There's some things I've wanted to talk about for awhile but I really haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Mostly because I just haven't had the motivation and also because I've been afraid to do so. So I suppose you could think of this as something of a confessional.
Firstly, I want to talk about my name. Everyone who has read my blog or followed me on Twitter knows me as Lee Chambers. However, this isn't my real name. Maybe some people thought that was obvious, maybe some didn't, but I felt the need to make that clear. My real, legal name is not Lee Chambers. It's a name I created years ago when I started writing erotica and I use it to protect myself in case someone from my real life was to come across my writing or my Twitter account. The internet can be a dangerous place when you have to worry about losing your jobs or your friends when they discover what you do in your spare time. I've read stories and known people online that this has happened to. It's never pretty and it's not something that I want to have to go through.
Secondly, more importantly, is that I've been fighting with depression for some time now. There's a long story full of sighs that I could go into about it but the biggest part I want to address is how my depression seems to have taken a turn for the worst in the last several months.
Near the end of October I started feeling down in the dumps. This isn't unusual for me as there have been times where I've had low periods, especially in the last year when I turned thirty and my job became something that was tolerable to a job I absolutely despised. It's also a job that I can't simply walk out of easily. I've felt for a long time like my life was going no where and these feelings only helped feed the depression. At first I was able to ignore it or just kind of shrug it off. I knew if I just soldiered on eventually the demons would get off my back and I would come out of the slump. Only the slump didn't go away. It stayed on. For nearly two months.
I don't know what changed. Maybe it was the holidays. Maybe it was the hyper-speed start up to another election cycle. Maybe it was a series of things that just managed to break my cynical nature and feel more pessimism than I've ever felt in my life. Whatever the reason, my feelings got worse and worse as the days went by. I love listening to music and it's one of the few real escapes that I have when I'm feeling down. It wasn't enough. I reached a point where I would listen to my music and would start to feel better but as soon as I turned it off it was like the floodgates were just opened back up and all the progress I had made trying to clear my mind just came back even harder.
Then I started thinking about suicide. I don't say this kind of thing lightly. These were serious thoughts that involved serious ideas about how to end my life. When I was a teenager, full of angst and lots of emotions like a lot of kids are, I had thought about suicide then. I've actually thought about it a lot in my life. But when I would think about it, it times when I was really down, there was always a part of my brain that would immediately shut down that avenue of thought. I would ask myself "Maybe it would be better if I were dead." And that part, the strong, unyielding, angry part of me would slap me across the face and say "Absolutely not!" That same voice was there this time, still strong, still angry that I would consider doing something so selfish as to kill myself just because my life was a mess. Suicide would never be an option for that part of me, no matter how bad things got.
But for the first time in my life, that voice started losing strength. Day after day, the negative thoughts in my head would grow stronger, feeding on themselves, reminding me again and again how worthless I was, how useless I was, how much I had fucked up my life, how much it didn't matter, how nothing I did would ever make a difference, how I had done nothing, how I had nothing to live for. The strong voice couldn't keep up. The depression grew and grew. It weighed down on my every day. I worked the job I hated through Thanksgiving. I watched people maul and crush each other in a panic to get whatever cheap shit they wanted to buy for Christmas. I watched as a season I used to love as a child, the time when I would be together with all of my family for a wonderful meal, was turned into something that couldn't even be called a holiday anymore. My family doesn't get together for those meals anymore. Anger and mistrust and family issues have driven us apart so that these days we barely talk to each other.
Eventually something broke. I was sitting at work, in a moment where I had nothing to do and nothing to distract me from my own misery, and I hated my life so much. Suddenly I was having trouble breathing. I didn't have to guess at why. I knew the stress of my depression had created an actual, physical reaction and for a moment I was afraid I was having a heart attack. As I sat there gasping for air, feeling like the demons that had been plaguing me for weeks were now sitting on my chest trying to crush the life out of me, I did everything I could do calm myself and breath. After a few minutes the pressure eased up and I was able to breath again. I spent the rest of my work shift trying to keep the negative thoughts out of my head, fearing that that crushing pressure in my chest might come back, or worse. Then over the next day or two I started to feel incredibly good. I felt like something inside of me had finally cleared out. I haven't felt like that in years. I thought that maybe, finally, I could get over all the negatives in my life and move forward.
But nothing changed. It wasn't long before all the negatives returned. I still hated my job and things there just got worse. I still hated my life, feeling trapped in a situation that is partly of my own making and partly of circumstances that I can't get out of due to my own sense of obligation and honor to people I care about. I looked at all my friends, who have gotten married, had children, raised families and started careers. Nothing is as perfect as it seems, of course. I know none of their lives are all peaches and cream. But I doubt any one of them would look at my life and think that it would be nice to trade places with me, even for a day.
I still have the negatives in my life. I'm trying to figure out a way to change them but I'm not sure that I can. I've pulled myself to a point where I'm trying to find a way to leave my job while feeling that anything else I would go into would simply be a lateral move, more of the same. There's part of me that knows that isn't true but I just can't help but feel that way. Which I'm sure is a bad sign in itself.
I've been thinking about going to see someone about this. If it reached the point of actual physical impairment, then I think there's a real problem that I can't work through on my own. I don't feel like this is something I can talk to my friends or family about. My family is the type that likes to ignore inconvenient problems unless they don't have a choice. My mother's answer to my issues has always been "You just have to give it up to God." My father passed away a few years ago but he was never a man who talked much about his feelings. My friends all have their own problems that they have to deal with and it wouldn't sit right with me to burden them with my own. I don't think they could help me with this anyway and I worry that they would just feel sorry for me or think that I'm weak rather than offering an actual solution.
I'm not sure what I'll do about it. I'm not sure what I can do. But I know I have to do something and I felt that if I could at least put this thing into words, give it a force and a form, something I could see, then maybe it would be a first step to fighting my way through it. I haven't had a relapse of how I felt before, but I've lost that free feeling after that first break. More than anything, I want to get that feeling back.
The other reason I wrote this is because there are a lot of people in my real life and on Twitter that I haven't been speaking to much in the last few weeks. For that I'm sorry. I feel bad because I've been ignoring you, even when you've spoken to me, but I just didn't want to be around anyone this last month, even my closest real life friends.
I've spoken to some of the people online and told them that I was "working through some issues." Some I've talked to and given a bit more of an explanation without going into great detail about it. Well, these are the details and it's a lot more shit than I can put into a 150 word tweet. I hate that I've had to resort to this but I've clearly got problems that I've been fighting all my life and I think now they're finally coming to a head. I feel weak for having to do even this, like I should be able to face this problem on my own and not burden anyone else with it. This isn't like some disease or injury that I would feel justified in asking for help. Maybe that's a guy thing. Maybe that's just a me thing. I don't like to think of myself as the stereotypical male who tries to shrug off his problems and say it's nothing but I guess I am. This isn't nothing.
I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'm hoping this, at least, will give me an idea of where to start.
No comments:
Post a Comment