Right now it's 3:50 AM, I have class in 4 hours, I can hear my hall mate vomiting in the bathroom from drinking too much, and I can't sleep. In fact, I just went to check on him since he was making some weird noises in the bathroom. I asked, "You feelin' alright?" and the response I received: "Fuck you"... fair enough. This is college.
Enough about me, now for my post:
As I said before I've been going through some pretty dark times. The constant numbness that seemed to surround me throughout the summer gave way to emptiness, emptiness to pain, and pain to despair. This post isn't about my fall (I'll save that for a future post), this post is about the mindset I am trying to maintain in order to help me survive this.
I'm a person of action. I like to be able fix problems the moment they happen. I hate waiting. Say my car breaks down, I will be perpetually uncomfortable about it until it is fixed. I can't stand letting problems linger. So when I am powerless to bring a problem to a quick resolution, when there is no quick fix, you can see how this would bother me.
One of the biggest problems with depression is my inability to directly control it. I can fight it but I can't fix it. It lingers, it persists, it must take its usual path. It can be buried, it can be ignored, but in the end it's still there and I have to deal with it and suffer through it; by avoiding it I'm only postponing the inevitable. So by not being able to control it, I feel defeated and hopeless. In a sense being depressed causes me to feel even more depressed...
It is important for me to accept this truth. I need to accept that I can't fix it and that it is okay. If I can accept that it is out of my control, I can then accept that it is not my fault, and then I can begin to focus on how to work through it, instead of trying to escape my shadows.
Every time I fall down, I get back up. Every time I crash, I rise from the wreckage of my life, and, like a rising phoenix emerging from the ashes of its previous life, I start anew, standing and alive. This is what I focus on. This is what I remember. Remembering this, knowing this deep within myself, I'm able to continue through the crash, through the fallout, through the fear, sadness, and insecurity, and I am able to make it to the other side.
The phoenix is not something we need to strive to be. The phoenix is something we need to remember we already are. All we need to do is survive. Though the present may be dark, the sun will rise when morning comes. We just have to make it through the night. We have to wait. When morning comes, we will, like the phoenix, rise up again.
There are many things I can't fix right now. Worrying about them yields me nothing. There is nothing now I can do, but I have to believe things will eventually work out. I can't wait until life is perfect to relax. Life will never be perfect. There is always something to worry about. I need to relax now and accept that things will be okay.
