Tempted by stagnation, it reels me in again.
Losing the voice is not easy.
No ignition, no dancing with the flame.
Faulty words and a lack of presence.
Give into force and have at it with an empty page.
I am a rock, immovable and hard.
Let loose the passion, dark and hidden in the shadows
Ode to a weak mind and a soft heart.
Shift, shift, stop.
Shift, shift, stop.
Make grace with the others, hold face with the others.
Just guts and a beating heart inside.
Finding a hobby feels impossible. The anhedonia I experience from depression makes it very difficult. I really don’t feel any pleasure or joy when I do things. And beyond that, my brain doesn’t work the way that it used to. Learning new things is 10 times more challenging then it used to be. Memory and focus are in the dumps right now. I don’t know how to fight the boredom.
I really need to talk to my psychiatrist. My mind just feels so empty, and it’s not right. I feel dumbed down, and while my thoughts still race constantly, the ones that slow down enough for me to capture are sluggish and without character. I feel like an empty shell of a person. My feelings are numbed right out.
It’s like certain things got better, like my self-esteem and my depersonalization, but others, like my creativity and focus, have gone right downhill. An annoying trade off that I’m wondering if the meds are causing. I know anti-psychotics can cause a flat effect, and slow down brain activity.
Even when I was writing before, I had a certain flow and feeling to go along with it. Now when I sit down to write it feels so lacking in passion. The words don’t spill out of me, instead I have to force them out. I felt a certain amount of poetry in my work before, but that’s lacking as well. I wanted to do some poetry today but nothing would come out.
I want to write, I really do. I want to feel the words and challenge myself in descriptions. When I stare at the empty page, it’s a reflection of myself and the blankness of my thought processes.
I apologize for having nothing worth reading on my blog lately, mostly I’m using it to get whatever feelings I do have, out in words. It’s cathartic for me to just sit here and write sometimes, even if the subject matter is empty and pointless.
I miss the way things were before the mental illness.
I need connection in my life, but I’m so different then most people that I meet.
I just can’t do this life thing sometimes.
The radio crackled before a high-pitched squeal, the sound it makes before an emergency broadcast. Tony turned his head towards the dashboard, adrenaline pumping into his veins and making his eyeballs appear to jut outwards. Felix reached for the revolver with his left hand, fingers creeping around the barrel, and then he was pulling the gun away with arms that felt like they were filled with lead.
A blast exited the chamber, smoking up the tip of the gun and tearing a peach-sized hole into Felix’s rib cage. The recoil of the slug hitting his body was the last tug needed to pull the revolver out of Tony’s hand. It dropped down on the floor, and was kicked under the seat as Felix thrashed around in the back of the car.
The radio still punched out reports. “…in your homes, do not attempt to go outside…”
Tony tried to reach down under the seat for the .44 magnum, finding instead mostly old crescent wrenches and a thick steel chain.
“…disease spreading through most of North Dakota. It is thought to have infected everybody through the water system. Deceased individuals at risk for reanimation and violent behavior…”
The Derringer sat on the rear seat beside Felix. Tony gave up on the revolver and slammed his fist into the side of Felix’s jaw. The thrashing stopped at once, his body going limp and sagging to the side. Tony grabbed the tiny pistol from beside him.
“…injured or sick individuals must be quarantined…”
Riggs was catching enough of the radio blurbs to understand what was happening. Zombies, they were talking about fucking zombies. This didn’t surprise him so much as piss him off. During his time spent in Laos in the 70’s, he had seen how the dead aren’t always dead, and the things they talked about in comic books didn’t tell half the story of the reality of it.
He reached into the side pocket on the door and pulled out a large handful of napkins. They didn’t look very clean, but they would have to do. Wrestling his body from the passenger seat, he leaned into the back and slapped Felix in the face a few times. No response. Tony pushed him over to the side and stuck a wad of napkins in the gaping hole. He tore Felix’s tank top right off his back, and wrapped a make-do tourniquet around the wound. This would have to last, his only other resort was his own shirt, the black one with the “Motorcade City” symbol on it that his sister gave him his first day back from the war, and he sure as hell wasn’t ripping that one up, even to save his own life.
The things that used to be people we’re climbing on top of the car, sinister faces of death watching and breathing in rasps that brought fog onto the sunroof. They were scratching at the windows, and one had broken several teeth off slamming its mouth into the dark black glass.
“Sarah, I don’t know why you picked this one, but you did. He better be tough.” Tony said, reaching for the water bottle stuffed in between the seat and the center console. He opened the lid, splashed a little on his face, and turned to face Felix. ” You better wake up, you son-of-a-bitch.”
I don’t even know why I’m blogging right now. I’m just straight up ranting, I have nothing to offer on this blog sometimes. That really makes me feel worthless. What’s the one thing going on in my life constantly? Mental Illness. It affects every minute of my life, and yet I sit down to write about it and I come up blank. What can I offer you? I’m coping. I’m alive. That’s it. I don’t know what to tell you.
