Eroded.

I am being eroded. Anxiety gnaws tirelessly at every part of me. Somehow I manage to endure the incoherences of being perpetually dropped from a terrible altitude whilst drowning under a heavy sea.

My days are endured, spent anxiously longing to be in bed watching tv. Months deep into depression, my thinking has calcified. Every day I wake up defeated that my first thought is fear, and my second, self-loathing. Angry that I am awake, somehow exhausted by sleep. Yet my aching to not be me is swiftly followed by a desire to be asleep again. Sleeping is the closest thing I feel to joy, because it’s an abatement from the pain. Perhaps I’m anxious in my sleep but there is mercy in not feeling it.

Going to sleep though brings its own dread, as the morning looms that much closer. The portion of my day spent trying to feel ok gets longer, and the sweet spot of twilight hours, before I start dreading the tomorrow of a life that gives me no pleasure, seems harder and harder to access.

In an attempt to talk myself out of my dire head and tormented body, I write morning pages. I struggle to fill the paper with my thoughts, they are so limited. I cast back to last night, editing the dread out of a memory of feeling happy and safe in my bed watching Sherlock. Alone and safe with no one to talk to and nothing to lose. No one to judge me, not even me. Fully absorbed in the occurrences of 221b Baker Street, I am switched off to this world, which scares me in a way that the 4th re-run of Sherlock doesn’t. I write myself into the show and out of my life. I know exactly what’s going to happen, and it is that that soothes me.

Here, in my bed, I’m terrified of all of it. That I’m part of it, that I don’t want to be because I’m no good at it. Anxiety, this unplaced, unplaceable fear where the world falls away, and I’m thrown onto myself (what Heidegger calls my ‘natural state of being’ (Dasein)). It could be a philosophical breakthrough, but he skirts over the sheer terror of it. Besides, what value can it serve if, as in my case, there is no mental acuity to accompany it, nor motivation to record it. It is just suffering. Dooming, endless anguish. Perhaps there is a value in my being authentically human whilst others throw themselves away into the world. But I am stuck here. And have, over the years spent more time than most in this dark pit of despair.

My spirit is sad and heavy. It wants to weep all the time but can’t because its detached from my body. In this darkness I am outside my soul. In my daily state of being, I groan under the anguish of my misery. Days roll into weeks and months, and I stay as motionless as possible in the hope that the world will stop with me. That my life will stop, and I won’t have to feel like this anymore. I do nothing- the only power left to me is to suffer.

I’m suffocated by these walls, I don’t even want to smoke. I yearn for this not to be my life with a longing that tears at my heart. I don’t want this for myself. I wanted something else.

This crushing sense of absence is awful, I just want it to end. I want my life to end, but dying seems impossible. I can’t do it. And so I crawl on because it’s easier than to stop.

So passed the next nine months. I slept or dozed some twenty hours a day, and in the intervals tried desperately not to think.