Thanks voice, but no

It is cold today. I have not yet ventured out. I have, however, got up, showered, made my bed in military fashion (by which I mean the quilt isn't a crumpled mess on the floor). I have put work clothes to wash, taken a damp cloth and cleaned the shelves and surfaces of my room that were furry with dust, rearranged my desk, put all the half-read books back in the bookcase to be taken out and attempted again in another six months.

It isn't much. It is more than I've managed in weeks.

And, yes, the voice was there, that one criticising my every move, telling me how small I am, how worthless, how ridiculous is any hope of change. When I felt good that I was about to stand up out of bed, about to move to the shower, the voice was there, telling me that everyone my age is buying houses and raising children and exploring the corners of the globe, and here I am patting myself on the back for shuffling under a jet of water and washing my hair. How pathetic that is, how puny.

And I almost listened. Almost climbed back into bed. Scrolled past nothing on my phone, rolled over, snoozed through the day. But it struck me the lunacy of the logic of that voice. By saying that getting a shower is a stupid thing to be happy about it persuades me to not get a shower at all. By believing that it's dumb to make small advances I end up going backwards instead.

What drivel! The voice's goal is not to tell truth, but to prevent me living my life, because the voice is cowering and uncertain and afraid. Yet how large it feels when it talks, how well it knows my weak spots, my vices, the precise angle at which to slide its knife.

So I stood up. It wasn't so hard. I walked to the bathroom. I ran the taps. I was mindful of the voice, recognised that I was separate from it, that it was but a silly function of my mind. Like a sneeze, I watched it come, felt its power, and let it go.

And of course it came back. It always comes back. In my experience it is not something to conquer, finally, like in the stories where the hero overcomes her demons and learns to accept herself and goes on to save the world. Your demons are part of you, aspects of your true self, to be acknowledged and faced down in each moment anew. You do not defeat the darkness, you work hard to slowly develop a healthier relationship with it.

If you have a voice within, whispering damaging nothings in your ear, telling you you are not good enough, not smart enough, that you will never be pretty, then that is OK. The whispering is painful, yes, but don't add to the pain by beating yourself up for the pain existing in the first place. Don't waste energy playing whack-a-mole with what is essentially part of your own brain. You mush it down, and it just pops up somewhere else. Better to let it rise, let it fall, without getting too much involved.

There it goes, doing it's thing, as it always does. "You're too fat, too weak, your skin is a mess." Let it chunder, let it bluster, then get on with your day.

That's been my approach this morning, and in doing so I have been kinder to myself, got some chores out of the way, written most of this. It isn't much, but it's the best I've done in weeks. Baby steps, one at a time, and who knows where it will end up? You toddle forwards, the voice knocks you over, you get up and toddle off again.

The voice has been there as long as I can remember. I guess it's sticking around. But then my ability to hear the voice and carry on regardless has always existed as well. And I think that is encouraging indeed.

Would You Just... Not Sweat that Oscar?

Well, I'm hungover. I drank last night by mistake. Finished work and had half an hour to kill before meeting my girlfriend, so bought a beer to sink with Steve while I waited. And then one of the regulars wanted to buy me a pint, said Go on, I said Sure. Then Fran had a crisis, a friend in need, messaged saying So sorry, she felt so bad -- but by then I had the taste and couldn't be happier and started eyeing up the spirits.

And I could have stayed later, gone out with the others after the close, got in the shots. Instead caught a taxi with Katie when she left, made sandwiches in my kitchen, fell asleep watching an episode of Sinner on my phone. But I woke up this morning gumpy and anxious and alone, angry at myself for weakness and a wasted evening and for confirming my worst beliefs about myself.

But here's a thing about happiness. It is not, and never has been, about what you have. It is about how you feel about what you have. If you live in a mansion but wish your mansion had a pool like your friends' mansions do, wish it had a helipad, a trophy room with an Academy Award sitting inside, goddamnit why have you never won an Academy Award? All your peers have won one, why do you not get the recognition you deserve? -- if you feel like this then you're going to be unhappy. But if you live in a one-bed terraced house and you feel grateful that you have a roof over your head and running water and central heating, as so many in the world do not, and you're excited about auditioning for a role in a small play, and excited about maybe one day earning enough as an actor to move to a bigger house, then you're going to be happy.

It's not what you have, it's how you feel about what you have.

And similarly, I don't think dealing with depression and low self-esteem is about changing how you act, by itself, but about changing how you feel about how you act. I continually drink too much, shirk responsibilities, avoid effort, because I'm in pain and desperately want something right now to assuage that pain -- a pint, the distraction of my phone, climbing into bed where the world is small and manageable and safe as the womb -- and then I feel ashamed of my bad choices, weak, impotent, and I'm all the more likely to make more bad choices in an attempt to assuage the pain of dealing with the previous bad choices. Repeat ad nauseam.

