A lightless abyss

Since I began the occasional posting to this blog, I’ve hit highs and lows. More highs than lows. In the last six months, but especially in the last three, I’ve hit the absolute bottom.

Within three seconds of waking, my stomach is in knots. I shake uncontrollably at the prospect of getting on a bus, let alone stepping foot in the office. I am terrified of talking to people, which is part of my job (isn’t it everyone’s?). Each day that goes by, I am so wound up by constant, unabating nerves that by the time I get home, I am too tired to sleep. Too exhausted in the head. My body never relaxes, my muscles are tense and knotted and my back stiff. My brain aches with fear at the smallest thing.

And I write this in a pool of tears, listening to Elgar’s Enigma Variations (op 36 – Youtube), wondering how I ended up like this. I’ve been depressed for almost exactly a decade now. All the potential I once showed has not born fruit. A gifted musician, surely destined for the world stage, one teacher told me when I was 13 and had completed another solo in front of a large audience of crying mothers. I excelled at most subjects at school, until I reached my teens. I learned foreign languages with ease. I was a great communicator, a doctor in the making – or so my parents believed. Well, I believed too – I wanted that. I comforted people, I made them laugh. I still do. I am a visionary and a believer in mankind’s good. I often can’t sleep but for the torrent of stimulation in my head: ideas, plans, projects. The need to do good. The need to help people. I am unsatisfied with my lot, passionate for change, passionate that I can make a difference.

And yet, instead, I’m wallowing in my own self-inflicted grief, and that of mourning my father. I’m still 17, forever stuck at the funeral, forever wondering why – why him, why me, why us.

And it doesn’t seem likely it will change. Perhaps I too, like him, will have my hopes and aspirations buried with my bones, unless I can somehow rid myself of this sickness of the mind.

Listen to the Elgar piece with headphones on and allow yourself to be moved.