What Am I Doing?

What am I doing? It's four am and I've suddenly become interested in True Blood again (I rewatched the first two seasons and saw the third for the first time this summer) and now I'm finally sitting down to devour the fourth season BECAUSE IT'S A PROBLEM OKAY? I honestly couldn't stop now if I wanted to. And boy, do I want to - because this show is keeping me away from my damn homework.

I have six assignments to do today, so once my parents leave for work I'm going to be spending hours sitting here finishing those up and then be able to hand them in tomorrow. I have to go back to school this week, and I don't know which one I'll even be going to or what I'm gonna be taking, so naturally it's fucking me up and I'm trying not to think about it.

Which hasn't been working out well for me so far, clearly. I need to finish them, but I keep procrastinating because, you know, that's who I am.

I also want to get in a workout today, which is going to be fucking painful, I already know. I did a nice one the other day, but now I'm sore all over. Fun, right? I know people say it's good to exercise, but I kind of feel like I died a bit.

What I need is to be able to focus on writing and publishing and building a career for myself, but I also desperately need this diploma, and to be healthy, and to, you know, face life. Which has been hard, since I'm also trying to balance the whole mental illness thing, and I'm not taking medication anymore because of the side effects. The upside is that I'm not going to randomly have a stroke or develop type two diabetes - the downside is, hey, I have to deal with all of this shit on my own now!

I don't like to talk too much about my mental illness, because I feel like sometimes in the past I've overshared and it hasn't been productive or healthy for me, but the basics of it is I have anxiety and depression, and minor paranoia.

I'm managing it, to be clear, but it's hard. And sometimes I do fail. And I know that that will happen; illness isn't easy, and sometimes it wins. But I like to win. And I do not like to feel helpless, which is how I do.

Right now I'm taking it day by day, focusing on self-improvement and trying to be kind to myself, and to be fair I think it's gotten a lot easier as I grow stronger and learn to take care of myself, but there are still days when I can't fight off invasive thoughts or work my way around it, and I go into a depressive episode or a state of mania and things get bad.

The reason I'm even bringing it up now is because I haven't really blogged since the beginning of the month, which makes me feel bad, because I like to keep this page updated and I honestly love blogging. But I went into a depressive episode that lasted a few days, and at the end of it I just knew I had to make some serious life changes and extract myself from certain situations that weren't healthy for me at this point.

So I did that, and it's been getting better, and things are getting back on track. I'm letting myself unwind with True Blood right now, but later today things pick up again.

The best thing I can do is pick myself up and do my best. So. Homework. Exercise. Healthy eating habits. Those are things I'm going to embrace today. And be productive.

School is going to be hectic, but Souls of Salt and Seawater will be out by the end of February or the beginning of March. I turn twenty on March twenty-second, so I want to be well-into edits on Shadows by the that time.

You've Got a Fire Inside But Your Heart's So Cold

Title from 'Haunting' by Halsey~

I feel like I should be happier than I am. I feel like I should probably be better at shoving out these empty spaces that keep trying to fill me up. And it's like I win, you know? I win the battle, and it convinces me I've won the war, so I stop being afraid to smile. And then as soon as things are good again, it all floods back in.

I don't really know where the person I actually am ends and the person my depression turned me into begins. In a lot of ways I think they're the same person. But I also think I had the capacity, once, to be happy, and naive, and innocent. I can remember being that way. I can not remember exactly when the chemicals in my brain starting turning against me and eating away at that person, but they did, they have, and they've been doing it for so long it's become my new normal.

And I worry, too - I worry that someday I won't beat it. Someday I won't be strong enough to swim against the black tide, but I will be strong enough to pick up a bottle of pills, or take that last step off a very high ledge. I wonder and I worry.

It feels like sometimes instead of being defined by what I actually am, I'm defined by what I'm not: like all these null and void spaces inside me I haven't filled up yet are spilling over, pooling on top of everything else like oozing blood until all I am is a long list of anti-accomplishments. Like I'm nothing.

It's funny how I win, too. Because sometimes it's as simple as drinking three cups of coffee and blasting some Katy Perry, circa 2011. And other times it's an entire November spent staring at the same blank ceiling and feeling nothing. Feeling like everything has spilled out a hole in the bottom of me and I'll never experience another emotion again. and when I do, it's fear.

But even when it's like that I always end up floating ashore one day or another.

I still worry though. It doesn't matter how many times you've been tossed overboard, how many times you've been unable to tell up from down or see sunlight through the surface - when the black tide swallows you up you panaic, even if these are the waters you were baptised in.

And the other ones? The anxiety? The paranoia? Those are a bit more problematic...

Depression is hot right now. It's sexy. It's hipster teens in black Adidos jackets, clutching cigarettes and torn sheets of loose leaf and turning blazed eyes into the cameras because they're gonna love this on Tumblr, it's gonna get five-thousand notes and every indie and pale blog in a hundred miles will have your face plastered on it! But it's the ugly mental illness indie blogs have never tried to make popular.

Because when I'm in the corner of my room at 3:43 in the morning with my shaking hands clutching a baseball bat to my chest like the last life raft in a stormy sea, that's not hot. Because there's not really someone trying to break into the house from outside, but hey, there could be. I don't fucking know: I'm crazy, in case you didn't get the memo.

When I run home from the bus stop so I'm panting and dry-heaving by the time I get to my lawn all because I think they're watching me from inside the trees, that's not hot. It's not hipster.

I can't help but think that if the lines I was broken along were smoother, more pleasing to the eye, that maybe I could cut myself some fucking slack.

But when it's 1am and I'm still shaking from that embarrassing thing I said today - why the fuck did I say that? - and cowering in the dark because my mind is convincing me that someone is after me, waiting in the woods and watching for the chance to catch me, it's harder to think kind things about myself.

But I still beat it, you know? I push away the pretty pills that pound my heart into oblivion because I want to be strong enough to swim on my own, without their help, without them keeping me up. But I remember how easy it was when I had them floating under my back, and sometimes I wonder...

I think there's a lot I could say about the ways people are broken in more malicious ways than I am, about the way they fall in love with their fault lines and try to paint them as pictures of love instead of working for recover. There's a lot I could say about how hard I am on myself.

But I still have it pretty good, and I feel like I should be happier than I am. So for now I'll just make some coffee and dig up some old pop music, and maybe I'll win another battle in this endless war with myself.