Prussian blue

Blue. The feeling. The feeling of Prussian blue. Deep, vast blue. Lonely blue. Filled with memories.

Are we as a race doomed to self destruct? Are we doing anything else? Is anything we do not destructive?

Where is the line drawn between destruction and creation? Nothing really disappears. My body is new now, seven years ago I was a completely different person. Every cell in my body has been renewed since then. Every single cell, every atom has been something else. The body that I had when I was born is something else now. What is it now? A bird? A different person? A flower? A hat? Probably. 

I'm painting and crying and painting and questioning why I keep caring about people. And I answer. 

I need to. Everyone needs to care. We are humans and need interaction, interaction needs care. Love. How can I not love everyone when they could be me? Strangers that I meet are built from the same stardust and dinosaur poop and old trees and forgotten beasts and feathers that I am. The people I love are built from atoms that might have lived in my body. We are physically connected by this little planet that we try so hard to kill. 

I want to paint the feeling of staring up into the summer sky and it's so clear that - even though it's daytime - you feel like you can see out into space, right through the atmosphere. I want to paint the feeling of dizziness after lying on your back and looking up and suddenly feeling like you'll lose your grip of the planet and just soar... 

I want to paint the pain in love and the anger in caring, the sickness of our race, the constant stupidity and beauty that is life. It's worth the pain even though I can never paint that, even though my paintings are infantile and stupid, even though my art will probably never mean anything to anybody. It's worth the pain of wanting to make something beautiful. To having salt in your face from all the tears but still pressing the last few drops of Prussian blue out of the tube. 

The feeling of love is worth the pain of having idiot friends, the feeling of creativity is worth the pain of creativity. 

Today I started taking my new meds. Even though I don't want to. I want the pain because I need the creativity, I want the need to paint a feeling, I need the anger and sadness and frustration to make something even a little bit good. I need to be me if I want the chance to breathe life into my art. And it's worth the pain even though the art is bad. 

externalisation

About a month ago I wrote this facebook post (translation below):


Swedish

Hur depression känns: tänk dig att någon som hatar dig står tryckt mot din rygg hela tiden, med händerna runt din hals, gallskrikande med en av sina munnar, hånande dig med en annan och talade för dig hur dum och värdelös du var med en tredje. Varelsens kropp är iskall och händerna har klor på sina långa, slemmiga fingrar. Jämt finns händerna runt din hals. Konstant. Ibland börjar de krama åt. Ibland kramar de hårdare. Ibland får varelsen fler armar, slingrande runt din bröstkorg och din mage. Fler långa fingrar med klor som klöser dig i ansiktet, flera munnar som andas i din nacke, skrattar åt dina misslyckanden, skriker med en röst som naglar över en griffeltavla och rundgång samtidigt, dränker alla andra ljud utom sina hånskratt och viskningar. Varelsen påminner dig konstant om alla människor som hatar dig, alla som slutat älska dig, talar om att de som fortfarande tycker om dig bara tycker synd om dig och tycker att du är rätt jobbig. Du vet att varelsen har rätt. Inom dig vet du att det är sant. Du vet att du är värdelös, vidrig, egoistisk och hemsk. Du vet att din existens är slöseri med syre. Du vet att du aldrig kommer bli fri, att det är meningslöst att försöka. Du vet att varelsen kommer finnas där så länge du lever.

Ibland är jag glömsk eller låter otrevlig eller så. Jag är ledsen för det. Väldigt mycket av min energi går åt till att bara orka fortsätta andas. Att hålla tillbaka tårar och hysteriska skrik. Jag förtjänar inte något daltande, många människor mår såhär, många människor har det värre. Alla har sina egna varelser. Jag är inte ute efter sympati. Tyck absolut inte synd om mig.

Men för er andra som är deprimerade, ni är inte ensamma. Vi är många, vi är svaga och isolerade och maktlösa men vi är i alla fall inte ensamma.

Till alla er som tycker att jag är jobbig; jag håller med. Men jag kämpar i alla fall.

English

How depression feels: imagine that someone who hates you stands pressed against your back all the time, hands around your throat, screaming with one mouth, taunting you with another and telling you how stupid and useless you were with a third. The creature's body is ice cold and the hands have claws on long, slimy fingers. All the time those hands around your throat. Constantly. Sometimes they start to squeeze. Sometimes they squeeze harder. Sometimes the creature grows more arms, winding around your chest and your belly. More long fingers with claws that scratch your face, more mouths to breathe in your neck, laugh at your failures, scream with a voice like nails across a blackboard and feedback at the same time, drowning out all other sounds except their jeers and whispers. The creature reminds you constantly about all the people who hate you, everyone who stopped loving you, telling you that the people who still like you really just feel sorry for you and think you're pretty annoying. You know that the creature is right. Within you, you know it's true. You know you're useless, obnoxious, selfish and horrible. You know that your very existence is a waste of oxygen. You know you will never be free, that it is futile to try. You know that the creature will be there as long as you live. 

