gray

Dear Diary,

I am going to write to you, as you’re an inanimate object and I can’t possibly burden you with negativity. I am so blah that my world has turned into shades of gray with splotches of black. Monotony, painful and eternal, is all that I can see for the future. I wake up, but everything I see fills me with a dread which eventually strangles me and kidnaps me of my ability to do a thing. The pot plant needs watering, the pets cages need attention, the kitchen is filthy, there’s a mound of clothes for washing, an email to write, a flute incessantly demanding I play it...or else, and a doctor’s stern order to exercise every day. I moan because paralysis is kicking in. I am incapacitated in just a few seconds. Sitting in a dark room crying seems the only option, everything else requires something which I don’t have. I have lost my drive, my personality...every time I walk past something I’ve left undone, it glares at me with condemnation: YOU LAZY WOMAN, YOU HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING TODAY. I cry because the words are so stern, so cutting, so truthful. I go back to my couch, and sit there numbing the pain with the soothing process of pulling out my hair...even the consequences of bladness don’t equate when compared to the temporary joy of repetitively, obsessively extracting each root.

Ben arrives home from work; surely this will cheer me up. It turns out to be my cue for some more tears.

“Think about the things you do enjoy doing...”

 “I don’t enjoy anything. It’s all awful, it’s so gray.”

“No Dee, think about what you used to enjoy.”

“I don’t know....”

“Drinking tea, and shopping and reading and walking – lots of things”

“Mmmm. I guess so. But I don’t feel like doing any of those things.”

“Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

“Nooo, I can’t. I don’t want to.” I am neurotic to the enth degree. I feel I will have a tantrum, simply burst because of what-ever it is trying to get out.

Eventually I am convinced to sit on the couch with my blanket, with some Mozart playing, and Ben close by me. It helps. Sometime later I crack my first weak smile. Some hope is returning to my little world, the glimmer that not every day is going to be today. It’s like a tiny candle being lit deep down in me, and though it wavers, I know I’m alive and my personality is just on holiday. It will return.

I’ve started seeing a Psychiatrist and despite that stigma-oozing word alarming me to some degree, I feel ready for this. He wasn't in a white cloak, and we didn't sit in a barred room. I long to learn to manage my personality – to learn to relax, to be less obsessive, less perfectionist, less stressed....and in so doing, pacify my anxiety. It would save me vast amounts of energy. I told him that I used to think I was insane, when I was a little girl and pulled out my hair. But he doesn’t think I’m crazy, which is a comfort. Neither does Ben. So maybe I'm not.

Anyway, enough rambling. I'll write next time I see gray.

Yours truly,

D