The Dragon

Preamble

Hey. Been a while, I guess. I don't know that I'm in a great place to try and put a lot of pretense into this, or make it properly theatrical, but I'll give it a shot.

I sorta forget the reason, but a few months back I decided it was time to make another big push on the mental health front. Maybe I felt stagnant or something, or-

No, I remember now. I made this friend last year. Really hit it off, had a lot of shared tastes, that whole thing. Then some shit happened in their personal life, and they sorta fell apart. They didn't feel worthy of anyone's attention because of some shit they did when they were a kid. Lots of guilt.

They ended up cutting off all contact with me, which sucked, but I had other friends, so it wasn't the end of the world. I saw a lot of myself in this person, however, and I understood that urge to disappear, and I wanted to try and take care of that.

I've learned a lot over the last few years, both about myself and about how best to manage the things I feel. I've moved away from trying to bash myself into a 'proper' shape. I've moved away from trying to push myself too hard and to be more mindful of what I can and can't do.

So I felt like I was ready to try and tackle some of my deeper shit, and at the time I likened it to having to 'defeat a Dragon without fighting it.' I had this nice little narrative all planned out about how my goal was to let this Dragon roar at me until it finally grieved with me, and it was romantic and lovely and all that shit.

I was ready. I wanted to move forward. Let's DO THIS!

Fuckin'. Lol.

The Dragon

I was wrong about what the Dragon was, first and foremost. It wasn't my anger and my grief, which I thought I would need to try and convince that 'hey, I'm worth loving and I deserve to care about myself.' As it turns out, my anger and grief are kinda on board with that already. That's shit I'd been dealing with for actual decades by that point. They were not the hurdle.

No, the hurdle is the part of me know that knows I'm a good person, and that it's sorta miraculous that I didn't turn into my dad, and also that I'm brave and strong and resilient and deserve to be happy, but just doesn't give a shit any more.

It knows that I'm doing my best, and that I should give myself a break. It knows what I'm capable of and the heights I can reach, but it doesn't want to do any of that because it's fuckin' done, and all it really wants to do is roll over and die.

The fuck am I supposed to do about that sort of Dragon? Listening to it doesn't help. Fighting it doesn't help. There are no exhortations that will get it to budge, no promises that will motivate it. It's just... there, dead weight that keeps trying to drown me.

Part of the initial push for this mental misadventure was to establish an understanding that I was going to feel worse for a while, and I would simply have to accept that. The trick here was to let myself feel what I feel instead of constantly trying to either overrule it with self-talk or pretend it wasn't there. This is what ultimately led me to my realization, I think. 

In short, it worked. It had the intended effect, I'm now doing a thing I need to be doing, and I hate it.

I hate it so much.

Dragonbreak

(It's an Elder Scrolls reference)

I've had a lot of ambition over the years, as I've written about a little bit. I've also written about how those dreams are sometimes harmful. One of the big catalysts for this current stretch of darkness was the realization that I was using my dreams as a crutch and a blindfold. 

I think I've written before about how I felt like achieving my dreams would make the abuse and the suffering 'worth it,' and why that's wrong. In reality, I was using those dreams as an ultimatum. I told myself that becoming this successful, revolutionary artiste would be the only thing that'd make me worthwhile.

This was the breaking point. I understand, now. I see how deeply my self-loathing is rooted - even my hopes are saturated in it. 

It's one of those things that's objectively good to realize. I finally have the understanding and the justification for letting go of those harmful dreams. That's an important step to being able to live in the present, to really reckon with my reality and deal with myself not as I wish to be, but as I am.

Unfortunately, those misguided imaginings were doing a lot of heavy lifting, emotionally-speaking. A lot of my burgeoning sense of self-worth was wrapped up in it, I think. I've let go of this harmful thing, and now I've learned what I needed to learn:

I have to accept me as I am, because this is the only me I can be.

And that's terrible.

Living Half-Undone

(This one's a Blue October reference)

Seriously, this has been my nightmare for so long. I don't want to be me. Why would I? Yes, there are positives about me. There are things to like, but can I look at myself as I am now and honestly say that, if I never accomplished anything more than what I already have, how could I ever be okay with what happened to me?

And yeah, I know what that's a flawed question to ask, but I can't help asking it and I don't have a good answer for it. The only answer is that I can never be okay with it.

It will never be okay. It will never have been worth it. There is no recompense coming for having suffered it. There is no karmic reward, no virtuous windfall or 'well-deserved break' coming my way to make up for the horror and the misery and the bitter, bilious self-loathing as result.