Sometimes I'm forgetful or I sound rude. I'm sorry for that. Very much of my energy is spent trying to force myself to keep breathing. To hold back the tears and hysterical screams. I do not deserve any cosseting, many people feel like this, many people have it worse. Everyone has their own creatures. I am not looking for sympathy. You should certainly not feel sorry for me . 

But for those of you who are depressed, you are not alone. We are many, we are weak and isolated and powerless but we are at least not alone. 

To all of you who think I'm annoying; I agree. But I struggle anyway.

Realizations

Okay I give up, I'm a night owl and however much I want to be something else I always revert to getting stuff done at night. It's when I'm relaxed and creative and calm and logical. It's easiest to focus on painting and drawing and going through reference pictures and looking for inspiration. I do other stuff too, like cry and play puzzle games on my phone (a difficult combo since the tears make it harder to see the screen) but that I can do any time of day.

One of the reasons is that I don't have a good reason to go to bed. I wait until I'm really tired so I can minimize the time spent lying awake and feeling like poop on a dead hamster. I have no reason to get out of the house and no reason (or will) to get out of bed. Sometimes I wake up feeling rested and just force myself to keep sleeping because reality is just too horrible. (By "sometimes" I mean most days.) 

Every day I stay in bed longer and go I bed later. I force myself to eat. I think about death and wonder what it feels like. I drink coffee. 

Being less medicated, apart from making me shake and feel nauseated and cry uncontrollably, makes my brain function differently. And by that I mean that I feel smart. I can use my intelligence. So can my depression. I hate it. I get WAY more creative and I have more energy to do creative stuff. 

I like this externalising of my depression. I don't want to view it as part of me, of my personality. I want it to be a separate thing. It makes it much easier to specify - if not to anyone else then to myself - what is ME and what is just my demon. The black, sticky, cold demon stuck to my back. Like the bug in that ep of doctor who. With Donna. Except not a bug, a huge, heavy, sticky, rotting creature that wraps it's long, thin arms around my throat and hangs there, strangling me. The creature is whispering to me. Whispering that I'm as useful as a dead hamster. 

Angsty angst

Today my heart is hurting. I long to be loved with passion, loved above all others.

But I am too broken. Too broken to be loved for real, too broken to love, to give good love. 

I am too worthless in my own eyes. I am too disgusting and ugly and stupid. 

I know I'm wrong but that doesn't mean I don't believe it. 

I'm smart and broken, I make people uncomfortable with my weakness and strength, my stupidity and my intelligence. I always think that people will understand things that I understand. But they don't. Expect the smartest ones of course. And they understand me too well. I never realized before that I might actually be really smart, and that that is one of my problems. 

Yesterday I realized that I'm not supposed to know when people are lying. Like white lies. Everyday lies. "I'm tired" instead of "I'm so sad". I always answer the meaning instead of the actual words and that makes people annoyed and I'm too stupid to even realize it. I'm too stupid to realize that I'm smart. It's stupid. 

I started figuring it out the last year or so and by now people I truly trust have told me so many times that I actually started believing it. But of course it's not something you should talk about. 

It's stupid. I'm smart and beautiful and I don't believe in it. And I can't talk about it. Because you don't say stuff like that. 

The smartest people I know respect me. That should really be enough. 

I'm only going to post about my sleeping habits forever

Seriously, it's five in the morning. I was drawing. And suddenly it was five in the morning. I was drawing and listening to an audiobook and music. Focusing on three different things at once is perfect for me. But I don't really notice the passage of time.

In other news; I'm actually seeing a psychologist next week! Amaze! After three years of being super fucking depressed! Yay! I asked my doctor if I could try to not be medicated maybe but she says no and I'm worried that they'll start screwing with the therapy if I'm not following their orders. I've been medicated for three years and I don't know if it "helps" at all. I'm alive but also pretty dysfunctional. Maybe it would be worse without meds. Maybe not. I'll never know (if they get their way). 

I'm worried that I'll be smarter than the psychologist. They don't like that. Neither do I. 

I really should sleep now.  

Small victories

I went to bed before three. I did an important thing. I beat my high score at a meaningless game on my phone. I finished "Enders game" on audio book and started on "Enders shadow". I really like them. I started on a realistic painting based on a selfie I took this morning. I focused too much on detail and now it looks wonky but I can probably fix it tomorrow.

Goodnight. 

Every damn night it's the same

I think "soon I'll go to bed" and then I paint and then it's god damn four in the morning.

