undertow
i'm a negative creep
i'm a negative creep
i'm a negative creep and i'm stoned _nirvana
disclaimer: only if you came here for neurotic babble
i thought things would get better when i came back home, but it's been two months now and i'm struggling. dear god, where are the handholds on this thing?
it's hard to admit it when you're drowning. you say to yourself, i'm doing everything i can. you say to yourself, i can take the worst of it without flinching, and before long you're being sucked down the drain with the bathwater, unflinchingly, and you'll never have to admit that you ever lost control. it's a pride thing. for some reason, these problems carry an element of shame. physical weakness is never as hard to admit as mental or emotional instability. better to carry around the flu or a bad back than to reveal a shattered mind or a broken heart.
depression has this self-feeding, strangling effect on people. you see the worst of everything; worse, you fear it before it happens. every minor failure gets blown up until it squeezes out the light, is chiseled into a stone that's stacked in a wall that circles around and encloses you, like a well. you are worthless. you are no use to anyone. you can't do anything right. your only respite from hopelessness is pure anger, the expression of which only makes you feel ridiculous once you remember that you're pitching a fit at the bottom of a theoretical well at a bunch of imaginary stones of your own personal masonry. you vent at the wrong people, people who have no clue what your fucking problem is. so it becomes easier to avoid your situation than to take control of it.
when it begins to crowd in like this, you start to sever nerve connections to the outside world. you stand, sit, lay in place. in everything, there is either mind-fucking boredom or potential failure, humiliation, disappointment. they become impenetrable realities of everyday life. feeling disconnected becomes a self-imposed norm, and it's not fair, you say, it's not fair and you've lost the will to overcome. you feel picked on; everyone's an asshole or a phoney, but for some reason, you can actually see how much you contribute to the big pile of assholeness in the middle, and due to a rather hefty martyr complex you feel responsible for all of it, so by now it's pretty much clear that your lot in life is to inherit what the ancients used to call the shit end of the stick. so you shut it out. you learn the false lesson that every display of emotion is innapropriate and that every true attempt at life is an invitation to pain. you stop growing; you stagnate. it's such a small, holographic thing, and it seems ridiculous that it can kill you.
the theme goes like this: people suck. i suck. we all suck. people are hateful, inconsiderate bastards who don't genuinely care about one another because they're too busy elbowing and stepping all over each other trying to get to higher ground before the flood comes in. they are hyenas in a feeding frenzy. and i am no better.
and while it would be easy to go through life believing that, i've never actually believed that, not completely. i've seen too much evidence to the contrary. and i've always wanted to think of the bad parts of people as an understandable side effect of being human. i believe the grandmother's cliche: there's good in everyone. and when you can actually see that good, past all miscommunication, past minor irritants and competitive impulses -- that's love. that's the best.
that's where i have to start, again.
i'm a negative creep
i'm a negative creep and i'm stoned _nirvana
disclaimer: only if you came here for neurotic babble
i thought things would get better when i came back home, but it's been two months now and i'm struggling. dear god, where are the handholds on this thing?
it's hard to admit it when you're drowning. you say to yourself, i'm doing everything i can. you say to yourself, i can take the worst of it without flinching, and before long you're being sucked down the drain with the bathwater, unflinchingly, and you'll never have to admit that you ever lost control. it's a pride thing. for some reason, these problems carry an element of shame. physical weakness is never as hard to admit as mental or emotional instability. better to carry around the flu or a bad back than to reveal a shattered mind or a broken heart.
depression has this self-feeding, strangling effect on people. you see the worst of everything; worse, you fear it before it happens. every minor failure gets blown up until it squeezes out the light, is chiseled into a stone that's stacked in a wall that circles around and encloses you, like a well. you are worthless. you are no use to anyone. you can't do anything right. your only respite from hopelessness is pure anger, the expression of which only makes you feel ridiculous once you remember that you're pitching a fit at the bottom of a theoretical well at a bunch of imaginary stones of your own personal masonry. you vent at the wrong people, people who have no clue what your fucking problem is. so it becomes easier to avoid your situation than to take control of it.
when it begins to crowd in like this, you start to sever nerve connections to the outside world. you stand, sit, lay in place. in everything, there is either mind-fucking boredom or potential failure, humiliation, disappointment. they become impenetrable realities of everyday life. feeling disconnected becomes a self-imposed norm, and it's not fair, you say, it's not fair and you've lost the will to overcome. you feel picked on; everyone's an asshole or a phoney, but for some reason, you can actually see how much you contribute to the big pile of assholeness in the middle, and due to a rather hefty martyr complex you feel responsible for all of it, so by now it's pretty much clear that your lot in life is to inherit what the ancients used to call the shit end of the stick. so you shut it out. you learn the false lesson that every display of emotion is innapropriate and that every true attempt at life is an invitation to pain. you stop growing; you stagnate. it's such a small, holographic thing, and it seems ridiculous that it can kill you.
the theme goes like this: people suck. i suck. we all suck. people are hateful, inconsiderate bastards who don't genuinely care about one another because they're too busy elbowing and stepping all over each other trying to get to higher ground before the flood comes in. they are hyenas in a feeding frenzy. and i am no better.
and while it would be easy to go through life believing that, i've never actually believed that, not completely. i've seen too much evidence to the contrary. and i've always wanted to think of the bad parts of people as an understandable side effect of being human. i believe the grandmother's cliche: there's good in everyone. and when you can actually see that good, past all miscommunication, past minor irritants and competitive impulses -- that's love. that's the best.
that's where i have to start, again.