I go through these cycles where I get really… messed up. It always creeps up on me — I’ll have forgotten to shower one day or something, or I’ll come back after a really long day, and I just start picking at myself in an attempt to try to recollect and categorize all the things that I haven’t gotten done. And even though my brain always tells itself that this is a necessary process for me to figure out what task to do next, this is usually the first step to me ending up in my bed three days later with greasy hair taking four hour depression naps, eating a lot of chocolate, and crying while calling my mom.
The reason why I wanted to promise to myself to never reread my posts when I first started this blog was because I try not to talk about how bad I feel, because I think that makes me feel worse. The whole “speaking things into truth” kinda vibe. It’s true: once I start talking about it, this whole flood of feelings just comes and attacks me and rips me apart. But if I don’t, I’ll explode from the pressure of trying to keep it all together. This is how it’s been for ages — me picking on myself casually, drowning in my own perceived incompetence, breaking down, getting back up, rinse, repeat.
There’s a post that I never published called “work habits” — I wrote it on July 4th, when I was feeling really awful and shitty and I was just trying to figure out what was going on in my brain by spewing out everything I know about my depression patterns onto the page. Writing that post made me feel even more awful and I had one of the worst days of my life, on a national holiday of all days. For a long time, I didn’t get it, but now I think I’m starting to understand why laying out all of these negative feelings that I’m feeling in detail didn’t help me. I was just speaking more sadness into my life: like a to-do list, I felt like if I had more things to put on my “why I’m so fucking sad” list, I could tell myself I was an incurable patient and never try to do anything about it.
Something that’s been helping me is actively recognizing my depression/anxiety/negative brain juices as Bad. Having steeped in these emotions/been trapped in these cycles for a long time, I’ve sort of come to recognize this grey bleh feeling as a Normal, Okay, Whatever I’ll Get Over It Later kind of thing. Giving my habits the label of Bad — and not just a “haha I’m just bad at everything” kind of bad, makes it an actionable (is that a word) item that I can choose to not!!! to do and thus make progress towards preventing the same periodical collapse of my serotonin producing glands that I’ve gotten used to.
And more importantly, the biggest thing that’s helped me is the knowledge that the weight of this life I hold isn’t on me — that I’ve already been saved and God has taken care of everything for me. To trust in His success for me is something that I have to remind myself of every day because I’m always being bogged down by the weight of my own pride and need for affirmation from the people around me. The whole self-worth = people liking me thing that I mentioned in my last post was something that has taken/is taking/will take a long time to work through, and I’m learning to see myself as someone who is well loved, appreciated, and cherished. This post is also really hard to write because I’m trying really hard not to sound like a white mom that runs a mental health and ‘spiritual journey’ blog about her experiences with yoga and essential oils and spirituality… but I guess societal perceptions really do be out here harming my perceived safety in self expression?
So far, I’ve been largely avoiding explicitly talking about God and being Christian in my posts, but I think I really wanted to be able to share this because this is the first time I feel like I’ve made progress and stopped my anxious cycle before it got to an unmanageable point. It’s a really, really big step for me. Finally, I feel like the weight is not all on my shoulders: when I was trying to manage everything by myself, the only path I could see as a feasible end was literally to die. Like literally, to just end everything and be dead because nothing I was doing ultimately made sense … at all. Why make images or try to find a career or do well in school when these things were just making me sad? Why try to make other people happy? Why try to make myself happy? Trying to adapt to everyone’s subjectivity, and subscribing to the idea that subjective ideals/morals are “just the way it is” made me really sad. I think it’s the reason for a lot of people being sad. It’s hard to care for someone when you can’t tell them how you really think. Dunno about any of you, but I don’t want a “you know what’s best for your life” when I ask for advice (no shade btw lmao). I think part of the value of building relationships with people is so that you can learn from them and they can learn from you — even when you disagree sometimes. I was hesitant to come back to Christianity after basically walking away from it in high school because I was scared of being rejected by the people around me. And I think that’s why subjectivity is so attractive — because you can just be like ‘well, that’s their opinion and I don’t have to care about it.’ But it hurts when it seems like people don’t try to understand you or walk with you in your times of need. I’ve realized that to believe in a greater purpose for my life is to walk a path that doesn’t ultimately end in me throwing myself off a building or something like that.
There’s a lot of stuff trying to pull me down right now, but I’m choosing joy. I’m choosing to live over and over again, even when it gets hard. Thanks for coming.
Best wishes,
Marva Shi