I was with my friends at a party last night, and I couldn’t tell you what brought it up, but I began to tell a fictitious tale about my death. I described lying on a mattress on the floor in a whorehouse in Morocco, the light streaming in through the blinds. My escort was showering in the bathroom to my left, and to my right, the sound from the Dhuhr Adhan crept in from the window where the blinds were. I inject a final dose of heroin into the vein in my arm, and as I lie back, the needle snaps off in my arm, leaving the tip buried in my vein. The glass syringe falls to the floor and smashes. I look up at the ceiling while the fire of the white dragon rushes through my bloodstream, mutter a satisfied “Indeed”, and shut my eyes for the final time.

I could not tell you why this was the scene my mind conjured up. It was past midnight on what had been a long Saturday. I had come up with it on the spot as a humorous, dumb, one-off bit for whatever we were talking about at the time. The humour being that that story was so wildly the opposite of my personality and the ending to a terrible film with an unlikeable main character. I am completely clean and sober with no prior substance abuse issues or plans to start doing heroin, like, ever. I have never solicited the services of a sex worker (though there is really nothing wrong with that part of the story as long as everything was above board). I have been to Morocco, but I was a child, and I currently have absolutely zero ability to afford 1) Flights to Morocco, 2) A Sex Worker, or 3) Heroin.

The party we had been to had been fun. I fisted a hot girl in a yurt while dressed as a sexy pirate and watched two of my friends voluntarily and consensually drown my other friend (though I didn’t stay to watch all of it because, well, even a fake drowning of my friend is rough). Though, as I often do at these sorts of events, I had gotten very depressed near the end of it. I haven’t figured out what about parties like this makes me go from excited and enjoying it to the bottom of a cold, dark pit. But I was there, in the pit. Perhaps my declining mood was responsible for such a weird and oddly detailed joke about my death, but it wasn’t until the car ride home that I gave it any thought.

I was riding home from the west side of Melbourne on an empty highway with a good friend of mine (The Drowned). We were chatting about the night and our separate experiences, and they had noticed the noticeable dip in my mood. We tried to parse out why. Fun things had happened, and on paper it was a good night, though I felt empty. I felt suspended in a vacuous void where joy gets sucked in, but it is never enough. I feel like this often. Like, no matter how many good things happen to me or how many positive experiences happen back to back, I will never be satiated and always end up miserable. Pessimism is a real problem for me. I focus on the bad far more than the good, and my ability to think negatively is unmatched. From this state, I only spiralled further and further into deeper, more complex sadness. While in a discussion about my sadness and the helplessness I felt, I made a flippant callback to my story and said, “I think it’s time to book tickets to Morocco.”

It is now just over one full day from this party and that night, and my brain has taken a liking to the phrase “I think it’s time to book tickets to Morocco” as a euphemism for suicide. My sadness right now is in quite the same place as it was at the apex of my downwards curve yesterday, if not further down. I spent the day resting and then headed out with my friends once more. Again, it was a good night on paper: I spent time with people I hold dear, and I was surprisingly extroverted and social with at least ten new people. But I hit a wall, and down I fell. Exceeding my usual level of outgoingness with people I didn’t know wasn’t enough; my brain branded it a failure because I didn’t hit it off with anyone. Spending time with my friends wasn’t enough. I sat there in the back room of a pub, under a disco ball and ambient pink lights, listening to the shit and certainly not mood-improving mix that was blaring through the speakers, and thinking about booking a ticket to Morocco.

I struggle with suicidal ideation. I think about killing myself a lot. It is really a knee-jerk reaction to unpleasant feelings. The reasoning I have come up with is that when I feel intense triggers for anxiety or depression, suicide instantly intrudes into my brain because my anxiety and depression feel so intrinsic to who I am that the only escape from these feelings is death. Like if you were inside a room and something you were scared of walked in, your first thought would be to exit the room, thus removing yourself from the undesirable situation, except the room is my brain, the object of fear is my own thoughts and feelings and exiting the room is killing yourself. I have never really experienced a sense of relief from my mental health issues. It has felt 24/7 from as far back as I can remember. So it doesn’t feel entirely unrealistic that my instant reaction to feeling large waves of these feelings is to exit the room. Suicide isn’t the answer to my problems; it isn’t a solution, it is simply the cessation of my ability to have problems. My problems will exist, unsolved, in the memories of those who knew me for as long as they can remember me.

