The Pit

Depression is not a sign of weakness. It means you have been strong for far too long.
 - Robin Williams

Last week I talked about the wall that anxiety can throw into your face at any given moment. Anxiety attacks can be abrupt, violently changing your mood at a moment's notice. Anxiety is often visible to others who pay enough attention. Depression is a different beast. Depression is patient. It eats away your sanity, your motivation, your very energy. It lets you be happy for periods of time, allows you to show those around you that you are feeling okay. It allows you to construct a mask that you put on in front of others to let them think everything is fine. Then depression decides that the next day you physically won't be able to get out of bed. Depression is a terrible dungeon master who knows that in order to create the most pain, you allow the victim to feel hope and happiness before ripping it from them.

Anxiety is a wall. Depression is a pit.

The pit can form for many reasons. Personal setbacks, loss of loved ones, toxic relationships, physical abuse, chemical imbalances that are entirely out of your control, and countless other things. What makes depression so awful is that unlike anxiety, it doesn't always have an immediate onset. It can build over time, slowly dropping you further and further into the ground. It can do it so subtly you don't even realize it's happening. But once down in that pit, it can seem impossible to climb out.

So people accept that they are living below ground. They build their lives down there, devoid of sunlight and true happiness. Sometimes, other people in their lives wonder where they have gone, so the depressed put on their public face and show themselves. The happiness they show can be real and they can feel like they are living in the sun again, and sometimes it is simply a facade to make the people around them feel like nothing is wrong.

Depression has a strange way of manipulating the way you perceive things. It causes you to think that you are a burden to those around you, that you don't deserve the care and love from the people in your life. It makes you want to sit in your darkness so that you don't trouble anyone else with your issues. These issues are all consuming in life, but somehow they seem to be trivial things that others shouldn't need to see or help with.



I want to try and explain what this life is like to those who don't fully understand.

If you are living with depression or anxiety, please be careful with reading this next part. I know what that life feels like, and this next part could be a little too real. Please feel free to skip ahead if you need to.



Imagine, if you can, living in the pit. Alone, dark, without drive or purpose. It's like being asleep but not resting. Life without living. You decide you are done with this non-existence and want to take the healthy next step. You decide to try and climb out of the pit. You can see the light, the laughter, above you. You see people who could care about you.

Now imagine that the wall of anxiety hits you.

You fall crashing from the heights you've achieved. You lay broken, crying, struggling to breath. No one is there to help. You scream, words stop making sense, only primal sounds escape your lips.

No one is there to hear your cries.

No one is there to tell you to breath.

No one is there to hold your broken body.

No one sees your pain.

Now you gaze up at the top of the pit, which got a little deeper from the impact of your crash. You see those who are happy, who are living their lives with a purpose. You want to join them. But now you know that the wall could appear from anywhere. And you know how agonizing the fall is now.



This is what living with depression and anxiety can feel like. It's not how everyone feel it. But what I can tell you is that everyone wears a mask. Be it just to get along with that one friend of a friend who you just can't stand, to hide depression so others don't feel it's burden, or simply because the mask has been in place so long that you've forgotten how to take it off.
This tattoo is me. Literally. I had this done within the last week, and it holds so much meaning to me. I will forever have inscribed in my skin that the smiles may hide the pain. Some people become so skilled at acting, at portraying the role of a happy person, that others are convinced. They don't see the actual face under the mask. They don't see the pain, the tears, the anguish.

If you suspect someone you know is struggling with depression, don't push them to talk to you. That can be so incredibly difficult. Just stay close. Watch them. Notice the small changes in their being. You'll know when you can talk to them about it, when they want to talk to you, when you need to just listen, or when you need to simply be there for them.

“I hid my wound under my clothes. Nobody could see it, including myself, and I completely forgot about it. Then I met someone who, filled with love, held me tight in that point. The pain was devastating, and I hated him, o how much I hated him, the cause of all my suffering. Then I met someone, beautifully dressed, and I loved him so much, holding him tight with all my passion. And he suffered badly, and he hated me, o how much he hated me, the cause of all his pain. So the story went on till I met someone who undressed himself, standing completely naked, with all his horrible wounds. Hence I also undressed, and I saw my horrible wounds, which he could also see. Then...” 
― Franco Santoro

Toodles!

I Wrote This For You // The Song Across Wires

The "baggage" that people carry around with them, their history, is something that for some reason has become kind of negative aspect. That the choices that made them precisely who they are today are somehow a burden for the people they let into their lives. Being a mess doesn't make you messy, it makes you unique. No matter how many times you spill milk on the floor, it'll never look the exact same twice. The real trick to dealing with your past is to find people who accept you for who you are, not who you used to be. That old version of you is important, for sure, they grew into the current you. But remember which one of them you live as. You can dwell on the old one, as the current one stands still in life. Or you can live as you are, and be able to look back at the footsteps that you've made up to this point, and the paths ahead waiting for you to step there.

