Dark Waters

The past month or so has been challenging. Not because anything’s wrong—everything has been going well in fact. But my broken brain doesn’t know that. I’ve been fighting moments of darkness—of sticky black clouds caught in my chest, of paralyzing fatigue, of thoughts I don’t want to revisit once my mind is right again. The surface remains calm, too calm, numb. The unsettling calm before a storm. 

I don’t know how unwell I might be; I just know I’m off from my normal. The world feels a little off. And I try to self-care by buying fresh flowers, hanging more art, not being alone too long. There is an undercurrent of urgency to find the fix, fill the void before I really fall in. My day becomes a set of rules: sleep, hydrate, shower, clean, don’t cry, don’t binge, don’t drink, don’t call that person and burden them with the chaos you can’t yet explain, don’t cry again. When I feel normal, I worry about how long it will last. Because some sticky black clouds don’t wash away in the summer’s afternoon thunderstorm.

I want to be better. I want to not be better because my writer’s block has subsided. I understand the stereotype of the addicted writer now. It’s a balancing act of tapping into the insanity of creativity and staying stable enough to survive the real world. For now I’m choosing the latter, but I sympathize with those who chose the former. 

I know there are brighter days. I know there are solutions. I know God loves me unconditionally. But knowledge doesn’t stop the drowning; I have to swim too. I have put in effort when effort feels insurmountable. Somewhere in this mess are lessons. Somewhere I can probably learn how to properly understand and utilize suffering. Something about it all is miserably and beautifully human.