So that can't be the answer. Dealing with my depression can't be about just making better choices, but about feeling better about the choices I do make. And as I feel better, hopefully that will by itself lead to making better choices.

So I didn't go back to my girlfriend's and write last night, I spent money yet again and got drunk yet again and woke up with a brain feeling like it was made of the matter at the back of the vegetable drawer, yet again. But that has already happened. Absolutely nothing can change that. Beating myself up is wasted energy. Pointless.

What is happening now, in the one place I can affect, is the forming of opinions about last night.

Can I decide right now to not hate myself because of last night? To recognise that though getting drunk felt like the wrong thing to do, maybe there are valuable lessons in the experience, that no one truly knows what is "best" or "right", that what has gone can be let go of and what is coming can be embraced?

So I am up and showered, eating cashews, satsumas, drinking green tea. My head hurts, but I'm trying, trying, to see that this is all right.

Would You Just... Write It Anyway?

I don't feel like writing this. I don't feel I have anything to say. It is half one in the morning and I am in from work, foot-sore, brain chundering, listening to the rain patter and plop outside my window.

I don't feel like writing this. I have a brain racing many miles an hour with all the negatives, all the reasons to give up, all the dumbnesses that I contain.

I don't want to do this. I want to climb into bed and watch videos of goats falling down slides and posh kids rapping after anaesthetic and 1000-DEGREE WHITE HOT KNIVES CUTTING THROUGH GOLF BALLS!!! -- to stare at the screen with the folds of night wrapped around me and stay very still and almost escape my thoughts, to feel my eyes heavier and heavier and eventually fall asleep like this.

I don't want to sit here alone at my desk with the distant howl of traffic and whirr of computer and pittle-pottle of rain, my lighted room the only light in all the darkness; to sit up here above the world and whisper onto the page, sing into the screen. I don't want to whisper. I don't want to sing. I have no music in me any more that I can turn to song. My sonorous chambers are filled with sand.

I don't feel like trying. I don't feel like fighting. I don't feel like writing this at all. The depression has hold of my synapses, threads its dark desires into my mind. it pries open my mouth with chilling tendrils, squeezes vocal chords, and in my own voice out come its bitter words, blank and jagged as the grave.

Don't try, says my voice. Don't want. Do nothing. Give up. Give in.

So I'm just not going to listen. I'm going to not feel like writing this and yet write it anyway. I'm going to do the opposite of what the voice tells me, and see what happens.

I may have no words, no voice, no song right now. But I've still got an arm. Yep, I can feel it. And that arm has a hand. And that hand has a middle finger, which is sticking all the way up. Sit on it, you dickhead depression. Sit on it and swivel.

Would You Just... Write Anything At All?

Mm. My depression has been bad again guys. I haven't felt able to write. I was drinking too much, as a coping mechanism, spending all my money, trapped in a cycle of anxiety-inducing hangovers and nights out to escape the anxiety. Then I gave up alcohol, but if anything it made me feel worse. Drinking was only a way to feel mild surface pleasure while underwater oceans of sadness roiled below, but at least there was that surface pleasure. Being sober for two months I have felt flat all the time. In stasis. Not running away from my problems, but not confronting them, countenancing them, either.

Has it been worse because I have not been writing, or have I not been writing because it has been worse? I don't know.

I'm in a relationship now with a woman with whom I am in love. I value her and need her a great deal. But wonderful as she is (and infuriating and complicated and intelligent and peculiar), when I am depressed like this she is like the sun above dark storm clouds: I know she is up there, and I am glad, but it is hard to feel her warmth down here in the rain.

I am able to go to work at the moment, and mostly competent and even cheerful when I am there, but as soon as I finish my shift I am hit by a sense of hopelessness I cannot describe. I used to drink to avoid this hopelessness. Recently I have been forcing myself not to drink, and so trudging home instead in the cold grey night, sitting on the bus as icy waves crash against me. Spending evenings and days off watching nothing on Youtube, eating without appetite, spending more and more time in bed. When I see my girlfriend I'm always tired, and just want to put something easy on TV and lie with her and her dog, to have nothing required of me.

I feel like a failure and a fraud for being like this again, for falling back into this pattern after all I wrote earlier in the year, all the lessons I pretended to be learning/teaching. It's like the depression stood through all my attacks against it, paused, laughed, then swallowed me whole.

I haven't been asking for help, because it is embarrassing, it makes people uncomfortable, gets them down. For other people I feel that mental health taboos need to be addressed, that it is all better out in the open. For myself, when I am sick, I feel that I am dirty, and to tell people about it would risk spreading the dirt to them. Better to pretend to be clean and normal, not worry anyone, get through the day, and then go home and collapse.

But I'm writing this. I'm here now. So there's that. Maybe it's time to try again, to try being honest again, to face it all again. It's not going to be easy, but I've reached the point where it has to be better than the stasis, the living death, I have been going through. Let's see what happens...