Day 60: Ignoring sirens

It's another hot day. There is only the haze of sky, the furnace of the sun, the bricks that are fiery to the touch. The car bodies and the rooftops in the sun are too brilliant to look upon. The air is heavy and oppressive.

Sixty days of sober blogging today. Two-thirds of the way to my goal. I'm right inside it now. I can't look up or back or too far ahead. I just have to keep my head down and keep ploughing onwards.

I'm working to fundamentally change the way I view myself, to change my relationship with the world, my relationship to my ego, to pain, to suffering, to work, to writing, to art. To change my conception of who I am and what I'm doing here.

This is not easy. There is no eureka moment, no quick fix or instant turn-around. It's just about getting up every day and forcing myself to act in a way that feels completely unnatural, but is I hope healthier than the default way I have fallen into acting over many years.

I still feel shitty much of the time. Tired, miserable, jaded, old, bored. But the feeling is perhaps not as suffocating as before. Those feelings are a fog twisting about my feet, not a maelstrom encasing me, a choking cloud out of which I can see but from which I can never escape.

Sometimes, usually the mornings, the fog creeps higher up my legs. Sometimes it's barely there at all. Yesterday was a good day, climbing trees with Mike and Zoe at Padley Gorge, making friends with regal cats, sticking my head out of the window and my tongue out of my mouth in the car as we wound back down into the city with the late afternoon sun still strong and bright above us.

Maybe I'm slowly finding more space that's me, less that's the depression. Maybe for the first time in a long time I'm finding something approaching hope.

But, like I said, I can't concentrate too much on this. Rumination spins up the negativity and makes me ill. I know this. I love thinking deeply about things, but for the moment I can't do it about myself. I have to just get up, do the blog posts, leave all those icky thoughts trying to spiral upwards well alone. Then go to bed, sleep, get up, do it again.

It's like my brain has all these warning sirens flashing on its control panel all demanding attention. When I go to them they say things like, "You've fucked up everything in your life!" or "Everything you create is shit!" Running to each of these alerts and trying to switch them off or to argue with them doesn't work. So I'm learning to simply ignore them instead. They're constantly going off, blaring, yelling out, but I just have to turn away and pull levers unconnected to them, turn cogs, do normal mundane stuff on the control panel. The warnings flash. I ignore them. They flash. I ignore them. On and on.

Perhaps they'll dim in intensity as time goes on. Perhaps they'll give up entirely. I don't know. What I do know is that I have jobs to do using that control panel. And no stupid flashing lights are going to get in my way.