Your Existential Dread Is Showing

I feel like I spend too much time poking at my own wounds, making them worse, instead of doing things I know I need to in order to improve. I waste hours, days, months, beating myself up for shit as opposed to actually working to do better. I don't really have a point with this, I'm not going anywhere special with it, it's just that it's hard to work as a writer when you aren't earning much income at all and people aren't really finding or reading your work and you're drowning in an ocean of mental illness.

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there with problems, so I hate complaining and I usually just bottle all my shit up until it overflows and ruins my life, usually in the form of doing something really self-destructive or starting a fight with someone I care about.

Actually, a lot of my personal relationships and friendships have deteriorated over the past two years. That's probably my fault for continuously isolating myself and distancing myself from people. The thing is, it feels like I should constantly be working, so there isn't time for a social life, and at the same time I feel convinced these people are better off not knowing me so I withhold my presence and emotional involvement with them and end up burning bridges. It's probably definitely not healthy, but it is what it is.

Basically what it means is that I have very few friends left and I'm unhealthily obsessed with my work, namely the fact that I can't stop not doing it and procrastinating or going on like twenty hour work sessions where I lose track of time and nearly kill myself.

Earlier this year I got into a car crash, and the day after I was attacked by a dog. My anxiety has been getting worse and worse, and it only increased when I started to fear physical danger and have intrusive thoughts more and more often after these experiences. I stopped leaving the house much, or at all, going for weeks and weeks at a time without going farther than my own back yard. I've spent days on end in bed, staring at a wall or drifting in and out of sleep. I'm basically a depressed collection of aches and pains, depressive tendencies, and pop culture trivia, blaming myself for every problem in the world while tweeting obsessively about American Horror Story. And I beat myself up for that too.

It's crazy to me, because so many people in this community are open to talking about their mental illness and how it affects their work, and I really only talk about mine when I'm mocking myself and turning the situation into a joke.

If I do let out a cry for help or let on how bad things are, I either delete it hours later or it just goes ignored, and instead of trying to fix the issues I stew in them, alone. I feel like it's not healthy that I haven't acknowledged how much I'm struggling, but the fact is there's a lot of pressure on me from every person and direction in my life, and I've already let so many people down that the thought of disappointing them even more by focusing on how much I'm struggling instead of trying to advance my career actually makes me wanna bury my head in the sand. Yeah.

A large part of it is that I have no routine and no healthy habits. I exist primarily on a diet of frozen foods, pot, and black coffee (fairly sure I have stomach ulcers or something but am I cutting down on coffee? Nahhhhh) and I have a totally irregular sleep cycle. It's normal for me to spend five hours online, pass out and sleep for like twelve hours, then wake up and spend the entire day on the internet again.

To put things in perspective, I've got six series on the go right now as well as countless standalone titles and things I haven't announced yet, I'm dealing with anxiety, depression, paranoia and self-destructive tendencies largely alone with no support system, I'm poor as hell and my career isn't where I feel it should be, and I compensate for the insane amount of responsibility I'm carrying on my shoulders...how? By bottling up all my emotions, blocking people out, and refusing to deal with anything or acknowledge the hand I've been dealt in life. Of course.

Has anyone found out why this generation is so unhealthy yet? I'd really like to know what's in the water that we're all anxious depressive fuckheads like this, but as of yet I have like zero solid leads. Is it internet porn? Copious drug use? Doomsday fears? Radioactive tap water? Cell signals rotting our brains?

I. Don't. Know.

What I do know is that I need to work on blaming myself less. There's this line from episode 3 or 4 of the Shannara Chronicles that I've been thinking about for days now, where someone tells one of the main characters something alone the lines of, "All of this isn't happening because of you. It's happening to you. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be."

So every day I've been trying to remind myself that all of this-all the pain and trauma and bullshit-is happening to me, and it isn't my fault.

I didn't ask to be born. I don't know why I was or why any of us are here. I don't know what comes when we die or if there even is anything after we die. And that's not a personal failing. It's an abjectly horrifying fact that we all, in some way, have to deal with. And I have not been dealing. I've been sweeping my problems under the rug and hoping they go away. It isn't working.

I don't know how many times I can do the same thing and expect different results. So this is me doing something entirely new and actually talking about the fact that I've got problems and issues and that most days I end up crying before six in the evening, and hoping that looking my demons in their glowing red and yellow eyes makes it a little easier to carry them on my shoulders all day.

I'm gonna drink some water and try to do physical activities and interact with other human beings for once. I'm gonna not keep convincing myself that I'm literally the devil and some unseen force who governs all our fates is condemning my soul or whatever, like some cosmic elf on the shelf shaking its head and smacking its gum at me from beyond the veil. I'm going to stop purposely looking for marks against myself to write on my karmic scoreboard and just let myself float.

At the end of the day we're all sad, confused, bitter little children running around on this rock crying out for whoever left us here. I'd like to think that I'm hardly responsible or even capable of being responsible for every bad thing that happens in the world, so I better start acting like it.