Depression is hard to recover from because as much as you don’t choose to stay miserable, it feels like a choice between staying miserable or faking it.
And the faking in of itself takes its toll on you when inside you’re anything but okay.
Depression makes it, so you also don’t see the point in recovery because, after all, you think that life is pointless anyway.
That, along with trying to fake it, is the ultimate struggle.
If life is pointless, why bother recovering?
I come up against this all the time.
People say Depression lies to you.
I say it doesn’t.
Who is right?
Obviously, I think I’m right. Depression tells us the ultimate truth that life is pointless in the grand scheme of things.
I’m always fighting this struggle inside; I can’t remember a time when I didn’t.
I don’t beat myself up for the same things as others, generally speaking, not to say I never do, I have my moments, but they’re few and far between.
I don’t beat myself up over a lack of success. Success never mattered to me because life is too pointless for it to matter.
But what I do beat myself up time and again for is not going through with the ultimate expression of this pointlessness, for being a coward for not doing it.
Some nights it haunts me that I am too scared to do the one act that makes logical sense in the scheme of things.
What does that fear and anxiety mean? That underneath it all, I truly want to live? That’s what I’m always told. ‘It’s a sign you want to live.’ ‘It’s because you want the pain to be over, not your life.’
But what if it really is just a case of cowardice? I have been a coward much of my life, never mind being able to do the ultimate act to oneself.
Weird how cowardly a person can be while also feeling so utterly Depressed.
It’s a weird thing, too, because Depression can be an empty, numb feeling and too much pain. Either oscillating between feeling so numb you could be accused of managing to be ‘stoic’ only because you feel so little there is nothing to express, or you’re so distraught in life people tell you to calm down.
A gorillas existential crisis
Tattoos & Scars
We tattoo and mark or shame
Hoping symbols
Will communicate
The things we cannot say.
Clown
I etched onto my face
A fucking clowns grin
An inside out frown
So you wouldn’t know
I was down
But I’m down and out
I took my clothes off
I shaved my hair off
And I walked down the road
Police picked me up
And took me to the hell hole
And they wiped my grin off
They said I was crazy
Said this is who you are
The man with a perpetual frown
So they sewed up my mouth
And pulled the strings
Until my lips smiled
Like the skeleton beneath
They took me to a clown show
And they stood me on a table
Shifted the corners of my mouth
Looked at my teeth and then turned me around
Said I came third
Pinned a rosette to my collar and cheered
But I was the only clown
And then I pinched my nose
And the crowd laughed out loud.
That one sustained note
Trying to find that one sustained……..
Note……
That resonates…
With this despair
Swelling in my chest
Hindering my capacity to breathe
That one note
As a howl to the wind
Haunting this world
As I am haunted in mind
Letting go
Giving into the pointlessness
Of existence
Time like sand slipping through fingers
Running
Head first into the demons
letting go
Of resistance
Exist
The cliffs and the sea are not friends or foe
They just simply exist
If only you and I could see our lives
In such a way
As the sea erodes rocks
Our tears chisel and etch lines on our face
Longing to be remembered
But not retraced
Meditation diaries: What Meditation is teaching me about my depression
I’ve tried talking therapies, just plain counselling none of which really worked on me. I was taught that the problem is thought patterns and thought loops that I get stuck into.
Meditation allows me to back away from the thought loops that can make depression harder to live with.
However, with meditation what it has taught me is that there is something much more to my despair than my thinking patterns. It’s worse than that. I feel despair without a thought, I can get to that mind space that is often called ‘the gap’ and all I feel within me is absaloute full to the brim of despair while simultaneously feeling empty. No thoughts to keep me there, just this feeling beyond words, beyond thoughts.
What i’m learning is that this is all hopeless.
I’m hopeless.
Anti-depressants don’t work much, therapy doesn’t work for me either and while meditation helps me to the degree that I can sit with the despair for longer rather than pacing, rather than ruminating I can sit with the despair with a sense of calm. Like i’m sat on a boat in the middle of a storm and there are surges of waves that are strong but I can just sit there as the wave cascade over me. But that has its limits, which I expect. Eventually it becomes more than I can take and all I can think is that I wish I could lay down and go to sleep and never wake up again.
I’m tired.
I don’t know why i’m Posting this other than to share my despair.
Which is ironic because I know how pointless everything is, including sharing this. Yet in this immediate moment this is what I feel like doing
Nothing ever lasts
The blue sky is there
You just need to wait
For the clouds to roll on by
Days, weeks or months
This too shall pass.
Including that thought
That nothing ever lasts
The Rose of Jericho
The internet has become white noise
Constantly there inside our heads
Beckoning voices
Of all dissenting opinions
Facts and alternative ‘facts’
Politics, politics
Fucking politics
So much, “I’m right, you’re left”
Handing weapons to one another
Via the mishandling of language
Everyone an expert
In things they know none
The age of ignorance
Not information
Snowballing into oblivion
All these voices
Becoming a life of their own
Rolling till they find their hold
Ressurecting themselves like the rose of jericho
Casting aside all the things we’ve come to know
To gather together and say the same old shit
In bubbles all our own
The illusion of connection
Making us feel wordly
Mass delusions of grandeur
Another selfie to look happy, happy, happy!
Projecting images of who we think we ought to be
And projecting onto one another
The parts of us we hate to see
I’m good, you’re bad.
I’m moral, you’re sick
I’m strong, you’re weak
I’m never offended
I’m offended by everything
No more middle ground
The internet is nuanced
But your bubbles not.
All these thoughts in my head.
You’ve made me into a person I don’t recognise
And I can’t remember who I was before
I just read previous enteries in my journals
And see someone elses writing
I think you killed him
I’ve had versions of me killed before
And when I think I’ve started to become someone again
You rub more salt in the still open wound
And I find myself losing sight of a self again
It hurts too much
And it feels pathetic
To hurt so much because of someone like you
I wish I was stronger
That pillar of strength I always used to talk about.
The man with a steady walk extending to steady mind
A man you could imagine in suit and tie
Even when wearing jogging pants
Because he just oozes that grace
Of a man who knows he’s found his own way
I think of this, until i remember that analogy in my head
Of ties being like nooses around downtrodden, broken men
I’ve got no use trying to look like a buisness man
And I’m angry and like a dog with a bone
I just can’t let these things go
You’re the tie around my neck
A noose that goes unchecked
And they all think I’ll be okay
Its all about keeping you quiet for just one day
To them
They don’t care
About what they don’t see
Inside my head
Like a damp cellar
No one goes into
All the while the monster is growing
And one day soon
He’s going to break out
I can feel it
But I know I’ll be his first victim.
silverbackgorillapoetry.com 