My future is more uncertain than ever before. I am supposed to start a new line of work soon but time is running out and I am afraid I have myself to blame for the way it is going wrong. And even if it works out, I don’t know if I have the strength to pull it off. My family is frustrated, my meds aren’t balanced, things with my partner are not going well and life just generally sucks. I wanted to write a post entitled “Hopelessness” yesterday but it would probably just have consisted of “Yes”.
Some writers have the talent to present their readers with a new perspective on life, one that doesn’t sound like a stale pep talk but instead gives us strength to keep going, not because we fear what follows us but because we desire what lies ahead. I could try to capture this spirit but right now, my guilt makes me reject all thoughts that would lighten the burden. I really am in trouble and it is my fault. I have strategies that might make me feel less terrible but I feel like I deserve feeling terrible.
If any of you are in a similar position, remember the old saying “Depression lies”. Depression has a way of always making life appear grimmer than it is. That is very exhausting in itself, but it becomes really problematic whenever you start believing it and basing your decisions on it. Neither you nor I deserve to feel terrible. And even if you are in trouble, being miserable will not help to change that. Recalling this might not be helpful immediately, but it might help with using your own strategies, whatever they may be.
Sometimes really unexpected things help to break your negative train of thought. I tried categorizing my posts and accidentally emptied two of them. If I had deleted them, no problem, deleted posts can be restored with one click. But I somehow updated my posts to be empty and everything in it was gone. You might scold me for not having backups, but silly me believed my web hosting service would take care of that. I mean what the hell, you can update a post but you can’t revert to previous versions? That is a basic feature! And how did that happen in the first place? I never deleted anything!
At first I felt even more terrible but somehow, the anger that surfaced after I realised that my work was really gone and my host had not accounted for something like that helped me to refocus. This post was going to be really short and without any hope but now it is longer and at least a little upbeat. Even though I feel like I took a too deep of a dig into the cliché drawer.
The Metaphorical of Delphi 