My pain

[Guest_48546029]

It’s not always an uphill battle. Sometimes I’m in a valley. The land is flat and easy to navigate. The grass is soft beneath my feet. And sometimes I’m in the sky, floating on cotton balls in the baby blue. It’s not always bad. Most of the time, I’m happy.

But sometimes the clouds sink and the valleys end. Storms begin, and I’m climbing mountains. These are the times I’m left in thickets and thorn bushes, bruised and broken, scraped and scarred. My mind is noisy but my heart is empty.

But I’m not.

No matter how much I try, no matter how long it’s been, the gears get stuck and don’t work properly.

I wonder why I’m so tired. I don’t do much, so why do I feel burned out

And then it’s the lack of desire and motivation, to see anyone or do anything anymore and am fine with that to.

And then I realize it. It’s back.

Then the anger starts. The thoughts rumble. My mind is a mess,

I prefer being away from the world cause i prefer being alone

I can’t control it, even when I try.

I can't be in social places for some reason 😕

I don’t write much. I just think. It’s been a while since I’ve written a journal or a book . It makes me feel unproductive, like I’m failing. It makes me question my abilities and my future. I think a lot, but at the same time, I feel numb.

But the reality of it is, i am so down but i’ve dealt with it before so am good

[mmMekitty]

Hello Guest_4854629

I found it exhausting when in the deepest depression, getting through each day, when all I wanted to do was to stop thinking & sleep. When I slept, I woke as tired & physically weak as before. It's so difficult, almost impossible to rouse myself enough to get up & see to my basic needs.

But I realised, moving my arms & legs seemed to help. Getting up & going to the bathroom helped. Then I could focus on eating something, be it a bowl of cereal or heating up some frozen vegetables.

I also found writing to be great when the thoughts would go around & around in circles, endlessly repeating the same thoughts I had wanted to push away already. The writing helped to break the repetition. I could literally point to where I'd written a thought onto the page & tell myself, look, it's there - there is no need to go over that again (at least for the day).

It takes time & a lot of effort changing these patterns of thought. I wrote thousands of pages over a few years. Eventually it got through to me how much I was going over old ground, getting nowhere, because I was talking to myself, & I had nothing new to say. I realised I needed another's perspective.

That's when I sought the help of a psychiatrist. & then it took a long time to trust & open up, to speak aloud those thoughts, memories, & yes, indeed, there were feelings I had thought I didn't have, to talk about, too. Even though he didn't say much, just hearing my own voice in my ears seemed to get through to me more than the writing. Hearing my words was harder to push aside & ignore.

I still needed more to get my head above water, to not see the storm clouds threatening to destroy me, so was a time when I had meds to help. They did, while I was learning other ways to manage the symptoms.

For many years I heard the voices from my past, being critical of me & whatever I was doing or not doing. Echos from the past. Those people aren't in my life anymore. Their criticisms were their opinions & only that. I understand now that I don't need to take on the thoughts & feelings they had about me.

Also, I learned feelings are feelings & thoughts are thoughts & nothing more. Having a thought or feeling is neither good nor bad; it's having a thought or feeling. I'm still learning to not judge, like those people had done so long ago. Hard work, but well worth keeping at it.

& finally, hard as it is to believe at the time, the depression days do pass & get better.

Hugzies

mmMekitty

[therising]

You create such a clear picture with your words, one I can easily see through my imagination. You have an obvious gift in how you express yourself. What you describe is 'the heroes journey'. It's a journey through territories of great ease and great unease or dis-ease. It covers territories of achievement and those of incredible challenge. I imagine there have been times where you've had guides and times where you'd had to navigate alone. Either way, it's about covering uncharted territory, situations or states of mind where you've never been before.

As a 53yo gal, took me decades to finally work out 'While life starts with guidance or guides (parents etc), there's no cut off point where we suddenly stop needing guides altogether.' While we may not need them all the time, under all circumstances, there are definitely times where it can be hard to live without someone who can help us navigate.

I've lost count of the amount of times where I've thought, in one way or another, 'Where the hell am I and why the heck is this part of my path so dark?'. Btw, 'How the hell did I get here?' can be about accessing hindsight to help gain a better sense of things. Finding people/guides who can shed light can also help make a big difference. From a bird's eye view, there can also be a sense of pride when you realise just how far you've come through all your efforts, with an occasional 'My gosh, that is seriously impressive'.

There can be internal guidance, external guidance and no guidance at all. With internal guides, there can be dialogue coming from our inner sage or our harsh and brutal depressing inner critic, dictating direction, positive and negative. With external guidance, there can be people posing the kind of dialogue that leads everything to feel like you're heading south or you can find people who'll help you find your 'true north'. With no guidance at all, it can feel like you're standing still, not going anywhere, with no sense of direction whatsoever, which can definitely feel depressing at times. I've found determining what the depressing or potentially depressing challenge is about is what helps determine who the best guide for the job is. 'A mental challenge, a physical challenge, a soulful challenge or all 3 combined (aka a complex challenge)?' becomes the question.

While I can hopefully trigger the seer in you, can you see where you currently are in the landscape? Not always easy to see or make sense of. For example, while I once found myself feeling like I was on a cliff's edge, I found a great guide who said to me 'You're actually standing on the verge (of change). Take a breath, look out and survey the landscape. The new territory you're about to enter into is vast. Take it in for a little while before you enter. The truth of the matter is...there's no going back, only forwards. When you're ready, take a leap. You'll be fine'. With the journaling, I suppose you could say it's like a form of mapping. Looking back over it, it tells you where you've been, how you managed challenging territories, how you found the best direction under a variety of circumstances and it can act as a reminder of what new tools or skills you had to develop and throw into your backpack. A journal can become a reference guide. You're not just a traveler, you're a cartographer too.