The Song Across Wires

I'm a picture without a frame.

A poem without a rhyme.

A car with three tires.

A sun without fire.

I am a gun without bullets.

I am the truth without someone to hear it.

I am a feeling without someone to feel it.

This is who I am.

A mess without you.

Something beautiful with you.

*Reminder that I take no credit for this work. It does not belong to me, I did not make it, I make no claim to it other than the feelings it evokes in me.

Toodles!

The Wall

The amount of reality in this picture hits me right in the feels. For people who have never had to deal with anxiety in their own lives, count yourself insanely lucky. To be clear, anxiety and depression are two different things, though they often go hand in hand. Depression makes you feel like shit, that you don't want to do anything. Anxiety makes you think about why you'd fail, who you're letting down, what could go wrong, and anytime you've failed in the past. That's the worst part about anxiety. It makes you think. You get caught up in your own head and tear yourself apart, without even attempting the thing that is causing you to panic.

Now, people experience anxiety and depression differently on a person to person basis. Some people shut themselves down, refusing to feel anything. Some feel too much, and get overloaded and breakdown. Some yell and scream, logically or irrationally. Some might even get violent, with objects or (unfortunately) themselves or other people.

If you're someone who has anxiety, or are simply trying to help someone who has it, one method you can use to fight against an anxiety attack is with a method called "grounding".

Grounding does not solve an anxiety attack. That is not what it's purpose is. Grounding is essentially a very simple form of meditation that helps you calm down, to put your brain back in control so you can deal with what is actually bothering you. Anxiety and depression have a nasty habit of blowing a small problem way out of proportion.

I'd like to mention one more thing before I finish up. It is OKAY to not know what is wrong. It is OKAY to not know how to fix why you feel this way right now. It is OKAY that you don't feel the same way as some other people. It is OKAY to feel that things in your life are difficult, even without being a kid in some place in Africa.

Right now, everything might feel like a pile of shit. But it will be okay. It might not be okay in the next minute, or the next hour, or tomorrow. But it will be okay. It will work out eventually. And there is ALWAYS at least one person who cares about you.

Remember that. I care.

Toodles!

The best kind of tea

Tea has become an incredibly important part of my life. It changes my mood when I need to calm down, when I need to relax, when I'm feeling happy or fulfilled. It remains ever changing, and I constantly learn new things about it.

How you handle tea and treat the leaves makes all the difference in the world. Some can handle extremely intense temperatures, while others require a much more delicate treatment. Timing and attention is very important, otherwise it can become unpleasant or at the very least, not fulfilling the potential you can get from it. Some teas require a very precise or constant attention, some require time to cool down, while others are much more forgiving, or simply easy to enjoy.

People develop their own personal tastes for tea over time, preferring one kind over another. Some people never find that one tea that they love, some change their taste as time progresses, while others choose one and stick with it throughout their life. 

This post may seem a little different than my normally detailed posts on tea. The reason behind this is because Kitten jokingly challenged me to compare tea to relationships. I'm always looking to evolve as a writer, so I took the joke as a goal. So now go back to the beginning, and reread this post, replacing references to tea to your preferred gender(s) of significant other.

Seeing Yourself

Something that I've noticed as I get older is that I see myself in more and more places. I don't mean literally, like my world is becoming filled with mirrors (that would be super creepy). I mean that I see my personality and mannerisms in people younger than myself. I see people who are still a teenager doing something, and remember when I was that age, and did the same kind of thing.

For example, a younger coworker of mine tries incredibly hard to be funny and to make people laugh. Once he finds a joke that works once, he tramples it into the ground trying to keep it funny. I remember doing that exact kind of thing when I was younger, and received an interesting perspective on how other people have viewed me throughout my life. I see how I used to be more annoying, invasive of people's space, argumentative, and show off-y. Now, that isn't to say that the people I see these traits in now are bad people. It just gives me the insight to understand why they behave this way. Having this to look back on has made me more patient with others. I realize that people act this way for acceptance, and having me shun them for being immature would be cruel. That would mean I am shunning them simply for acting how they think they should to receive accreditation from others.

Before you tell someone to go away, that they're annoying, think back to how you acted when you were their age. If they're older than you, think how you want others to see you when you reach their age. Hopefully it'll help make you a little more tolerant, and give more people a smile instead of a scowl.

Toodles!