygen to a stable ‘happy’ mind. But what if your brain just isn’t responding to that oxygen? What if, for prolonged periods of time the only contrast you have are in the different hues of bleak dreary, blacks and greys?

Yes it’s true that even bouts of depression don’t last forever, but it feels like forever. And they bouts last long past their due.

Dysania

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The sun rises
And I’ve had a night of it
Turning the sheets
the way of turmoil
feeling beat
And I won’t rise again
Feeling the sun rays penetrate
the gaps between the blinds and the sill
and I lay still
waiting…

Waiting with time I don’t even want to kill
hoping I can win out
Against natural urges
just lay here alone, hidden
No one hear a word or a breath
Just lay here trying to be dead

© Silverbackgorillapoetry 2016 August

photography challenge: self portrait

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I’ve not been making it to the bird hides of late, so i searched for photography challenges to try and inspire myself. The list of challenges i found started with my worst nightmare. A self portrait. I often take the piss out of people taking their selfies.

So let me take a moment to humble myself and become one of you selfie takers…

IMG_4912c.jpg

Silverbackgorillaphotography ©

Born a genius

MattLeave a comment

By a stroke of luck
I was born with a light bulb above my head
So they knew I was a genius
Right from the start
The doctors slapped my bum
And said “Ya’ve got a genius boy, just look at his light bulb!”

I came shooting out the womb
Talking and walking
I didn’t cry
I simply greeted the doctor like this
“Why hello dear Doctor, please clean me up, I look a right fuckin’ mess”
Imagine his surprise at my French?!

Male baggage

MattLeave a comment

Unzipping the baggage
Contained within
Only for you to recoil
And shove it back in.

“I was not prepared to hear over and over from men how the women – the mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives – in their lives are constantly criticizing them for not being open and vulnerable and intimate, all the while they are standing in front of that cramped wizard closet where their men are huddled inside, adjusting the curtain and making sure no one sees in and no one gets out. There was a moment when I was driving home from an interview with a small group of men and thought, Holy shit. I am the patriarchy. Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.” Brene Brown