The toughest thing I have found about suicidal ideation is that it is undeniable that it will take away the feelings that plague me. I will never be able to argue that solid, irrefutable fact. The only real counterargument to this is to experience positive emotions and realise that it will also permanently remove them. I often look at coming to the decision of killing myself as essentially gambling. Am I willing to gamble that the rest of my hypothetical life will be so miserable that it is actually prudent to end it now and save myself the suffering? If I knew and could convince myself that I would actually be happy for most of my life, then I probably wouldn’t think about killing myself as much, but that is what depression is best at: convincing you there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I am very far from where I want to be in many aspects of my life, and when I am sad, I am utterly convinced I will never get to where I want to be, but in my moments of sunshine, it seems unavoidable that my dreams will come true. Both states of mind exist, and both have my full belief depending on what state I am in. But as I said, pessimism is a problem for me, and I often remember and fixate on my sadness rather than my happiness.

It has just gone past three in the morning, and I have been writing since two. I have to get up in five short hours for my sister’s birthday breakfast. This monologue was burning a hole in my brain, and I spent forty-five minutes deciding whether I should get up and write or jack off and go to sleep. I figured I would probably feel a different kind of tired and a different kind of sad tomorrow, and it might make my pain manifest in a slightly less poetic way, and then I would be tortured for nothing.

Discovery has been made. Phone is evil. Need less phone in life.

Phone used to be for talking. For connecting beyond physical proximity. Phone has changed. Phone has become omnipurpose device from the very depths of hell.

Phone can do everything and therefore inserts it’s prescence into every facet of life. This used to be wonderous. Phone could save so much time! So efficient and useful! But the makers behind Phone have changed tactics, they no longer want Phone to be useful tool, they want Phone to be black hole of attention.

Phone engineers want every possible second spent on Phone. Every app fighting for every possible second of attention, every scrap of engagement. They sell your time. They want Phone to know everything about you, collect all data related to you. They sell your data.

They are selling you. Phone is selling fragments of your very being for money. Phone is evil.

Phone should not want things from me. Phone is tool. Phone should make my life easier. Instead Phone consume. Phone uses machine learning to create algorithm to consume as many hours of my life as possible.

Phone algorithm uses just joy? NO! Phone algorithm uses fear, sadness, envy, anger! Phone will scare me into using Phone more. Phone will distort perception of reality so that I use Phone more. Phone will distort perception of self so that I use Phone more.

Phone is not friend. Friend doesn’t treat friend like that.

Phone company is massive, heaving, thirsty conglomerate. Now Phone sucks you in not only to Phone time. Phone is a portal to be leeched upon by ground-breaking new systems of capitalist vacuuming of working-class wealth.

Phone is inhuman. Phone is technology. Phone does not care. I am human. I live, breathe, bleed. I care. Phone does not view me as human. To Phone I am number, I am metric, I am dataset. Phone sees through eyes that strip away humanity.

We must revolt against Phone.

Source actual camera to take photos with instead of Phone. Return joy to taking photographs.

Recreate forgotten devices of music listening with modern music streaming technologies. Devices that ONLY play music. Divorce music (beautiful) from Phone (evil).

Source alarm clock. Phone wishes only to wake you so that you can go on Phone. Alarm clock wakes you, and is content sitting there unused until it is time to wake you tomorrow.

Source Watch. Phone shows you time so that you open Phone so it can tempt you into further Phone time. Being on time still important, source watch. Digital or Analogue NOT SMART! SMART IS JUST WATCH PHONE!

Read book, like real paper book. Phone doesn’t care that reading it degrades eyes, it just cares that you spend Phone time. Paper book good for eyes and brain. Print out smut from internet (most of Phone reading is smut reading).

Use texting app that is texting ONLY. No feed, no algorithm, no stories, no posts, no short-form video content JUST TEXTING. Texting can be good, but good to remain unreachable for hours of the day.

Short-form content used to be fun Phone time. They have turned it into evil Phone time. Beware.

Phone not need to be checked during hangout, during conversation. Friend need to be checked in on during hangouts, during conversations. Phone NOT friend.

Strip away Phone elements until Phone is just useful tool. Phone can be useful but you have to restrict it. Like chaining up a destructive but super-intelligent monster in a cage. If out of cage, destroy world. If in cage, be helpful. Like Hannibal Lecter. Outside of cage, he kill and eat people; inside of cage he help solve crimes.

Phone is just as harmful as psychotic cannibal Hannibal Lecter.

Phone is EVIL! Less Phone = Better Life.

Should I play video games until my eyes bleed? This was the question proposed in my latest therapy session. Surprisingly, I was on the ‘nay’ side, and my psychologist was on ‘yay’.

Some important context is that a very common theme in our sessions is my struggling under the weight of expectations. I find the expectations of others (Societal, Parental, etc) often cause me great deals of stress and depression.

And with these expectations comes a lack of agency. They aren’t my expectations, but I feel as if I have to meet them anyway, and then feel a loss of control. This loss of agency, this lack of control, seems to trigger trauma responses from my school days.

School was awful for me. I was so anxious that I felt sick every day. I was a terrible insomniac because my anxiety would keep me awake all night, and then be dead tired at school while dealing with the epicentre of my worries.

