I no longer use antidepressants.

[sibelian]

39. It might be.

I can really only talk about myself.

I think letting yourself believe and trust that there is a sober part of you, a part that is sombre, sullen, dreary and unwilling to let go of the things it wants to gnaw on can be a very powerful thing. It's like discovering an enormous black dragon in the back of your head. A huge, beautiful, dreadful dragon that really is YOU, refusing to pretend to be what it isn't. Gripping its own authenticity with baleful, bitter resolve. A thing to be respected, really, I'd say.

Over the past year I have wallowed and wallowed in despair. I have looked at miserable songs on Youtube repeatedly, over and over again, walked in the rain, sat at home staring into the distance and refusing to go out and meet my friends. I did these things deliberately. I got my head really muddy. I stopped planning for my future to be bright and beautiful. I kept opportunities to fool myself about what I thought about myself and my life to an absolute minimum. My mind went wandering. I wanted the truth, not fun.

I think it's like a wave. Like a great storm passing. It's not logical.

Now I'm on the other side I can see new things, like surviving pieces of a wrecked ship washing ashore. I've picked them up, washed them and put them on the mantlepiece in my head. "This isn't what I wanted," I think, polishing my newly found and unexpected total disinterest in what other people think of me. "This isn't what I planned" I think, scraping dirt off my newly found and totally unanticipated refusal to "achieve" things that hold no interest for me whatsoever. "This wasn't what I was told would happen" I think, as I carefullly re-arrange my material poverty (which is probably permanent), my cruddy job in the National Health Service (which I've always hated) and my tendency to find myself in endless crisis (which I manage well, but hate) by the light of the hearth and they reveal themselves to be, respectively, excellent budget management, a dedication to difficult but worthwhile things for very little reward and a flexible, enduring nature. "It isn't what I wanted to be." I think. "It's the OPPOSITE of what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a materially successful, spontaeously creative arty guy that's inflexible and active and gets what he wants out of life. But... it is who I AM." I ponder this thought deeply and the dragon chuckles, his grey eyes glinting dully in the funereal gloom.

Perhaps a storm will smash away what doesn't matter in you and the sea of Despair will wash your true self ashore. That's what happened to me, it needn't be what happens to you.

But I'm very glad it did happen to me. I can get on with it, now.