Clarity / Insight
02 June 2011 12:07 PM Categories: Writing prompts
That’s not a good thing. We need to convince ourselves that our lives have meaning, that the structure we impose is there for a reason, that despite the fact that we all know how it ends (badly) we have to keep on shaping and forming and being as though it matters. This feeling was one of the worst I’ve felt in what I still hesitate to call my depression and I’ve felt pretty bad. Before I started the antidepressants, drinking was a way to access the bad feelings, to lose myself in maudlin tears. Sometimes it was a way to delude myself about the future, to be in some hazy moment where, somehow, all would be well and I would be lifted out of all of this, out of all the hard work, by some magical force.
But the drugs are giving me clarity of vision. I can’t buffer myself against the future with slightly hazy evenings of escapism. Instead, the alcohol and a triggering situation pushed me right against the edge and it wasn’t an escape, it was a dagger to the throat, the tip of the blade piercing the skin.
It’s not as if I get drunk. I have one, maybe two drinks, occasionally three over the course of three hours. But I am a small person and the beer I drink is high in alcohol. It’s been enough to smooth out the edges of boredom and worry. Or at least that’s what it used to be. Now I see that this habit has to stop, another thing to let go of, a coping mechanism that is a form of avoidance.
The next step is creating meaning. I have no idea what the future holds. I live necessarily day by day. I’m in transition though it looks like I am standing in place. It’s the internal framework that is moving, by force, by thought, by feeling, and if I concentrate too hard on the process, I’m lost.
Goodbye to all that, the escape, the avoidance, the long corridors of revisiting myself alone again and again. I'm hopeful this morning though hope feels ... odd, strange, like an exotic fruit I've never sampled. I have to taste it while it's still in my hand, ripe and fragrant.
From a photo prompt (not the photo above).
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited. Hoping something dark and fictional comes my way tomorrow.
Image by mako.
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