I haven't been doing so good

a letter in spring

I wrote this in September. I was heartbroken and fearing that things would never get better. Nowadays I’m in love with the world again. Things do get better, in spite of it all, the world keeps spinning.

—

The spring brought a realisation, that I have been in some form of a depressive spiral for over a year now. I have long outgrown the suicidal ideation of my younger self, and I have attended enough funerals to know that I will never willingly subject my loved ones to that ordeal. Still, I can’t seem to shake the inescapable feeling that maybe I’m just not cut out for being alive. My inescapable melancholy seems to be an undeniable testament to the fact that, maybe, I’m just not supposed to be here.

The past year brought constant health complications, the most demanding academic workload I’ve ever taken on, and betrayal by someone that I thought I would spend my life with. Maybe the idea that these things shouldn’t have such a profound impact on me have etched themselves into my soul, scaring and spreading. Again and again I hear that it is a blessing and a curse to feel things so deeply, to be so effected by the world. My capacity to do so appears to be destroying me, eating me alive from the inside out.

I fear, like I always have, that I won’t escape this time. That forever more, my life will feel like clawing my way through molasses.

Strangely, however, I seem to have become attached to the sadness. Mornings when I wake up and don’t feel the crushing, strangling terror that usually comes, I lie and wrack my brain to remember what it is that I should be crying about.

I find it hard to be honest about the depth of my sadness. Being honest always seems to bring a conversation of reassurance, reminders of how functional I am, that maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem, to me. But isn’t that all that matters? How bad things seem to me? I’m as bad as I’ve ever been, but my ability to say so seems to be evidence of the contrary.

And people love me, I know, people love me and they care and they want me to know that I’ll be okay and even if I’m not that they’ll love me anyway. That’s all that matters, really. In the end my gratitude for those that love me is swallowed by my hatred of the fact that I can’t live up to their desire for me to be happy. Deep down I am rotted and sour and don’t care if they love me, I am a wounded animal desperate to bite the hand that feeds me, to sleep in the cold and the wet and die under a long abandoned house next to the coins that a forgotten lover spilled. A just fate, for one that could not appreciate the beauty of the world.

Luckily, I am only 23, and although my smoking and drinking and love for the sunshine is sure to be shortening my life, I likely have a great deal of time to discover the heights of happiness that I so often hear about. I think I came close, in the past year, there are moments of happiness in all things, it’s true. But contentedness alludes me, as it always has. I write these letters, hoping that maybe my pain can be given meaning through art, that maybe I can write my way out of suffering. But in truth, I don’t think my art is impressive enough to give anything within myself meaning, I think in the end this is just what I do, when I am too full of myself to keep it all contained. It is a selfish and egotistical practice, but it’s one I cannot escape.

There is so much I do not know, so much I have yet to live, so much I might become. in spite of myself, I’m excited to see it.

—

It’s been three months, and happiness has found me again. Oh, the dramatics of youth.