But you HAVE to go to school. There was no other option. I had no control, and I felt an immense pressure not only to go but to get good grades and be social and be normal. I was stuck trying to meet expectations that felt impossible with little agency over my life.

It appears that, though I have grown up, the mentally ill kid in me never left.

Jumping back to the present day. The pressure I feel today surrounds getting a job, building a career, moving out, and building a life. Generally, getting on some path. The problem is, I don’t really WANT to do anything.

I’ve been depressed for more than a decade, and I didn’t think I would get this far. I have a weird philosophical distaste for life and an aversion to planning the future. There is no one around me whose life I want to model mine after. My brain sees no path where I am happy or at least neutral.

Thus, the expectation to find a job, a career, something to do with my life doesn’t feel like it is coming from me. It feels like that is just the way the world works, and I have to conform. Leaving me feeling a loss of autonomy over my life and thus like a scared little kid again.

This pressure to do something drives most of my life. I have hobbies like writing, I write these articles, I’ve been working on my second novel, I’ve written scripts and things. I also play four instruments and have been writing and producing my own music at home.

I enjoy these things; they bring me small pockets of joy. But my reasoning behind doing them can sometimes be flagged as unhealthy. A big driver behind working on these things is the intense pressure I feel to be productive, to be doing something.

I think this largely comes from my parents. I live for free in their house and eat their food, and I feel as if doing nothing all day would put a strain on the huge level of support I receive from them.

Why are those activities designated as productive? Well, because theoretically I could make a career out of either of them, should I reach a level of skill and or talent. So technically, working on them is working to get my life together.

I have to make myself work on these. The dopamine cycle for music and writing is far harder to earn than playing video games. I have set days that are assigned to working on each during the week (Mon + Wed = Writing, Tues + Thurs = Music) and have to really stick to an imaginary schedule to work on these things.

A big driver for doing my set days and my schedule is a) the expectation of productivity from my parents and b) the societal pressure to build a career and become a functioning member of society. Though I love doing these things, I will admit my motivation comes from these external pressures more than the sheer love of the work.

Underneath every day, I feel a deep urge to just sit and play video games all day. To stick a show on in the background and play and play and play and play. Because it is easy and fun, and it doesn’t matter if I suck at it, it is meaningless.

So my psychologist proposed the question: If I had ten million dollars in the bank and had empty days to fill, what would I do? Would I sit and play video games forever? Would I still work on my creative pursuits? Would I finally be free to find out what I actually WANT to do?

So he proposed that I try just playing video games until I naturally find myself working on writing or music. I am privileged enough to get food and housing for free, thus allowing unemployment. He asked what would happen if I tried to resist the pressure and fulfil my underlying desire, and what would be so terrible about that.

Should I play video games until my eyes bleed?

My worry is that I will become complacent with the cheap dopamine of video games and never again choose earning it the hard way with creative pursuits. That the skill I’ve built up in my writing and music over the past few years will dissapate before I return to working on them, and I will have to start again. Or worse, not start again because the mountain is too big to climb.

I worry that if I shrug off these pressures that cause me such grief, such anxiety, such sadness, such internal turmoil, I will simply accept a life of nothing. But if I keep feeding the cycle of killing myself to meet external expectations, maybe I will never be mentally well.

Maybe doing nothing will free me from the chains that bind me, and maybe living within the chains will make me amount to something.

I am left pondering, should I play video games until my eyes bleed?

Largely, my mental health presents me with challenges that are thematic in nature but unpredictable in execution. Things pop up in ways I don’t know how to deal with, but are usually rooted in my core mental health afflictions.

That being said, occasionally I will be graced with a familiar phase. Certain familiar mindsets and feelings will descend upon me and last for an undeterminate amount of time. I am unsure what triggers these or what cosmic schedule they follow, but I am aware of their existence.

The one I am currently facing is the “All My Friends Hate Me” phase. This usually involves me somehow doing enough mental gymnastics to convince myself that all of my friends hate me. That secretly they all wish to distance themselves from me, as being my friend is a burden, unpleasant, or just boring.

A core factor of this phase is the thinking that my friends are all too polite or too aware of my mental health to outright ghost or say to me, “I don’t want to be friends anymore”. And instead are attempting to slowly phase out the friendships in a natural way, so it feels like we all just grew apart, and there is no clear confrontation. This is delusional.

Another key part of this phase is the weird stigma I have internally of straight asking my friends, “Do you hate me and not want to be friends anymore?”. The reason I feel I can’t ask this is twofold. The first part is that I fear they will not answer honestly, so as not to end up in confrontation and jeopardise the natural phasing out of the friendship. And the second part is that in no way does asking that not seem crazy, whiny, insecure and stupid, plus it essentially validates this whole delusion that I am convincing myself of.

