"I bet you are having a better day than I am."
I laugh at the thought, through tears, waiting in the holding cell at the police station. I don't even want to look over and make eye contact with the man saying this to me. Because then someone will have facial recognition of me in this ridiculous situation at 28 years old. How does this keep happening to me?
"I doubt it." I replied.
"Did you wake up in a bed?" he asked. "Because I woke up in the woods."
Point one to the large black man staring through the same rusted bars as me this morning.
I have carried that moment with me every morning since. I have successfully woken up in a bed pretty much every morning for as long as I can remember. Not always my bed, sometimes really awful beds that are more like mattresses on the floor with a few throw blankets tossed haphazardly over them. But for whatever brought me to that point on that fateful morning, it could always had been worse.
I could have woken up in the woods.
I haven't written a blog since August. Since Robin Williams died and I went on a whole long tangent about depression and the way it's perceived by people - specifically the media. Then I went dark. And in that time I have checked myself into a hospital for depression and what would have become my demise in ending my life. I ended the first relationship that ever felt healthy and fulfilling. I left some jobs, came back to a job. There have been good days and there have been terrible days, but I can say I have always woken up in a bed. Albeit one of those beds was in a mental institution, a bed is a bed y'all.
I still don't have any big answers or keys to solving depression. I am trying to change my perspective just enough to get out of that bed each morning, and I think that starts by acknowledging I am in one.
I can't seem to get a handle on anything involving self-worth and confidence. At the end of the day, it's me who stands in my own way more than anything a single one person or circumstance could do to me. I believe I will fail, I believe I don't deserve love or happiness, so the moment things are falling together I find some sort of destruct button and watch the whole thing crash and burn. I maintain unhealthy relationships with people because those are the kinds of people I will inevitably end up with. I call off of work, because I am probably going to get myself fired any ways. It's a vicious cycle that no matter how self-aware I am to it, I can't seem to stop.
No one chooses to feel like this. No one wants to believe they aren't good enough for good things to happen. No one wants to keep chasing their tail in circles while everyone around them seems to be moving on and growing up and for some reason you can't move past not liking yourself very much. I understand and fully acknowledge that nothing worth having or doing in my life is going to come together until I get passed this hurdle. This hurdle I have been sitting next to staring at for almost two decades. The reality of this hitting me hard as I am approaching my 10 year high school reunion.
I don't think I am going to have a "rock-bottom-aha-moment". I think I have been living in that moment for the majority of my twenties waiting for someone or something to take me by the hand and pull me out of it Now that I've put in the time waiting I can state with 100% certainty that it doesn't work that way. That if you are fortunate enough to wake up in a bed each morning, it's entirely up to you to determine how the rest of that day turns out. Because, quite frankly, if you wake up in a bed, the hardest part is over.
