Choices

Here I am, emerging from darkness and beginning to feel good again. I’ve been here before and I don’t doubt I’ll be here again. But unlike every other time, I see a new path ahead, a new choice to make.

There is a very prevalent pattern in my life. I’ve always known about it and I’ve tried to break it, but every time I do I just end up going through the cycle again and again. It doesn’t really have a start or an end, it’s like a circle and there are just stages along the way. Mostly it consists of a depressive episode followed by a new zest for life that fizzles out and leads me right back to dark solitude. My efforts to stop it have failed so many times that they’ve become a part of this pattern.

The only thing that makes this time different, allowing me to see a new light, is that I let myself become content. I didn't try to “fix myself” or suppress my emotions. I didn't force myself to move onto the next stage, pretending like I was okay all of a sudden and life was great. Instead I let myself feel it all. I allowed myself to actually work through my low point rather than slapping on a bandaid and saying I was fine. This way I could eventually arise genuinely okay.

I stopped holding the bar for myself higher than I could reach, instead I set it on the floor and abandoned the reputations I tried to uphold to please other people. I let myself be weak and vulnerable and powerless. Not just at night when I was alone in my room or in the bathroom at a party or under the guise of “I’m just tired”. I let it all wash over me to the point I became numb. I was apathetic towards life for awhile, thinking, “Is this it? Is this what I’m supposed to feel? Is this what I get for allowing my self to let my guard down?”

I made small efforts to feel “alive” again: driving around for hours, letting sunlight hit my skin, drinking copious amounts of water. They seemed futile until I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. And it lead me here. Where I’ve been before, except there is a slight difference. There is a new path in front me. This one leads me out of the cycle. The other leads right back into it.

I think that the reason I can see a new way forward now is because I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that not everything can’t be perfect. Not everything can be exactly right all the time. It’s not healthy for me to see the world as “all or nothing” and I am now ready to fully accept that.

It’s been a long road to get to this point and an even longer one awaits me, but it beats spinning in circles for the rest of my life.

Burnout

I’ve always loved coffee, anything caffeinated really. Not even for the purpose of the caffeine but simply because I enjoyed drinking it. However, that innocent pleasure I got from a cup of coffee quickly turned into a never-ending dependence. Towards the end of my sophomore year I started to feel overwhelmed and strung out. I told myself I was just tired so I would drink one, or two or five, cups of coffee and then face the day, only to drink a RedBull for lunch and dinner. That, to me, is when my burnout began.

Between the end of sophomore year and the middle of junior year I started to devolve. I would oscillate between autopilot and manual control. Whenever I felt overpowered by anxiety and stress, I would just switch on autopilot and go about my day on my own “default setting”, meanwhile, in my head, I was focusing on not completely falling apart. Eventually I stopped going back in forth. I would stay in autopilot for days, then weeks, then months at a time. I figured that if I just told myself I was fine and kept pushing forward then it would manifest itself into reality. But it never did.

The week before spring break is when I really started crashing down. I was late to school three days that week and I didn’t even care that I was missing class. All I wanted was for life to just slow down so I could stop to take a breath. Life was draining me and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. About a week later, I found out that school was canceled due to COVID-19. My initial reaction wasn't shock, joy, sadness, it was relief.

I was relieved that I didn't have to compromise my own sanity anymore. I didn’t have to drink a fatal amount of caffeine to feel alive. I could finally recharge. Autopilot switched off and I felt like I had just woken up from a bad dream. It blows my mind that it took the entirety of the world to stop for me to realize I was allowed to hit the brakes.