So I am at a state where my brain is attempting to convince itself that all my friends hate me, thus looking for any tiny sign that is true and amplifying any gesture that could be interpreted as a negative sign. And I am unable to straight-up ask if it is actually happening, leaving me in this kind of limbo where I will either be proven right or the phase will end, and I will be fine again.

Now all this stuff happening in my head bleeds into reality and psychs me out when I actually see and hang out with my friends, so that I am awkward and quiet. A good, solid, fun time with my friends would dispel all of this, but I feel unable to engage with them like that because I believe they don’t want to have fun with me, and me being all cheery and normal would be a catastrophic misread of the room. Like those conversations where one blissfully unaware idiot thinks everyone is having fun and liking them, but everyone else is wishing they could get the fuck out of there.

This mental psyching out means I don’t connect with them like normal, and I feel I can’t text them like normal or ask them to hang out like normal, which creates actual real non-mental-fiction distance between us. This only exacerbates the issue within my mind.

Sometimes nothing triggers this whole stupid thing, sometimes it comes after I feel as if I have taken from the friendship multiple times in a row without giving (i.e needing support, dictating an outing, anything where someone went out of their way to accommodate me).

That line of thinking and, in fact, the whole phase at large is stupid because I have very strong friendships, so it is unlikely that all of a sudden, with no warning whatsoever, these loyalties would completely flip. In reality, if my friends had an issue with me, they would bring it up when it was small and easily rectifiable, not silently let it fester until they abandon me as a human being.

As I stated at the start though, this phase is very delusional, and so rational thinking does very little to combat the active negativity of the whole thing. Slowly, tiny things compound to bolster the negative thinking, like someone talking to me slightly less or them needing to reschedule a hangout, or any number of perfectly normal things that I would otherwise never think twice about if I weren’t in this phase.

I am currently in the depths of this phase, right in the eye of the storm. I have a big group hangout that has been scheduled forever, happening tomorrow. Already, fewer people have RSVP’d than the last time we did this kind of thing, which does not help, but again can probably be reasonably explained away.

A core group are planning to attend, and I see this going one of three ways:
1. They will last-minute drop out, which will send this phase into overdrive.
2. They will attend but not want to interact with me in a “normal” way, thus further fuelling the no-blame natural phasing out narrative.
3. I will have a great night with my friends, and all of this will be put to bed.

I am assuming the level-headed reader has read all of this and is smugly leaning towards option three, as that is the non-delusional path. But here in the middle of the storm, I cannot help but be anxious as to how it will turn out.

I should go to bed. Sleep radiates through the bags underneath my eyelids like sand across desert dunes in a windstorm.

Nothing good will come from being conscious any longer. I should go to bed.

My spelling will be atrocious, and my grammar a far cry from the questionable it is when I am firing on all cylinders.

Yet I remain here, curled up in my chair, eyes straining against the burning white of an empty page.

Why? Because I think I am eloquent when I am sad. Because when I send my sad writing to my goth friend, I receive praise I value.

Maybe it is because my thoughts became narration, and I couldn’t help but imagine them sprawled out on a page.

The million-dollar question: Why am I sad?

Well, I don’t really know. It might not be any one thing, more a perfect storm.

Starting from the world and heading downwards, it is winter. I used to love winter, but last year I came out of my depression far enough to feel seasonal affective disorder, and this year is the same.

I want to stay in my room playing videogames far more than I did during summer. The pull is strong. I have less energy, I have less drive, less verve.

I stopped taking my Ritalin, I had to; it was inflaming my already monstrous anxiety in a way I could no longer manage day to day. The lack of dopamine is most certainly playing a factor.

My yearning for a connection I do not have has only become stronger and stronger and is tearing me apart.

I felt good for the first half of today. I was productive, I was active, and I was excited for my evening plans. Whenever I feel good, I often crash and end up feeling bad.

The event I was excited for didn’t go as planned, and I was left feeling alone in a room full of happy people actively receiving fulfilment. Noticing that other people’s joy was negatively affecting me made me feel bitter and hateful. Why couldn’t I revel in the joy of others?

I started spiralling and retreating into my mind. I began to disconnect, and my internal monologue became louder and louder. What I sought was engagement and fulfilment, and I began to retreat and deny myself any chance at that. Suddenly, I felt rooted in my position, as if I couldn’t leave my chair; I could only look around the room and inspect what was happening, but I wasn’t really there. It was like I was marooned on an island ten feet from a happier island. I began to turn on myself.

I began to notice myself making it harder on myself, and that only fueled the self-loathing that lies in a shallow grave inside me. I became frustrated at myself for my inaction, but felt so far from being capable of taking action. I felt stuck like a useless lump at the mercy of the hands of fate. Why couldn’t I get up and make my night better? Why couldn’t I get out there and find solace among the crowd? Why am I built the way that I am? Why am I stuck in this body, this mind that seems totally unfit for the life I want? Why am I repeatedly unable to grasp any semblance of happiness from situations that appear to everyone else as ripe with the fruits of joy? Why can’t I just fucking work? Why can’t I function?

