S&M

People think depression is sadness. People think depression is crying. People think depression is dressing in black. But people are wrong. Depression is the constant feeling of being numb. Being numb to emotions, being numb to life. You wake up in the morning just to go back to bed again.-Mitch Clark

Am I the only one who thinks life is mostly a dung heap? There’s a flower here and there around the piles of reeking waste but when you go to pluck the stem because you’ve finally found something nice and pretty to hold onto, you discover it’s just a weed and not much can be done with a dandelion. If not for being covered in the mire of life, you’d gladly get off the grass. Maybe you didn’t even know how messy it would get. Who would’ve thought you would end up this dirty? Maybe you just stumbled. Maybe you fell for a lie, fell in love or fell for a line and now here you are covered in lye, stuck in the middle of a dung heap. Without even the fortune of standing on the top like a Queen waiting for a royal flush, nope, your location is layers beneath the worst of it and it stinks.

If adulting has taught me anything thus far, it’s that I am good at making mistakes like, really freaking great at it. It’s probably what I’m best at. No, writing is what I’m best at. Plus I can lift heavy things. As far as mistakes though, I just keep knocking them out of the park. If life were baseball and poor choices were the small white spheres threaded with identical, parallel, red laces, I’d be on a homerun streak. Don’t give me responsibilities and then the options to ruin them because I will. Get too emotionally involved with people who don’t have the desire and/or the ability to meet me halfway, resulting in me splitting my own heart once again-check. Catch feelings for the wrong guy at the worst time-check. Rip my knuckles open while channeling the pain of losing love, feeling alone and like I’m not enough on a punching bag that was not prepared for an attack-check. Every finger bend I now make feels like a burn from the sun-check. Being in the dung heap stinks.

To be clear, I understand that my issues are miniscule to most and First World at best. The academic thing, the relationships thing and the men thing are not on par with ISIS or Russia or whatever else is currently stinking up the world. Nevertheless, they are my issues. Just because there are bigger problems in this world does not mean I have to ignore mine. Pass me the tissues. I get that these problems won’t kill me because let’s be honest, nothing has, but it still hurts. The lonely thing and the failure thing are heavy things and although I mentioned I do have experience in lifting heavy, I can still buckle under the weight. Ever get to a point in your misery where, you’re so miserable that you actually don’t feel miserable anymore? At some point it just becomes hilarious. It’s as if you’ve used up all your sorrow and you’re unsure if you’ll make it tomorrow and something about that is rather funny, actually it’s really funny. There’s a point where, the misery is so miserable that’s it’s not miserable at all, it’s hilarious and you can’t help but laugh. Sometimes I laugh at my misery or my misery laughs at me, either way it’s funny. I’d rather laugh through the turmoil than cry any day of the week.

There’s a point where, the misery is so miserable that’s it’s not miserable at all, it’s hilarious and you can’t help but laugh.-Genevieve Rose

Misery doesn’t love company misery loves hilarity. Perhaps I’ve finally cracked like Olivia Pope when tensions in the White House rose higher than the chair she held above her head. There’s a point when you know that things won’t ever be the same and maybe they shouldn’t be, maybe they need to change and maybe I should change with them. Either I’ve stopped caring or I’ve started to adapt. I don’t know why I do what I do. These days I feel like Paul when he wrote his conflicted heart and soul in the scriptures. My bad habits are well established. My lack of punctuality and dedication that have screwed me over since always are hard to shake. Do I even want to change? I do it to myself, why though? I don’t know. I guess I like the pain. Maybe I don’t care that it inconveniences others when I’m not on time. Maybe it’s not a true bother to me that I don’t handle life like I should. Maybe I am just a sadistic masochist. It’s not like I went into this summer unaware of the obstacles ahead. I knew going back to school would be tough. I know I have bad habits and the tendency to run away from stress rather than tackle it because I don’t know any healthy ways to deal with it. I know deep down that I don’t love me or like me and some sick part of me wants to see me keep failing because it’s what I think I deserve. Why else would I hurt the ones I love the most as deeply as possible? Why else would I let myself down constantly? Why else would I sabotage the best relationships I’ve ever been apart of? It must be because I think it should happen to me. I know that this is warped thinking and not the advice God or His Word would give me but it seems to be a very real snare I’ve trapped myself in. No one tried to catch me, I was simply walking in the woods, contemplating the lyrics of Hurt covered by Johnny Cash that apply so intimately to my life when I saw the steel trap and voluntarily let it clamp around ankle. It’s eerie how accurate the man in black’s music is to my existence. As I wrote that reference to my all-time favorite singer, 2cellos cover of Hurt came on my Pandora. I seldom seek out Johnny Cash because I don’t have to, he just shows up. I knew the challenge of going back to school would be hard but I did not have to let an avalanche from garbage mountain bury me, now I’m stuck wondering if I even should try to dig myself out. Why do I let myself get buried so deep? Am I really this self-destructive? Do I want to fail? Do I create the chaos I complain about? Just how selfish am I? Will I ever care enough to improve? As for the relationships thing, I feel like it gets complicated again as soon as I touch it so I try to leave it be. As for the guy, I haven’t done a thing about it because I don’t believe it would be a good idea and I’d hate to drag someone I care about into my mess of a life. Lastly and most importantly, my issue with academia, the course I’m enrolled in ends in August so we’ll see if I succeed in spite of myself or act at the detonator on the C-4 that borders my potentially legendary life.