I woke up to my alarm telling me I needed to take my medicine. I silenced it and began wrestling with the uneasy feelings my slumber had left me with. Dreams that I couldn’t remember and turmoils unresolved. I felt sick, like my stomach was in knots. I felt fed-up, annoyed, angry, sad, disappointed and hurt. Without knowing why these feelings swam throughout my body, I took a shower and hoped the warm water would wash them away. It hushed them, not quite muting them, but making them a bit easier to live with.
As my day went on, the feelings got quieter and quieter to the point where I they were not overpowering my actual feelings anymore. They settled down as my mind continued to process the things I could not remember from the night before.
At my work computer a few days later my mental state began to unravel and fall downhill. It was around 10:30 or 11 am and I still had not had breakfast, so I went to the kitchen to begin the process of toasting an English muffin in the oven. When I made it back downstairs with my breakfast, I had to take a call only to find out a set of reports I prepared were incorrect because the file format changed… again. 20 minutes of trying to talk that out. Of course then a text saying I needed to call on a financial topic, basically yesterday, came through while I was on the phone for work. So, I switched gears and called about this money mistake. I sat on hold, I had to explain the situation far too many times and it took way too long to get the information I needed. When 12:30 pm finally rolled around, I had a moment to eat my breakfast.
As the day went on I became more and more frustrated, more distracted and disengaging from my work. At one point Kevin had a meeting, with the shared office space and his excitement, sometimes he can get a bit loud. Normally it is fine and I can concentrate on my work, but this day was different. It took me minutes to type a sentence. I felt the struggle in my body, like I was moving while tied back with 100 industrial bungee cords. I thought that having the music rushing directly into my ears might help me focus. I grabbed my earbuds and put them in – the left one wasn’t working. I tried to repair them. I put the earbud in and out of my ear. I sat frustrated and defeated and chucked the earbuds to the floor as hard as I could.
My day was one drag after another. I felt beaten down. Defeated. I phoned it in for the remainder of the workday, doing tasks that took little effort, giving myself small wins. But, as I shut down my computer, I could feel me shutting down inside and as I walked away from work for the day, I walked right into a wall of less than positive emotions.
I felt so empty. So sad. I wanted to do all these things, but I also didn’t want to do any of them. I was hollow. Everything felt wrong, but I had no idea what everything was. I couldn’t even begin to pinpoint what was making me feel like absolute shit, and that’s because there wasn’t something to pinpoint. Sure my day had been shitty, but I had had worse and not walked away feeling like someone was pulling my gut further and further down my body and into the ground.
It was dark and dreary. The weather matching the mental state I was slowly realizing I was in. I went to make myself some hot chocolate, hopefully to cheer me up, and instead I found myself bent over our kitchen island sobbing silently, not wanting to interrupt Kevin’s meeting. Tears streamed down my face and snot began to drain from my nose. The origin of the tears, of the breakdown unknown. Nothing more to explain it all than a chemical imbalance.
In the living room I sat close to the dog, looking at him with tears still in my eyes and begging him to make me feel better, repeating to him over and over that all I wanted was to feel better.
The night continued on and by morning the feelings were dull, they were quiet, and they were much more manageable. But that day, that day depression had it cold dead hands wrapped around me. That day I sat wondering why I am here, who would miss me if I were gone, how things could be better without me and ultimately about how I could die or that I should die. There was little light in the day, despite all the things I may have tried. I had been pulled under by the tide of depression and crushed by the weight of the ocean above me. While I may have lost many of the small battles that day, I didn’t lose the important one – my life.
Your Mind Tells Lies 