Or Burn This Out

 

I’m not lazy. I’m not.

But how do you explain to someone you can’t manage normal life when you can barely even dredge up the motivation to breathe, or eat; or not be so miserable you’ve crossed the point of comfort and simply rearranged atoms to make space until it’s firmly woven into you.

How do you even begin to tell somebody you can’t even manage to regulate your own happiness, that you haven’t been able to do that for years, that every time it comes back, it’s a little stronger and a lot more familiar and not any less easier.

“I’m sad” sounds equal parts overdramatic and gross understatement and so so silly but it’s the truth and how do you tell someone you feel like an absolute failure for it but you just can’t right now, you can’t.

How do you even hate yourself a little less? Cut yourself some slack? ‘Cause you can see it logically  sure, but mind and practice are two different things and both are out of commission lately and you need to get it together, this is an important year but you can’t. You’ve barely been holding it together for 3 months and then the universe decides to go ahead and screw you over a little more as if you need any more reason to be pathetic and sad and pathetic and it is so silly it’s laughable–if every laugh didn’t sound forced and fake and empty, like you were shredding up your lungs just to torture it into giving up that basic, basic sound.

Tone down the self-loathing, man. It gets old.

Anyway, point is all of it sounds like I’m just making excuses but I’m not. I want to be able to just function and I want to not be such a flipping mess, and I want  to be able to explain it to you in terms less weak and confusing. But I can’t.

I can’t get out of bed, and it’s such a fricking cliché, and I can’t find it in myself to care, I can’t keep telling myself this isn’t happening and that I’m good when I can feel it heavy and thick and blistering all around me and it’s so amazingly pitiful and I am so done.

I say sad and I say miserable but there are different kinds, like when your dog dies and it sucks but that kind of sadness is one that grows inside you, born of healthy feelings and normal responses, warm and not nearly as self-destructive and then there is the kind that descends over you like a blanket that you wrap around yourself in ways you can’t remember later until it feels like it’s just spun itself into your skin, a physical barrier between you and everything around you, filtering out everything until all that’s left is shades of muted grey and crimson–and why crimson where does that even come from and grey is such a fricking cliché — and it’s foreign and alien and familiar and what does one even say to that.

It is so messed up to describe any sort of sadness as flippin’ “warm” of all things but I speak in relative terms. It’s warm in the way the lump that surges up in your throat eventually goes away, and your eyes may be scratchy but you feel like you’ve been scrubbed clean, like there is a new day and the last one sucked, sure, but this one doesn’t have to. It’s warm in the way that you don’t find yourself drained and empty and pathetic, but just upset and exhausted while being secure in the knowledge that it’s temporary. It’s warm in a way the other kind of sadness isn’t, in a way that doesn’t leave you satisfied and avenged when you don’t eat or get out of bed or attempt to make things better for yourself. It’s warm in a way that doesn’t compel you to self-sabotage in ways nobody else notices.

The other kind is just plain cruel. Shaky hands and dim rooms and self-loathing.

I’m not lazy, I’m not making excuses, I’m just incredibly, terribly off.

(And I am sorry, I am, but I don’t know how to fix it)

 

Yours Truly,

 

P.S I haven’t been around for a while and I apologize for that. I also apologize for coming back just to post this depressing thing but I really needed to just get it out. Thank you for putting up with it.