Day 98: To the front door

Eee, enough of that. Time to stop wallowing. I've showered. Clipped my nails. Trimmed my pubes. I've cleaned my bathroom. Put towels to wash. Edited some photos. Replied to messages.

I've just been fatigued, is all, and depression has swept in, as it always does when I don't have the resources to fight it. It's no big deal. It's what will happen from time to time. But I've been doing well. These 98 days, I've been doing well. Not as well as some people, or even most people, perhaps, but better than I was doing.

Look at it like running. I want to be a marathon runner, but I'm overweight and out of shape and my ankles are weak. I've spent years going to a couch rather than a coach.

But for 98 days now I've forced myself up and out of the door, run round the block, sometimes further. Sometimes much further, and I've been up all night pushing myself, then felt burnt out afterwards. Maybe it's good to push myself as hard as I can, but I think I crashed after the finish line of 90 days, and for the last week I've been back on that couch - still going at least out of the door and down to the front gate and back every day, but no more than that. And I've been feeling like there's this elastic around my waist that ties me to the couch, and the harder I run, the more I eventually get twanged back to the couch, and the more it hurts.

Well bollocks to that. Beliefs stay true for precisely as long as you believe them. Beliefs that you've held about yourself for many years are, yes, difficult and scary to overturn. They become part of your sense of identity. Losing them can feel like losing yourself. Like going all the way over a cliff into nothingness. There's always subconscious resistance to changing long-held beliefs about yourself.

But it can be done. And it's what I need to do. I don't have elastic round me. I'm not cursed to stay depressed and weak forever. I'm not inherently and inevitably broken.

I've been doing well. And I got tired.

I don't need to judge myself against marathon runners. I don't need to judge myself against my next-door neighbour who runs five miles a day. I don't need to judge myself against anyone at all.

I just need to do as much of what is difficult for me as I am able to do. And to carry on doing that day after day after day. If I can't run five miles then run one. If I can't run one mile then run to the postbox. If I can't run to the postbox then drag myself on my hands and knees to the front door, crawl over the threshold, breathe down the fresh empty air, and crawl back inside.

Darkness can be fought. It can always be fought. Even if just with the strength left in one fingernail. Do not stop. Everything is right where it should be.