I’ve been more than a little bit distracted lately, and I’ve been wrestling with some inner demons - and I can’t seem to shake my depression. That combination of things leaves me thinking that I’m just sleepwalking, and that I’m wasting energy and time.
The good part about sleepwalking though is that you do wake up - you might not know exactly where you are or how you got there, but you can wake up and move forward. Now that I’ve got a stronger sense of what’s going on and all of that, well, now I’ll be able to make some changes and move forward.
Sometimes I feel nervous about pushing through the rough patches, but every now and again I see that it is possible; I see my experiences reflected elsewhere:
At some point in my early thirties (around the time of my father’s death in 2001) I kind of all of a sudden realized that I had been completely miserable all through my twenties. Even before that, since adolescence — from the dawning of self-consciousness — I had been a depressed, self-loathing, self-destructive, self-critical, cripplingly shy, socially inept, isolated, angry, sad, immature, frustrated, loveless wretch. And I realized that I was sick of it, sick of being so miserable, especially when I had so many reasons not to be miserable
The same discussion goes on to say:
My “wasted youth” refers to all the years that I wasted not on drugs, but on being unhappy and closed off to “all the people that I never knew” because I was so wracked with self-doubt and -hatred, and so stifled by shyness and an inability to communicate on a person-to-person level.
In my roughest patches I need reminders, I need to think about all of these random moments and the fact that it’s all connected - that even in my own anxieties and frustrations I’m not completely alone. That’s what makes pushing through the rough patches bearable: knowing that no matter how much it hurts, it’s part of just the human experience.
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