There were many people in that room I knew and liked, yet they felt so far away. Maybe I had resigned myself to despair and was projecting distance between myself and them because I had made up my mind, and despair was easier. It didn’t feel like that, it felt like I really wanted to have a good time and that I just couldn’t. Like, some invisible wall was blocking me from participating. I just couldn’t. There isn’t any way to explain what I mean that is better than the phrase “I just, for some unknowable reason, couldn’t”. It makes me crazy that I can sit there and know I am unhappy and know I won’t be happy if I continue doing what I am doing, but feel powerless to stop it. Am I fucking useless? Am I fucking broken? What is this bullshit, this magical inhibitor that prevents me from having a good fucking time. The sadness just set in, and the world became bleak. Everything became hopeless. Nothing will ever turn out the way I want and I will be writing stupid fucking essays on my misery that no one will ever read for the rest of my miserable life. I don’t know if I hate myself, I don’t know if I know myself but sometimes it feels like I wanna beat the shit out of myself like in Fight Club. Just throw myself against a wall and rain down punches until my fingers are too broken to make a fist. I can’t function. I hate that I can be smart and funny and charming one day and fucking nothing the next. I hate that I have no control. I hate that I am uglier than I want to be. I hate that I actually think I am worth something, but so often find myself incapable of showing people anything redeeming. I hate that I will turn on my nighttime jazz playlist and indulge the thoughts that should be nothing more than a passing whisper in the recesses of my mind. Why am I like this? God, I should be asleep by now, I have magic wafers that melt under my tongue and knock me out forty-five minutes later, but here I am. I began to have anxious daydreams about becoming schizophrenic on my way home, which is a marker of me deciding to make myself feel worse. Nothing positive has ever resulted from someone imagining what they would do if they spontaneously developed schizophrenia. I just want to feel loved in exactly the right way by exactly the right people, but it frequently doesn’t happen. Is it unhealthy that I search for validation, pleasure or whatever else from external sources? Maybe but the fuck else am I supposed to do? Isolation doesn’t work, I either already love myself or hate myself so much that I actually have no concept of self so of course I am going to search for meaning in others. Maybe I should do heroin. Can there ever be enlightenment for me in my state of hyper self-awareness? I am stuck so heavily in my head, which is both reality and fiction at the same time, and I really don’t see how I will ever get out of it. My life isn’t even bad and I am so fucking sad all the time. Bad shit hasn’t happened to me, I have comfort at a high level and yet my brain seems defective. Just a fucking missconstrutrced piece of machinery. I should go to bed, I am cold, and my bed is warm and tomorrow might be better. I don’t know if I believe that, and if I wake up just as sad, then I shall incur the inquisition from my father as to why I am sad, and he won't understand. If I wake up sad, I will want to make plans with my friends, but will be fought by seasonal affective disorder and the ever-growing concern that people will only have so much pity, and my sadness will grow tiresome to those who have to deal with it. They won’t, probably, but I will hate myself for not being fun, for not being a positive part of their lives. I will wallow that no one will ever fulfill my needs if I appear to them a sack of depressed shit which only pushes me further down the hole. My neck hurts. I don’t know what I am going to do tomorrow and so much open time will make me worse but I don’t know if I have the fucking stones to do anything about it. I can’t magically make myself happy in one day, so why even try?

I don’t like how angry I am right now. Anger isn’t beautiful, and I don’t think it’s poetic either. Sadness is poetic. This didn’t turn out how I wanted it to, it will not stoke the reactions I seek, and my neck really hurts.

I am an extremely empathetic person. It informs my every decision and is one of the core tenets by which I live my life.

I spend time, energy and effort evaluating the effect my actions have on those around me and whether I am comfortable with those effects. I attempt to understand the emotions of others so that I can be there for them in a way that matters.

I rule my actions as good and bad by the reaction I would have if someone else had made that action and it had a secondary effect on me. My sense of good and evil comes entirely out of empathy, if I eat someone’s food out of the refrigerator I feel bad because I know it pisses me off when people do that to me. So I avoid that whenever possible.

It is the simplest concept ever, and we teach it to children, yet, unlike many of the things I was taught in school, I use this every day.

People tell me I am emotionally intelligent, and I often wonder what that means because they often say it after I was just empathetic. They will tell me this after I simply imagined what I would feel like if their dilemma was happening to me and gave them advice.

Pretty much everyone does this. Empathy is present in most people.

The problem I find is that I take it too far, I feel actual distress on behalf of someone else. I imagine how they must feel so vividly that I feel it myself.

