its always going to be like this. struggling to be reasonable when i’m not. struggling in general. pain and fatigue and lying and not measuring up to my own standards. complicated relationships and being disappointed in people places things.
so why bother
and the response is always “no! don’t have those thoughts!” hands outstretched voices rising cooing like frantically trying to stuff the thoughts down as if no no no no let’s do something else is a valid answer to a legit reasonable thought.
give me an answer
my brain and body are broken and I’m incapable of feeling pleasure in all the things that are worth it unless i try so so hard and struggle so
why
bother
I wrote this in 2015. Five years ago.
The answer is because your premise is flawed, past me. “It’s always going to be like this.” It hasn’t been. These bad days and times are cyclical, you aren’t wrong about that. You will always have depression and always have these recurring bad times, but they are only a bare fraction of the actual days you will experience. And the more you learn how to dig yourself out of those bad days, the easier it is not to fall into them again.
You learn what works, what keeps you from the edge. And when you feel it starting, you learn how to make it stop. You won’t always succeed, but the thing is... You’re *in it* right now, when you posted this. So yeah, it seems like it’s forever because you’re standing in it. Come back in a week or a month and you’ll be out of it. And when your mental illness starts exaggerating the bad and minimizing the good and telling you “Look, see. this is how it’s going to be forever,” you learn to say “Yeah, asshole, you said that the last six hundred times and you were wrong every single time” and start digging out of the hole you’re in. ‘Cause the stuff outside the hole is amazing.
In the five years since I posted this I’ve fallen in love twice, got my dream job, lived in California by myself for a month, built a beautiful relationship with my best friend, came out as nonbinary and it was mostly okay, pet a whole bunch of great dogs, made a youtube channel, learned how to blend eye shadow, wrote several video games, learned how to write like the fucking WIND instead of whining about no motivation all the time, kept a plant alive, had a tank full of snails, made out with five new people, slept with a boy who touched me like I was made of glass, played so many great video games and read so many good books and laughed at so many amazing memes and all of that is worth putting in the work to self-care and putting one foot in front of another and not giving up. *That’s* why you bother.
