NOT A NEW CHAPTER
It's been three weeks and it isn't going away.
She buys herself a sugary donut on the way to work and it feels heavy in her stomach. She stares at a small, manageable pile of emails and can't muster a convincing reason to lift her fingers. The whole time, she remembers the few mantras she drilled in her mind the last time she felt happy - one, it'll pass; two, history is on her side; and three, find just one moment in the day when life feels okay.
She knows she can take time out for herself. Be gentle, take care of your health. But the debts keep racking up and after three weeks they don't feel as surmountable anymore. What kind of hole is she digging for her future self? She has people who care about her. Why doesn't she even want to get out of bed?
When she was fifteen, she was diagnosed with a mild anxiety disorder and it stresses her out thinking about it. At the time, she was feeling what she remembers to be the lowest period in her life. She felt almost constantly suicidal, she couldn't sleep most nights, and she didn't understand why. People either couldn't understand or wouldn't, but she finally convinced her parents to bring her to a doctor after she turned sixteen. They had her fill out a bunch of forms. The problem was that she loved taking quizzes and analyzing herself. She'd already read up on depression and was worried she exhibited all the symptoms. Except it must not have been bad enough if she was self-reflexive about it. Plus she still went to school everyday, even though she would cut class and cry in random corners. They prescribed her anxiety medication that she never took because people were starting to talk about how she wanted attention. She was a teenager. It made her doubt herself, mostly because she knew in part that was what she wanted. She thought the doctor might've diagnosed her with a condition because she'd already dragged her parents all the way there and was making a fuss about it. Regardless, she's never taken the diagnosis to be true or accurate at all.
She fills her days up by scheduling dance lessons and forces herself to go because she'd already pre-paid for them. She sits at work and hopes nobody notices that she hasn't showered in two, maybe three days because every time she gets home she's too tired to do anything but sleep. In fact, as of last week, the sleeping is now starting on the train home and she has to shake herself awake every few minutes, reminding herself that nobody else is responsible for making sure she gets home safe and that there is a reason she should care about that, even if she's too tired to remember it right now. The dishes pile up, she gives in to eating out and buying whatever she wants as she watches her expenses go up, she tries to talk about feeling so low, so low, but never gets very far, afraid of bumming other people out.
She considers emailing her therapist again, who'd "graduated" her from her occupational therapy program only a few months before. She ends up sticking it out a little longer. She wonders if there's at all a masochistic element to these low periods that keeps her tied down. As it is, she finds it tough to breathe sometimes, with this weight always sitting in her chest, accompanied by an inexplicable urge to explain why it's there and an irrational need to justify why she isn't taking the proper steps to remove it.
It's not like she doesn't know them. Why is she simply staring at the ceiling when she could just sit up and meditate, or even lie down as she is and meditate? How has half an hour already passed? She could get things done tonight before bed, especially if she starts with an easy list. Why is it so goddamn difficult to even get up to use the bathroom?
It all comes to a head one day at work. She still gets through the day and she still turns her tasks in before she leaves. But she has to keep going outside to stop herself from sitting at her desk and crying, even when she doesn't know if any sound or tears will come out. She can tell her coworkers are starting to notice something's wrong. She asks for the utmost time what she's doing with her life and why she's here if she can't ever appreciate any of it. The little hope she'd been holding onto disappears and she knows that in the future, this feeling will never go away. It'll always be part of her, this ugly questioning of why she has to be alive, even when she's happy, even when she's physically with the people she loves, even when she can't remember how much these low periods utterly eviscerate her. She can't recall the last time she felt anything positive. It's all just been so low, so low, so low.
Perhaps it's a happy dream she falls asleep to that night. She can't ever tell for sure what brings her out of her low periods, but when she wakes up the next morning, it's a little easier to get out of bed. She finishes answering her emails that day. The moment she walks through her bedroom door, she feels like she wants to shower and she does. She doesn't want to celebrate, knowing how precarious her position is. But over the next few days, she notices how things get better. When the wind blows through her hair, it's easy to smile. Her mind feels clearer at work and not only can she get more things done, she actually begins to care again about what she's doing. It's less of a struggle paying attention to people when they talk. Ideas flow through, she jots them down, and she finds purpose in the books she starts reading. Best of all, there are now moments in her day when she suddenly feels a rush of joy - from catching up with a friend, from seeing something funny - and she revels in this new feeling, knowing she can catalog it for the future when she'll inevitably have fewer of these moments.
And one night, she feels motivated enough to write about her experience, hoping that the next time she has to remind herself of why it's worth it to keep going, it'll be an easier ask to open this letter and read it to herself, not as a way to motivate her into action, but simply a living proof that she's already done this many, many times before.