I lost. Shit was taken from me, and I'm not getting it back, and now I have to accept that I'm a broken mess and somehow find a way to love it? Are you fucking kidding me!?

No. No, you're not kidding, and no, I don't know how to love this. Don't bless this mess; curse it until your dying breath, and then burn to ash with the loathing in your animus until it spreads upon the winds!

I don't show people how hard it is to interact with them. I don't let them see me when I'm at my absolute worst. Most of the people in my life who love my and support me don't understand what it's like feeling like everyone you pass by on the street is liable to suddenly start screaming you or hitting you for no fucking reason.

Now add on to that the fact that I'm basically Hutt-fat. Add on the fact that I don't have it in me to clean my fucking apartment most of the time. Add in all the people in my life who love and adore me who do important shit while I sit here doing... this.

If you could see it all, wouldn't you be disgusted? Wouldn't you be repulsed?

The New Colossus

I'm gonna interject here.

Fuck.

Shush. You wanna know what the problem is with this conclusion?

That the 'talking to yourself' shtick is hackneyed?

I'm just gonna stop asking you questions for the time being and press on.

Cool.

The problem is thinking that you have to do one or the other. See, you have this perspective that you must either be wonderful or terrible and nothing in-between.

Ugh.

That's right, I'm telling you something you already know because you clearly aren't getting it all just yet. You are wonderful and terrible. You are brilliant and dumb, witty and awkward, wholesome and perverse, brave and scared, selfless and selfish. 

You are mostly kind and occasionally mean, but usually just to be funny. You're angry and sometimes irritable, but you give other people every spare ounce of energy you've got because you love them and you want them to be happy. 

Do you know what actually scares you about this? I lied earlier about not asking more questions.

If I devote that energy to myself, people will stop loving me.

Isn't that dumb af? You're afraid that if you do a thing people who love you have been asking you to do for years and years, they'll stop loving you! The hell?

I know! This is a fucking nightmare of a brain! I hate this so goddamn much.

Do you know what this makes you?

Ugh!

It makes you human. Everybody's a fuckin' mess, and you know that. Everybody struggles, everybody's messing up, and everyone's just trying to figure shit out as they go.

Humans are the worst. 

And the best! All your favorite people are humans.

That was cheesy as hell.

BEHOLD ME IN MY GRANDEUR AND GLORY, MORTAL-ME!

Fuck!

I AM ETERNAL! WHAT IS DONE CANNOT BE UNDONE!

WhyCantYouJustBeNormal.gif

I EXIST TO SHOW YOU THE TRUTH: THAT YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE, AND YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY BE SOMEONE YOU'RE NOT - YOU CAN ONLY TRY AND FAIL.

THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE! Of course I can be not-myself; what do you think I've been doing all this- ah, shit.

There it is! Did you get it? Did you see the thing?

Yes. God damn it.

Everything you have ever been has been a logical consequence of the things that have happened to you, and the things you chose to let influence your recovery. You have only ever been you, even-and-especially in trying to be not-you. Of course you don't like yourself. That's what happens in people who don't develop a healthy sense of attachment.

You've spent your entire life without proper support, so you've had to take on a lot of that work yourself, and that's never, ever going to be a good enough substitute for having a proper, validating childhood. That's the thing that you're never getting back, and that's the thing you can't really change.

So what's the point?

The point is that you choose to try. You are 35 years old, and you can't remember a single moment of your life where you didn't have some form of depression hanging over you. Everything has been soaked in it. Every day of your adult life, you've thought about killing yourself, even if only out of reflex, but that doesn't matter to you.

You keep trying anyway. You still have enough of a heart to care about your loved ones enough to stick around. You are a broken and battered thing, and still you're a warm-hearted, kind human being who's only ever wanted to make other people happy.

The only person you've ever truly hated beyond redemption is you, and even then, you're opening yourself to the possibility that, hey, maybe you're not so terrible after all.

You are doing the things you need to do. You're learning the things you need to learn. You gaze into the abyss on a daily basis, asking yourself what the point is, and still you keep getting up every day. You do what it takes to survive, and that's fucking good enough.

You're fucking good enough, which is why you keep trying. You don't have to do anything differently. You don't have to be someone else. Every breath you draw from here until your last means that you're succeeding. Every moment you have to think and worry and feel means you've won.

Once you realize that, then the change will come. Aimless change, non-striving change, but change nonetheless. Embrace that shit.

Embrace it!