I’m feeling pretty blank right now, emotionally flat and without personality. I don’t really want or crave anything, and yet I feel empty and restless. I’m not thinking about much, I can’t really focus anyways. I would love to come up with some interesting blog idea, but nothing really gets me going. I’m not interested in anything enough to really come up with content.
I wish I was passionate about something, but I’m really not. Even just interested enough to do something a few times a week would be enough. I have no routine, and when people ask me what I do with my time I don’t know what to tell them. Would anybody read a blog about how I pace the house everyday?
I do my best to keep up with writing fiction, but I usually don’t find the motivation to keep at it. Or I overwhelm myself and give up. I do acrylic painting every once in awhile, but that takes up a lot of my brain power, and I often just don’t have the juice to bring out the creativity and learn how to paint.
I just have to say that this is weird. A strange situation in life I never could have planned for growing up. Simply not caring about anything. Not able to learn from disorganized and rapid thinking. I can remember how my brain used to work, and it’s so different to the way it does now. I wish I had the ability to explain it better.
I’m so sick and tired of not knowing if I’m being manic or really thinking clearly. Just as bad I can’t always recognize when I’m depressed and being hard on myself. I don’t know who I should be. Some days I feel like I know myself, but days like today I feel like it’s a stranger in the mirror.
I guess as always the thing that keeps me going is the search for some greater meaning. Losing myself as much as I possibly can in the process of finding inner peace. Looking for business ideas, website and blog ideas, job prospects, inspirational quotes, hobbies, new interests. I never really seem to come up with much, but I sure do spend a lot of time in the pursuit of something better in my life.
Tony Riggs had a big fat tattoo on his arm and a claw of a nose, the two most memorable traits Felix noticed as the big meat bludgeon of a fist came down onto his nose, breaking it in two places and spraying blood all down his white wife-beater. Nobody in the crowded bar seemed to notice. The next memory Felix had was riding in the back of the blacked out ’70 Chevelle, watching a cigar pass between the driver and Riggs. It was dark out. He could just barely make out the shapes of the dashboard as they drove along some sort of gravel road, and the tip of the cigar burning put him in a trance as it wandered between the front seats. Tony and the driver laughed. The radio crackled and hummed quietly, playing an old western song.
The driver ashed the cigar. “Guess he won’t be screwing your sister anymore.”
Tony grunted.
Felix felt like a thousand degrees, the heat was cranked and his red leather jacket was sticky against his arms. His chin lolled down onto his chest and he could see how much blood he had lost all over his favorite blue jeans. Long blonde hair swept down over his eyes, also covered in blood.
“Look who’s up,” the driver watched Felix in the rearview mirror, “best go back to sleep hoss, for your own best interests.”
Felix closed his eyes and folded his chest down over the tops of his legs, his arms hanging down with his hands touching the floor.
“Don’t puke” Tony said flatly.
“Eddie better have the gasoline,” The driver said “are you sure nobody owns the barn?”
Tony stubbed the cigar out in the ashtray. “Frank owed me one, you think he isn’t serious?”
The driver’s eyes went wide for a second and he locked his gaze back onto the road. “No, of course not. Franks solid.”
As slowly as he possibly could, Felix reached into the top of his boot, fingers touching warm metal and grasping for the derringer hidden there. He palmed it in his hand, rest his hand under his leg, and sat up in the seat. If he had more time, he might have been able to contemplate who to shoot first, but instead the car veered off to the right and plowed into two large men. The old Chevy skidded to a stop over top of them, the suspension rising.
“Did you see that?” the driver yelled, “There was like 20 of em’ on the road. What the hell were they doing?”
“I don’t know, but you just hit a couple people and I think it would be in your best interests to get the fuck out of here.” Riggs said.
The wheels of the Chevelle span in the same spot, gravel shooting out from them as they dug grooves into the ground. The bloated bodies under the front of the car were lifting the whole front end off the ground and the car was going nowhere fast.
“Ditch the car. Tell the cops it was stolen. Let’s go.” Tony grabbed a revolver out of the glove compartment before opening the door and swinging his legs out.
“Didn’t you hear him?” The driver said, looking at Felix, “Get your ass in gear.”
Felix pushed the front seat forwards as Tony slammed his door and after the driver had stepped out of the car.
“Woah buddy, nothing to see here, ” The driver was talking to one of the group of people that was standing on the road staring at him, “hey, what’s wrong with your face?”
The moonlight glinted off blood trailing over the place where the mans nose should have been. The man cocked his head at the driver, sniffing with raw cartilage. He was fifteen feet from the car, standing on the gravel road with a backdrop of cedar trees behind him. More people were appearing out of the trees, seeming to be wandering and sniffing the air. The others on the road turned towards the Chevy, also sniffing the air and watching the driver as he scratched his head.
