NOT SURPRISINGLY

I've been one, huge, jovial mass this weekend and a credit to my friends. They really did try to cheer me up, but implying I'm a whore and have no honor really only goes so far.

I can't say depression is new to me. I can't say I've never been affected. (Well, I could but a quick glance around this blog might produce some tell-tale signs to the contrary.)

But the severity of it, that's new. It literally feels as though someone has wantonly and maliciously carved out my chest. I feel hollow.

I am a creature of planning. I try, have tried repeatedly, to ease this feature of my personality. But not knowing, spontaneity, makes me uncomfortable. Makes me fret. Makes me analyze again and again the possibilities in my head.

I don't know if you know this about me but I do not have high self-esteem. Part of this comes from my exceptional ability to internalize anger and make excuses. The other part comes from my need for acceptance and terror at being singled out.

It really doesn't matter what I start out thinking, how convinced I am about the truth of something. The demons will come.

They hide in my imagination, and they prepare me for every possible outcome by showing me, over and over, in excruciating detail the worst possible scenerio. They show me bashing all my teeth out my head when I trip over a crack in the street. They show me breaking my neck and impaling my chin on the creepy little light fixture at the bottom of the stairs. They show me alone and lonely.

This is why I respect people who are blunt, people who will be honest with me no matter how much they think it might hurt. Because my demons, they are creative little shits and what they show me is always far worse than whatever the actual truth may be.

I face, for the second time in my life, the prospect that I am very easily discarded, very easily left behind. It happened once when I was 19, which, in all honesty, was my fault and it was my arrogence that caused it. I thought he would wait for me but three months later he was dating a cute little thing with a perfect manicure and was exceptionally content shoving that fact in my face. It crushed me that I was so quickly and thoroughly replaced. I didn't date again for three years, and when I finally did, he was an asshole and verbally abusive and I can't fathom now what I saw in him. Luckily, that mistake only took up a month of my life.

I blame myself a lot for things that I know are not my fault. I accept blows and more times than not, rather than getting mad at the person throwing them, I convince myself that I deserved it. I paid my dues with the boyfriend I hurt and lost at 19, but I can't help but feel, with such eerily similar circumstances, that I'm being punished, by God or by karma, for the pain I caused him when I so suddenly walked away.

I learned, in the three years after, that I am more than capable of taking care of myself and my own. It made me want to be more cautious with my feelings, but I'm not patient enough for that, nor does hiding how I feel really work with my need for honesty and my supposed inability to be anything less than blunt.

So what is my point? I don't really have one. I'm depressed, soul-crushingly so, and the only truly effective outlet I've ever found was writing.