i’ve written a bit before about how i need to get round to realising that i can’t just sit back and wait for something to make me happy, i have to go out there and find that happiness for myself. this is because when i was fourteen i was really, really unhappy for a long time; and i don’t think that i’ve ever stopped being paranoid that one day -maybe tomorrow! oh no!- things are going to turn on me and be that way again.
i felt this sense of paralysing paranoia all the time; i could burst into tears at a second’s notice [literally burst into tears. i've never done it since.]; i never ate anything, i would buy something for lunch and then realise i just couldn’t eat it and it would sit in my bag until i threw it away; i had this constant churning feeling in my stomach, like nervous butterflies and just feeling sick in one; and i acted manically happy when inside i felt terrible because i thought that if i acted happy eventually i would turn back that way. it didn’t happen.
i came home each day and shut myself away in my room and cried and cried. i listened to my chemical romance albums on repeat because i could concentrate on drum beats and guitar solos and shut everything else out. i would rather listen to lyrics about cemetaries and blood, violence and apathy, than songs about love and stuff because they would rub things in my face. i got a pair of scissors and tried to slit my wrists, not because i truly believed it was going to make me feel better but because i had read of other people saying it made them feel better and at that point i was willing to try anything. it didn’t work, the scissors were too blunt. i cried even harder when i realised that i was such a failure i couldn’t even manage to slit my wrists properly. i couldn’t say for definite that i was actually depressed, because what do i know? i’m not a doctor and i never spoke about it with anyone really, but if that wasn’t depression then i don’t ever ever want to know what depression feels like.
and everyone says that you learn from your mistakes, right?, but what scares me about the whole thing is that i didn’t learn from my mistakes because i don’t know how i got that low in the first place or how i managed to get myself out. so there’s this paranoia that i could end up back there at any point and not find the way out this time.
so anyways, the point of this post is not that i used to be really sad but that i’m not really sad anymore but i still haven’t learned to shake that feeling completely. i can be happy and i’m generally a happy person but there’s always a part of me that’s .. not sad exactly, but i feel like it’s holding me back from being absolutely 100% happy. like everything is watered down. like i’m only experiencing half of it.
and i was beating myself up about it and wondering what was wrong with me when i realised that maybe it’s not my fault, i consider that sad time to be in the past but maybe it’s not. maybe i’m still on the road out of it and i still have to learn everything in order to be truly happy again. or maybe this is life and i’m never supposed to be 100% happy or like i’m experiencing an emotion in it’s strongest concentration. but i wouldn’t like that to be true because there was a time when i didn’t feel this way so i know i can do it. only time will tell, right?