“Are you seeing this Riggs?”
Riggs had the revolver pointed at the man without a nose. Tony could sense the evil, smell it’s presence in the air. When somebody has been to the depths of murder and crime, they get a feel for it. He was shaking slightly, the cold flowing through his bones. Only it wasn’t just the cold of the night, it was the company of something much more sinister then himself.
Then no-nose was running at the driver at full speed, teeth gnashing and clicking open and closed.
Felix could sense the evil as well, although in a different way then Tony Riggs. His thorough contemplation of the world left him with a keen eye for the strange. He knew enough about sticky situations to see when there was something wrong. And this felt so wrong. He reached forwards and grabbed the door handle, pulled the door shut, and watched as the people outside began running towards the vehicle.
Tony fired a shot, hitting the man without a nose in the chest where his heart should be. The man didn’t slow down, he kept running full speed at the driver. He was upon him in seconds, arms encasing him in a great bear hug. He bit down on the driver’s neck, flesh and sinew tearing away like butter. The driver gurgled as he went down to the ground in a heap. Tony opened the passenger side door and jumped in the car without thinking twice, his large frame jostling the car as he slumped into the seat and slammed the door.
The crowd of people, now even larger from the ones who came out of the trees, surrounded the car. Clawing at the windows, biting air and sniffing wildly, they looked like rabid dogs in human form, not a single one without some sort of strange wounds all over their body.
The revolver snaked around the corner of the seat, pointed at Felix’s chest. “I’ll take that pistol off you now.”
Moe sat up and looked around. A soft clawing at his ears brought relief from the rabid bites of fleas. As he jostled the blankets around with his paws, searching for something to eat, he noticed that his head fell off. Oh god, my head fell off, said Moe.
Today the depression really snuck up on me. I’ve been feeling it sort of creeping around for a couple weeks, but today it really hit me.
The restlessness is pretty bad today too. The psychiatrist lowered my dose of medication in hopes of getting rid of the restlessness, and while it is definitely better, there are still days like today where it gets to me.
I don’t know what I want today, I feel like nothing could satisfy me. My girlfriend is coming over later and I’m looking forward to that at least. We can be bored and depressed together so that’s better then being alone.
There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how to explain it fully. It’s like my brain just sais no to learning or trying to do things that take any sort of effort. To the point that if I try to force it, I get irrationally angry and frustrated. I can’t focus on anything and it drives me up the wall.
This is just a bit of a rant today, expressing things that probably should come out.
I’d like to be writing a book today, or doing some painting. I feel like everything I do will be shitty though, I don’t have the creative flame burning today.
I just can’t do things that regular people can do. It’s so hard to explain, my brain just does not function as it used to. My memory is shit, my focus is nil, and I have no motivation or desire to really do anything. I don’t compute things the way I used to. It’s really quite impossible to tell you how it’s different, but my reality and the way I see things is literally not the same as it used to be. My thinking patterns are not normal. My emotions aren’t normal. I know normal is subjective, but I mean normal for me. And I don’t mean the difference in the thoughts you have as a child and as an adult. I mean wildly different the way I interpret the world as how I used to. I don’t feel like the same person, I feel like there’s a sliver of me left in who I am today.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to work again and that really makes me feel useless. And I don’t think people understand that it’s not a choice. I would love to be able to go to work everyday and provide for myself.
I sort of decided that I was going to try to pursue art, as oversaturated as it is, as a means to make money. In a perfect world I would have the focus and attention and motivation to do that. But I can’t bring myself to pick up a pencil and sketchpad even. How am I going to compete against people who do it all day every day, when I struggle to do even a painting a month?
I must still be trying to make my life better or I wouldn’t be writing a blog post. So with all the effort I have, I’m positive about that. I’m still doing the best I can, even if it’s a lousy whine of a blog post.
I think mostly I just need to express that my mind is not working properly. It is a piece of shit right now. Barely able to have a coherent thought. Fuck you brain for fucking yourself up. Stupid idiot. Why can’t you just work properly? Why can’t I learn things beyond a basic understanding? Why do you have to be such a stupid fucking idiot?
What’s up hair, I see you fuckin around
What’s up weak chin, I feel you not being manly
Hey there small muscles, lift any feathers lately?
Receding hairline, lookin fine like vulture today!
Confidence, where you goin man? Hey come back!
Did you get those clothes from an idiot? I think you got those clothes from an idiot.
Momma said you look so handsome son, where’d you get the looks from?
Gramma sais you look like a man now.
Baby-faced, lookin’ like I try too hard.
Where’s my style now, where did it go?
Just last week I could have sworn I knew what it was.
I can’t eat, I can’t eat!
Force it down son!
Spend that money, hope that it changes something.
It’s just today, though. Give me a couple weeks, a few more pounds, I’ll be okay.
Work can begin now, lift those weights!
Soon enough, none of it will hurt anymore, I will outgrow this.
Our Depression 