Step 21: Get back up

Photo courtesy of Unsplash / Mike Tinnion

I'm going to be honest.

I lost several hours to depression today. Those hours would have translated into words. It's night now, and since then I've recovered a bit, so I'm trying to output what I can before I sleep.

Today was interesting because instead of depression just being a somewhat crappy experience in of itself, which many people, far too many people can relate to, I could also quantify the loss caused by it.

I teach kids and teens, from 11 - 18, mostly in the 13+ range, and because I work at a private centre, I sometimes get away with teaching what I want, regardless of the lesson. One of those topics is if someone brings up depression, or mental illness, or suicide, or they use one of the many slurs that do the rounds in the hellscape that is middle-to-high-school. "He's totally mental." 

"She's faking being suicidal."

I stop the lesson and teach them about depression and mental illness, which mainly involves emphasising a few facts. 

1. That the causes are biological. Our brains are organs, affected by a myriad of factors both internal and external. It's machinery. The machinery can be damaged without it being the person's fault. Medication can affect, and thus fix the machinery.
2. One person's molehill might be someone else's mountain. And vice versa. Reality is in our minds, and its judgemental and narrow-minded as hell to assume you *know* what someone else's reality is like. As an add-on, I try to teach them about actively listening- which is to listen to someone without judgement, being present and asking questions to clarify- a simple form of support that can mean the world.
3. Our thoughts generate emotions, its true- thinking positive means you may feel more positive, but your emotional state also generates your thoughts. A person can feel irrationally hopeless, irrationally worthless- they can think very concretely that reality is a certain way because of their emotional state, and this can feed back into a spiral, upwards or downwards.
4. Depression is not sadness. Sure, some people cry, and there are many aspects of it that may resemble sadness but really, depression is the opposite of vitality. It is a complete lack of energy, motivation, purpose. It is a vacuum, a gulf.

These are also things many adults I know could stand to learn.

We are making progress, slowly, as a society when it comes to mental illness, but we still got a ways to go.

So fuck it, I'm being honest. Depression kicked my ass a bit today. The opposite of vitality. I found it difficult to do anything at all. The cause was unbelievably stupid, and I won't go into any of that, but the point of this, and it's relation to writing- is that I could really understand,  because of this project, that depression robs you of time. Time is the resource man, in this project. There's also energy, motivation, all of that- but time's really what it comes down to.

For everyone struggling with mental illnesses, with motivation, with all of it- if they are blaming themselves for how many minutes tick by, how many hours are lost; that's the great battle. The fear, the procrastination, all of it stealing your time. 

Fight for your goddamn time.

We all got only so many minutes and we don't know how much's in the account. I want to spend it on words, but we all got our shopping lists. 

On the good days, you have to spend that currency well. It doesn't matter how you spend it, or on what, as long its what you actually wanted. 

Fuck motivational quotes, this one's dead simple:

You won't always have the freedom of time. Depression or circumstances- when you have the freedom to fill those minutes the way YOU want, you take that shot.

Make it count.

It's 11:40 pm, and I've gotten 1000 words in, and a bunch of planning, and honestly, today was tough. 

If I can do that, you can fucking do it. Whichever random reader made it here. 

I get depressed and I'll be damned if THAT is the reason I don't get this done. I'll take laziness and poor decisions, but that other fucker's the enemy, for me and all of us that go through it.

One day I'm going to write the book that's closest to my heart, and it'll be about mental illness, and crazy cockroach demons, and cosmic warfare and all this stuff that I've been writing in my head for years. I'm training to write that book. That's one of my motives. 

All of this is training for THAT book.

My phone background is the featured picture. And it comes from this Reddit thread. 

MyLastTie is one of my fucking heroes.

With his last month he wrote one thing, one goddamn message to the world, and he poured his heart and soul into it, and people like me who read it, read it again for strength, so that this otherwise completely anonymous person is now fueling the hearts of anonymous people, and those anonymous person's families, their children, as long as those words last.

That's the power of truly honest writing. That's fucking magic. 

"Make it count." 

I'm trying to make every one of these days these three months count. I don't always succeed, but that's the real struggle and focus of this- making those minutes count.

Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting.  

The title of this step is taken from a performance I did, awhile back. Sometimes I get embarrassed by it. It's one for the bad days: Get Back Up.