When someone I care about tells me of something bad that happened to them I spin out. I imagine how they must have felt and become overwhelmed in these terrible emotions. Then a new wave of distress hits as I realise I am only able to simulate a fraction of the unpleasantness they felt, and the reality is that this person I care about felt something far worse.

There is often nothing I can do about what happened to this person, yet because of all that I felt, my brain drives into a frantic state where I must make it all better. But as I said, there is often nothing I can do, and sometimes the person is completely over whatever events transpired and needs nothing.

Yet it remains in my head. I have to actively push this menacing, festering storm cloud out of my mind because imagining the pain they went through will not serve me or them. And still it lingers. Like my brain is just waiting for me to drop my guard and make me remember how awful they must have felt.

I think one of the problems is that I can’t physically put myself in their shoes; I can’t physically experience their situation. I can only imagine myself in their shoes and thus put an imagined version of myself into their situation.

I have survived my fair share of things over my life, and my mental toughness is probably a lot more than I know, but my imagined self is weak. When a friend shares their trauma, I lack the self-confidence to imagine myself living through it and assume that it would break me.

This gives me an overwhelming desire to help them in any way I can, as if the tables were turned, I would need so much help, but the help I try and offer can be overwhelming itself.

My empathy tears me apart, in an attempt to get me to be the most compassionate person I can be.

I don’t know what to do about it, quite frankly. My empathy guides me to being a good person and friend, a job it does really well. But it also makes me melt down when something bad happens to someone else or if someone is negatively affected by my actions. Both of which are inevitable scenarios.

I see people without empathy and people who ignore their empathy, and neither of these are viable options as they would radically change the person I am and not in a way I want. I just hate being so fragile.

It is a superpower to be in touch with people’s emotions when things can be resolved, as you can actively strive for the resolution. But a great deal of emotional situations cannot be resolved as much as they can be outlasted, and sitting there imagining the pain someone is going through or the pain you knowingly or unknowingly caused them can feel like getting acupuncture from a blind voodoo doll enthusiast.

I got COVID earlier this year and found out a few days in that I also got my friend sick. I didn’t knowingly get them sick or even know I had COVID when I hung out with them, yet of course, I felt responsible.

I didn’t have to imagine what they could be feeling, as I was currently feeling the same symptoms, but what I could imagine was how this would affect the rest of their lives and how much more damage being sick for a week would do to their life versus mine.

That menacing, festering storm cloud hovered and jabbed at me whenever I saw their name in my texts or conversed with a mutual friend.

There wasn’t anything I could do to alleviate their sickness, there was no more support I could have offered that I hadn’t offered. The empathy serves no one and provides no other function than to plague me.

It seemed to be bad feelings for bad feeling’s sake and with nothing to do but become entrenched in my room and that sucked.

I am often overwhelmed and taken over by things like these, despite the fact that I never knowingly cause things like this to happen. It still floods me, and I feel terrible often until I am relieved by the person I perceive myself to have harmed, or when it simply gets replaced by a new thing. I then only receive psychic damage when I am sporadically reminded of the situation.

I don’t know how to not feel things, I don’t know how to divorce myself from situations that have no business affecting me, or at least I don’t know how without sacrificing what makes me, me.

I started a journal on the 18th of December 2024 after reading “The Bipolar Runner” which is a memoir written by my friend Jacqui Louise Swallow. This memoir is essentially a journal of her days leading up to her running the Melbourne Marathon and it deals with running, mental health, motherhood and a raft of other things.

This was the first time I ever felt like I related to media about mental health. I have been reading and hearing about mental health for years as a part of my own struggles, but I never felt like any of what I was consuming was at all similar to what I was feeling until I read Jacqui’s book.

While my mental health struggles differ from Jacqui’s quite a bit, there were some passages that felt like they had been ripped right out of my head. It was alarming and comforting to see things I had thought before written down by someone else.

I was so inspired by this I set about writing my own journal. I don’t have an upcoming marathon, so I tried to come up with a different time constraint/hook. My life had recently started trending upwards in almost every conceivable metric, so I titled my journal “Until It All Falls Apart”

With the idea being I would document every day until all this progress and good eventually blows up in my face. Very negative view of things, but it gives it intrigue, it gives it spice.

I have been diligently updating the Google Doc my journal resides in for 135 days! A few select people have been added to the document and can view it as it updates with new entries, which I think is genius, but most people probably think is stupid.

I, of course, take my journalistic integrity very seriously and maintain that even with people being able to view my journal, I write exactly what I would have written if no one were going to read it. I am very adamant about this fact and pull no punches. Not that I ever really write anything bad or mean.

Today I am trying to take a moment to reflect on my journaling thus far in an effort to recenter myself and see what it has morphed into from where I started and where I want it to go.

