Category: Mental Health

Mental Health · Personal Development

Dopamine

Ruby Pipes33 Comments

"The journey is the reward" © Nishanth Jois, 2012. CC BY 2.0.
“The journey is the reward” © Nishanth Jois, 2012. CC BY 2.0.
Faith. It’s all going to come down to faith, isn’t it? Establishing belief that if I work hard on the things that matter I will see improvement.

Noticeable difference.

Faith. Even when it seems like I know better, I don’t. Forgetting every time I felt like I gave my all and got burned anyway. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I am not finite. There is no “all”. No matter how empty, how hopeless, how beaten down I feel. I can always get up again. There is always something I haven’t used yet.

It’s easy to feel I’ve been doing everything I can my entire life. Easy to assume that if any of it were going to make a difference it would have by now. Harder to learn to see the difference between fighting and learning. It’s never been about how hard I can punch, only how quick I can dodge it.

Divert. Disperse. Learn a different tactic.

Don’t try to stop the river. Rivers always find a way. At some point, the dam breaks, and you’re worse off than you were in the beginning. You must be gentle. Coax it. Day by day.

We don’t need elaborate gestures. Don’t need fireworks that draw our eyes up, then fade out into nothing. We need constant pressure. And I know that’s harder.

Harder because there are no grand ceremonies. No celebrations or finish lines. We just trudge forward and hope we’re doing better than we were.

Faith. Understanding that growth, that improvement, has always been gradual and near invisible. Only observable by looking back. By remembering where we were a month, a year, a decade ago.

This is not a fight. It is a slow and steady climb. And yes, it’s easy to feel like Sisyphus. But the boulder isn’t rolling down. We never go all the way back to the bottom again.

All the work is always counting. We will continue to push our limits and surprise ourselves. It’s okay to take a moment and throw some confetti.

Mental Health

The New Low

Ruby Pipes10 Comments
“dark moment on the road” © enki22, 2013. CC BY-ND 2.0.

I rode the wave for a couple of weeks. Could see the bottom, but my feet weren’t touching. Skirting the edge. Always.

Then, in the morning while I was standing in the bathroom doing my make up it finally caught up with me. Sinking. Gasping for air. Heart pounding. I was thirty minutes late for work.

When I got home my husband was still out. So I took a walk to nowhere in particular. Leaned against brick walls. Circled city blocks. Anything to not be home. To not be alone. Searched out safety.

Today I made it to the gym in the morning. But I didn’t make it to work. Laid on the couch in my gym clothes until noon. It got me.

Nothing “happened”. It’s always undramatic. The final switch flipped off, but the light it connected to was barely illuminating anything to begin with.

A slow sinking. A sun setting. Hurt that creeps in slow and disconnects me piece by piece until even the couch cushion I’m sitting on feels far away.

But somehow the work email was still checked and responded to. I didn’t drag myself to the store for bourbon or cigarettes or pints of ice cream. At no point did I curl up on the bathroom floor and sob. I didn’t take one of those five hour walks where I scrape my knuckles along concrete. Where I stand on the ground and look up at bridges and tell myself stories about how this all eventually ends.

Instead I watched a movie and a bunch of Seinfeld. Took a nap. Sat on the couch and stared out the window and texted my best friend.

And at 3:45 I got up, showered, and dressed. Sat down at our dining room table and wrote it all down. Tried to make sense of it. Tried to shake out patterns and identify sources. Pulled out fragments of my inner workings. Pieces of a pocket watch strewn in front of me. Each one serving a purpose I could name, clean off, and put back in.

It’s not getting any easier, but I’m getting better at it. At taking a breather and getting up again. If this is what bottoming out looks like now, I think I can deal with it.

Not gracefully. Not easily. I will not escape without wounds to lick.

But I think I can deal with it.