The Particular Finest

Presented by aurynn shaw

Recoveries

It’s been several months since I’ve posted anything here. It’s been several months since I’ve felt like I was able to think coherently enough to write. It’s been several months since I’ve felt like I’ve really been myself.

In a nutshell, depression sucks.

It doesn’t just suck to be in it and unable to function, a background sense of things being awful. Instead, it sucks away at my life, my passion, my energy. It sucks the ability to live, sucks away the day-by-day joys that we all rely on and crave.

It sucks away the desire to live and replaces it with a burning void. It is not sadness, and there is no cheering up.

The last few months, it’s hit that point again, a year from the first time I fell so far and lost so much, from when everything fell apart and I was empty.

Recoveries are hard in their own way. The void is filled, not by the shreds of my soul but by the return of light and substance. I am able to feel again, to see my own life without the pallor of unlimited self-loathing, but what I see is its own difficulty.

I see that I’ve spent a year barely able to work, a year where my projects and desires have not moved. I see a year where I have not achieved those things which I consider worth achieving.

But it’s still a year where I have a single achievement, even if it’s something that so many others take for granted.

In my year, I didn’t die.

It’s a recovery that I can say that it was this bad and it doesn’t hurt to say it. It’s a recovery that I can look upon my life critically and say that this isn’t what I want my life to be. It is recovery that the vile beast Should does not fill the darkness, and instead becomes a tool.

It is a recovery that I can say I do not want this and be able to work towards change, change without guilt.

Fading

The darkness fades and it exposes ruins, things I once did and let fall by the wayside, be they friendships, tasks, or even aspects of my person, things that I wanted to be, things cruelly sucked away by depression.

But it fades.

It is recovery, that I can feel these ruined aspects, see them jut from the darkness and know do not feed the darkness.

I can rebuild the ruins jutting from the darkness, and that they are ruins does not hurt.