This may sound like a peculiar thing to do, as your journal isn’t really supposed to be anything other than your journal, but my intent at the beginning of writing mine was to publish it. I am unsure if I still want to even try to get this published for a multitude of reasons.

I have found journaling quite helpful as it has always given me a project to work on. When I have no inspiration, I have always had my journal just to get me writing and get the juices flowing. I think it has also been emotionally cathartic, though sometimes I end an entry sadder than when I started.

My entries have certainly become shorter as the months wore on and have started to become almost bullet-point-like recountings of my days, which I dislike, as it takes no real effort or skill to do. I like the idea of my journal being artistically relevant to me and a strengthening of my skills as a writer.

I also think these short entries hold no value to a reader, should I choose to get it published. This holds complex issues because what is interesting to the reader should hold no weight on the content of my journal, because for my journal to be of any value, it has to be honest and real and honest and real is sometimes boring.

I wanted this to be a very raw look at my mental state and life. I wanted the intrigue to come from the fact that it was actually what was happening in my life and in my head. Whether there is any actual intrigue there remains to be seen, but that was the thought process.

The viability of my journal as a piece of art or content is not something I need to worry about now though, as that will only serve to send me down a path I don’t particularly want to go down. So we move on.

I have become complacent in my journaling. My entries are no longer long monologues about my woes and vivid descriptions of my highs. I wish to return to far more fanciful writing and exploring stylistically different forms of journaling.

This whole check-in will hopefully spur me back into doing inspired writing in my journal, which will no doubt trickle into all my other writing.

I think this has been a very good thing for me. I can see myself continuing to journal in one form or another for a very long time. I mostly enjoy doing it and it helps me write more things outside of my journal.

I don’t know if I will ever go back and read my journal from start to finish. I haven’t a clue what impact that would have on me mentally. I do, however, see myself continuing to journal for the foreseeable future despite the fact I am leaning away from ever publishing it.

Maybe one day, when I am a man of great achievement, people will clamour to read my journal and discover my secrets…

I am anxious often; in fact, it could be considered my natural state. I am anxious more often than I am at peace. I have always been this way ever since I can remember.

I used to lie awake at night as school caused me copious amounts of anxiety. No one could figure out why I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t know I was anxious; that's just what I thought normal was.

I find myself again anxious when I should be powering down for rest. I don’t know if I have panic attacks because I am so constantly anxious, but currently I am flushed, sweating, and it feels like a malevolent ball of energy is trapped in my stomach. I am wired to the tits.

I feel like this often, but it is easy to conceal; if you didn’t know me, you would assume nothing at all was happening. I have had to learn to show my anxiety and let the people around me know when I am distressed because I spent so long learning to conceal it out of anxiety that I would be viewed differently.

I don’t know if this qualifies as a panic attack because I assume it would be far less manageable, and I manage these anxiety events on a near-daily basis.

I can’t quite figure out what it is I am worried about. I have some impending test results for Gonorrhea that I have to ring the sexual health clinic about tomorrow.

I was a contact of someone who tested positive and immediately got myself tested, but I got tested the day before the easter long weekend, so I was unable to get my results. It has been hanging over me all of this four-day weekend, and I have largely dealt with it by convincing myself I don’t have it.

The doctor at the clinic said it is very unlikely that I have it. I have no symptoms, the person I could have gotten it from might not have even had it when we hooked up, and no one I could have transmitted it to has shown any symptoms.

Yet it seems logical that I would be worried about this. It is stressful, and I am anxiety-prone. I am unsure what to do if I am worried about this. I have talked to my support network about it and that usually makes me feel better, but at present I do not feel better.

There is quite literally nothing I can do right now at 10:20 pm. I also have an appointment for a haircut at 10:45 am tomorrow morning that I need to be up for, as I have already rescheduled it once (to get tested for Gonorrhea at a walk-in clinic).

My body has been going through the downturn period of a mysterious, cyclical illness that illudes diagnosis and it means I sleep like shit and have an awful time trying to wrench myself out of bed. So, on top of whatever I am currently worried about, I am worried about not being able to sleep and missing my appointment.

I do not feel I can go to bed and take my sleep meds because my sleep meds make me extremely groggy and drowsy. One might say that is a good thing and it is because it gets me to sleep. Unfortunately, I am so zombified by the meds that if I have a disturbed sleep, I can only regain enough consciousness to be aware that my sleep is disturbed, but not enough to get out of bed and fix it.

If I take my meds, then I am in for whatever panic-filled nightmare sleep that results from being so worked up and taking powerful anti-psychotics that knock me out instead of solving my anxiety.

You see my predicament. The longer I stay up, the worse it is tomorrow. If I force a sleep now with my meds then I risk a fucking fugue state of anxiety.

Sometimes writing makes me feel better, hence this whole thing.

