Scaling the Walls: Escaping My Latest Bout of Depression
Taking on the burden of all my sisters and brothers around me, assuming the maximum weight of everything I can carry, and making myself the vehicle of anguish for our modern world…these adhesive hardships seem to come quite natural for me. Yet putting utter emotional darkness into words is no easy job.
I’ve evolved so much since first facing the introspective mirror at five years old, I have accomplished so many meaningful moves, stared down my fears, filtered my stress, and surpassed most limiting humanoid factors determined to stop me. My personal operating toolbox, my proprietary CoolShit ToolKit runneth over with proven rituals, routines, processes, and tactics to mostly keep me on the proverbial straight and narrow.
Looking now into the erstwhile rearview, my previous spells of clinical depression were initiated by a major component, sparked by a huge happening, or brought on by some reactive dysfunction, so I believe, but not this time, so I think. When I was long ago upside down awhile inside out amid my substance abuse, I had dug myself into a hole that was frankly inescapable for quite some time, meaning me alone pinned myself to that drug deck for over a decade, sacrificially. Just before my second marriage imploded, it was found that I had been prescribed a negatively occurring anti-depressant. Here now and just days past however, it was the sum of 23 non-chemical life normalities that were collectively conspiring to do me in.
Not that I saw my latest meetup with depression coming, but once realizing I was stuck neck-deep in the swamp of despair, I quickly nametagged my affliction with accuracy. For a week or thereabouts I felt to first withhold a physical ailment. Perhaps such was the initial case exactly, now four weeks later a bad tooth infection as it only recently came light to be, but beyond the objective starting-out bad body chemistry, my legacy emotional darkness was then eager to join the self-abusive bash.
The second and third weeks were the worst: I was sleeping about 50% more than normal, I didn’t want to participate in any fun or joyful games, I was physically drained, my nutrition took a nosedive, I was totally pissed off with the entire world, didn’t even want to go outside, or eat, or shower, and both the private journaling to self and a moderate number of my public pronouncements teasingly approached suicidal speak.
I had been here before, and way worse, except now I possessed more tools than ever to help pull myself out of the quicksand. I believe needing to brush the bottom of my barrel for at least a few hours was necessary, so to initiate my journey up and out of my abysmal pit. For me, the bottom served as a slight cleansing like ok, I got that shit off my chest, out of my mind, mostly proved all the loser-loser lowlife loser rhetoric not to be true, and now it’s time to get busy. I turned first to my daybook journal and filled a total of 68 pages across a month’s time, mostly during week one and week four. Then utilizing the critical practice of my 21-life-seasons-old Unhappiness.xls spreadsheet (available for free on my website under ‘life tools’), I faced the mirror to ask…ok bird boy, what’s the damn problem?
Listing everything currently tugging at me, no matter the surface-level insignificance it may bear, I began tearing the list apart, row by row and column by column. A handful of crossover topics appeared once diving into it, so I cleaned those up in condensed fashion as I went along.
There were big things like insufficient funds to adequately put food on the table for the remainder of the year, then some silly little things too. Silly little things like my dear darling doggie Maximus makes me mad sometimes when he’s being mindfully disobedient, translated as ‘playful’ in canine speak. Some stuff didn’t get entirely solved but the great benefit to me was writing it all out, dissecting it strategically with a sifting of honesty, and getting busy with the first little starter step of the things that I COULD factually control.
Emotionally that afternoon I grew two fricking feet in height, hence peering through the clouds to veritably see the shining sun behind it, theretofore dropping my damn cloak of dread. More future darkness will track me down no doubt, but for now, I’ve righted my own ship once more. I picked up a few added insights this time which might assist me down the road, so to identify my hold-me-downs quicker, and hopefully peer through the clouds sooner.
Love you all, go do good shit today.
~Bird out.
