I came across one that of those common internet memes a few months ago. Apparently there are 36 questions you can ask someone that will lead to love. The idea is that you sit with someone and each if you answers three sets if questions. There are 36 if them all together. The first are basic get to know you questions that are meant to open up your outlook on life and your interests. The questions get more involved the further you go and eventually they ate supposed to build intimacy because of the self disclosure. At the end you look into each other’s eyes for four minutes straight and then you supposedly fall in love.
Sometimes I get scared when I am happy. When I was a child I had a reoccurring nightmare about a dwarf, like Rumplestiltskin, who would pop up out of the ground wherever I was. I’d be on the playground and he’d emerge through the tire rings. I’d be in the swimming pool and he’d come through the plugs. He’d then drag me into an underground chamber where he would test and torture me. That is what depression is to me. It’s always around, waiting to drag me back down whenever it sees the chance. I fear that cold, dark, secluded place it takes me. There is no life there. My friend often tries to reach me but he can’t. I am apathetic to his love, as though I have turned to stone just like the walls around me.
Every day she’s so depressed and angry and in pain. All she wants to do is sleep but today she was woken by her mother’s guests. Now she must lie awake and suffer. She suffers silently behind closed doors, closed blinds and under the blankets of her bed while laughter fills the house. Her dark room is both her refuge and torture chamber, the darkness seeping into every bone and tissue of her body to the point the pain becomes physical. She breathes and exhales darkness. There are no tears; she lies in a dried up riverbed, thoroughly scorned and beaten by life.
When I met a group of people the other day I felt nervous but I also felt that it was a very good day. There are not many of those for me but when they do happen it makes me feel like I did something right. A good day is when you seem to have a small but positive impact on the people you meet.
Now, I do have a double standard when I compare myself to others. Other people deserve kindness, respect, compassion, humor, attention, validation and a decent chance at life. I can’t quite make the argument that I deserve all those things. There is no logical reason why this is so. I have simply been habituated to think this way. The double standard was enforced all throughout my childhood and now my brain automatically does it without any external force dictating that I should feel this way.
Irrational guilt. That’s a persistent component to my c-ptsd. I met a lovely group of people the other day. When I finally ventured to open up about myself I felt a great deal of relief that I had not felt for some time. It was a positive experience for me but something happened that I should have been prepared for.
When people are nice to me I begin to feel a creeping sense of guilt build up within me. The more sympathetic the person I’m talking to the greater the sense of guilt. Why does this happen? The conditions that led to my c-ptsd also left a self-correcting mechanism within it. This leads to my questioning of why I am worth anybody spending time on in the first place.
My last ramble about George Orwell’s classic work of literature, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, got me thinking about what other books are apt metaphors for my life and my inner issues.
The short stories and novellas of H. P. Lovecraft kept coming to my mind. For those who are unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s work I could describe him as the figure in American horror/sci-fi/fantasy fiction that sits between Edgar Allan Poe on the one had, and Stephen King on the other. Like both Poe and King he described otherworldly situations and threats from beyond the realm of what we would consider “normal”. Unlike these other two authors though Lovecraft always tried to give a semi-scientific justification for the horrors that emerged from his writings. Ancient alien races from millions of years in the past and hedious intelligences from extradimensional spaces would slowly be revealed to the reader as a dry, academic, no nonsense investigator gradually went mad at the realization of what was lurking beyond the everyday world that occupies our attention.
When I was in high school I was directed to read a number of classic works of literature. I could see the value in this exercise but I never really got much out of them until I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel gave me an insight into the way things had developed on the world stage since the beginning of the modern era and it showed an extreme vision of what could have been.
The real value in it for me though was that it provided a disturbingly close, though hyperbolic it was, view of my life up to that point.
Note: all names in this post have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals
I sat up till 1:30am last night as I got lost down the alleyways of YouTube’s music videos. The alleyways of memory. From Devil You Know, to Five for Fighting, to Coldplay. Eventually I came to “The Scientist”, a song which always takes me back to Jaspar. Back to the days I was fresh out of high school. The days I thought I’d been through the worst of my mental health and it would all be up from here.
It was enrolment day at Swinburne university. I had just signed up for a degree in psychology and was trying to find the exit to the building I was in. That is when I met him. I didn’t realise it at the time, but we weren’t just lost physically. No, we were also trying to find an exit to a seemingly endless disillusionment with our lives.
It was late 2016, if I recall correctly, that I swallowed my first pill. I had cut it into eighths and had one of my therapists on the other end of the phone, as it was impossible for me to do this on my own. Up until this point, purity was my holy grail. I ate organic food and worked hard to protect the sacred temple of my body against anything that had been tinkered with by man. My therapist continued to challenge my anxiety-ridden thoughts around this- what only seems like brainwashing now- until finally I managed to take an eighth of the tablet, washing it down with water. I did not sleep that night as I was in shock about what I’d done, but slowly it got easier and easier. Eventually I managed to take a whole tablet and it became a normal part of my routine. I was waiting for the day depression and anxiety, like a pair of boiling hot tongs, would finally release me from their crushing clamp. The day I could sleep, clean up, cook, see people, reply to messages and just do normal things without everything feeling like I were running a marathon. That day did not come. After increasing the dose a number of times, putting up with side effects (at one point I had to take a second medication to counter the side effects of the first medication), and waiting weeks for it to kick in, I finally accepted that I wasn’t getting anywhere. The emotional roller coaster of getting my hopes up and having them dashed over and over again was the hardest part. Yet still, I didn’t give up on this drug business. Maybe another one would bring me relief.
hsphaven 