I could be anxious about other things: The energy imbalance I am feeling in my sexual life and it’s resulting insecurities, the results of my blood sugar, serum cortisol and ECG tests I had done in pursuit of my mysterious illness or the upcoming opportunity to correct my sexual energy imbalance and my fear of a million things botching it.

Or some unrelated other thing I am not even remotely aware of at present.

All I know is I am on edge and sweaty and flushed and nauseous and there is seriously bad energy pulsating from the pit of my stomach.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to call. And writing 800 words didn’t fix it.

I bob and sway with the motion of the ocean and lean in certain directions, but nothing that could be construed as moving in one. My head stays above the pitch black water, if only barely at times.

I see no moon, sun or stars, no distant light or promising sign. I float aimlessly. I could start swimming if I wanted to, quite literally at any time, but I would have to spin around the empty nothingness I see and pick a direction.

Exerting the energy to swim would require hope and the complete lack of evidence towards an optimal direction is screwing with my ability to hope. Swimming fruitlessly in the wrong direction seems more tiring than floating until I simply can’t any longer.

Maybe I’ll lie on my back and pulse like a squid for a day to break up the monotony, but I probably wouldn’t get very far, and I’d miss the familiarity of whatever space of bleak nothingness I started in.

Even if I did start moving in a direction, there is no telling if I would actually move. I could be held in place by a current and not even know it, such is the nature of an imperceptible void sea.

I don’t know what it is I want to see when I strain to look in a certain direction. Like, I literally don’t know what the right thing to move toward would look like, what physical form that would take. The endless options of what anything could be seem to only deliver me more confusion.

Perhaps a stronger swimmer would have made it to shore by now. I am, however, limited to my body and mind, which can change and be moulded, but have certain rigid, built-in elements.

Just because I can’t see anything now, it doesn’t mean a ship won’t sail by and extend a helping hand out of my current predicament; the world is full of intrepid sailors. I find it difficult to hold out hope that so gracious a hand would find such a tiny dot in a vast, empty sea.

Maybe this is just for today, and by tomorrow, this ocean will have dried up and the world illuminated once more, such is the allure of one more tomorrow.

But for now, I remain floating aimlessly.

I have, quite literally two seconds ago, had the impromptu desire to write something important. This isn’t it. I haven’t a clue why this thought popped into my head but it did.

I don’t know what I would classify as something “important”. Important to me? Important to others? How many others have to find it important to qualify? Could anything I previously wrote be classified as important even if I previously didn’t think it was?

All great questions to which I haven’t any answers. My mind immediately gravitated towards some sort of political writing or emotional outcry about the current state of life and the world. For someone whose brain deems this important I really don’t read anything close to it.

I am alive therefore an inherently political being. I do try to stay away from politics and political discussions because so very rarely do they leave me feeling good. I feel the whole system is rotten and the more I engage the more of me rots with it.

I barely watch the news anymore because it sends my brain into a depressive spiral that leads me to believe the world is so far gone it isn’t worth living in anymore.

Yet political writing is my brain's go-to for something that would be deemed important. Something that gave a clear and powerful voice to the outcry of the suffering people of the world. Something that caused action that led to real tangible good.

I don’t even know if such a piece of writing is even possible. And I would certainly not be the one to write it. I am far too dumb. Too uneducated. Too wrapped up in the fantastical, privileged world that exists in my head.

Taking a political stance involves assuming you are right or your set of beliefs is right or worth believing in. I struggle with this partly because it takes a certain amount of confidence to assume you are right and because of the incredibly subjective nature of, I don’t know, pretty much every issue in the world.

For writing that would somehow be viewed as important, I would not only have to take a stand but that stand would have to resonate with countless other individuals who perhaps couldn’t find the words themselves. The last thing in the world I am confident in is that someone else is thinking the same thing as me.

I am smart. I believe that. I also believe I am uninformed. I also believe that I could be easily made a fool out of because I so frequently worry about that very thing happening and therefore allow its possibility to exist. How can I champion the voice of the people with such fragile foundations?

What possible opinion could my unimpressive mind produce that could not be written better and more succinctly by any one of the countless bright minds tinkering away at their keyboards?

How can I lower myself into the Thunderdome of politics without a foolproof plan and some rock-solid thinking backing me up? Then I would be like the rage-filled hate-spewing fools I so detest. I would become one of those pundits who have come so far from what they believe in they barely even know who they are.

How could little old me ever write something important when my existence is simply unimportant.

Thus my hesitancy to write something political. I guess it boils down to not wanting to bother unless what I have to say is revolutionary. I would hate to contribute to the slop and misinformation produced by the world’s political spheres.

There is little valiance in not trying for fear of failing. There is simultaneously courage in not wanting to add to the garbage heap and cowardice in refusing to go for the gold.

I doubt I ever will write anything important and if I do I would probably find the burden of it all crushing.