At least I've been in a pretty good mood today. And I survived the first day of my new, even lower dose of meds with only ... Well, a lot of abstinence jitters and forgetfulness and stuff. But you know. No suicide today!

Another day closer to dying of old age. ASAP.

Hey wow

I woke up early actually. I got the dishes done before the others woke up and we ate a huge magnificent brunch together.

My throat hurts more today and I'm so fucking angsty. I'm so sad and tired and my brain feels like it's just not working properly. The painting hysteria is fading a little as my paintings are getting more crappy. I don't know. Maybe I'm imagining it. 

I feel angry and lonely and friendless. Unloved. Unworthy of love. 

I'm in bed, listening to Leonard Cohen-covers, feeling both mentally crappy and like I have a cold coming on-crappy. But at this exact moment - not like I want to die. Don't know why. A bit strange. 

I'm going to stay here for a little bit more and then do brunch dishes and then go back to bed. Hopefully for the rest of the day. 

Tonight I'm goin to bed early

I think every night. And then, when I think "okay enough painting and audio book listening for one evening" and look at the time it's fucking three in the fucking morning again! And when I go to get ready for bed I realize that I forgot the last of the dishes I said I'd do and I accidentally make a lot of noise and one of the people I live with is really easily woken up and I know they'll be disappointed in the morning because there's still dishes and I feel like absolute crap. I don't want to start doing dishes at three in the morning even if it is Saturday. I brush my teeth and go to bed feeling like the failure that I am.

And I still feel bad about a character in a book that died and I feel like I'm trying to make up for a lifetime of painting with acrylics in just a few days with drying oil paintings on every surface I can find. And I'm painting on everything, peices of cardboard, old paper bags, card stock, everything with a surface. And it's bad. Most of my paintings are crap. I know it's a step towards getting less crappy but it's frustrating to see amazing artists make better things than I can ever hope to make and never get any recognition, and to see people who can't paint for shit get rich. I know it's just my opinion but yeah. I guess most artists have opinions on art. Whatever. My infantile crap is going up on the art blog along with the doll that I'm actually really happy with. 

Anyways my throat hurts why does it do that I wish it would stop. I wish I was not stupid from withdrawal. I wish my sleep schedule would stop being fucked up. I wish I was... Happy?

Correction

Okay I take it back. I am more suicidal now. Life is utterly meaningless.

The zone

My first two oil paintings took several days to complete. I started them (alternating between them to let paint dry a little between layers) on Sunday and finished them both last night. The third one I started today and finished today. The fourth one was a quickie to use up the paints left on the palette. Even though it was technically larger than all the previous ones. I'm in a frenzy. I can't not paint. Sometimes I need a short brake to not stare myself completely blind at the piece I'm working on so I knit a few rows but pretty soon I'm back to painting. Discovering oil felt like coming home, like finding the missing piece of myself, like the most fun thing I've ever done. I suddenly understand something that I can't explain. It sounds stupid I know but it's almost four in the morning and after finishing the third and fourth oil paintings I had to knit for like 40 minutes just to wind down.

I'm listening to audio books by Christopher Moore while painting and I love them. I finished welcome to night vale and the style and feeling remind me of Moore and John dies at the end in a completely delicious combination. I wonder if jdate has been recorded as an audio book. I have the actual book but there we have my 'concentration problem'; I need more than one thing to focus on or I start thinking about something else and forget what I'm doing. 

Now I really have to sleep. Can't mess up my sleep cycle again. (Or, it always ends up with me falling asleep between three and four when I don't really make an effort to keep it "normal"...)

Tomorrow I will eat the traditional bun with whipped cream and milk. It's totally weird. I'll explain tomorrow. 

Day two

So yesterday was the first with a lowered dose of cymbalta, the depression meds I've been on for a couple of years. I think I've taken five or six different kinds in different doses and combinations. The lowered dose has already made me feel kinda queezy. Cymbalta is - according to my personal experience as well as to what others have told me - the worst to quit. Nausea, strange dizziness and headache is ordinary.

The new kind that I'm supposed to be switching to is called voxra and a friend of mine says that it's one of the best meds she's personally taken but I really don't want to be medicated anymore. After three years of being medicated and extremely depressed it's starting to feel a wee bit pointless. (So does everything else. But you know.)

My life might actually be some kind of experiment?

So my beloved readers; some depression news. I have seen a new doctor. She was quite young I think, it was hard to tell. Her face looked pretty. On her desk was a picture of her, a man and like five children. Anyway. She was, like most doctors I've met the last few years, quite rude and superior. I think it's easy to be superior when you honestly think that you are. Is that something they teach you at med school? That you are literally better than every other person in the world? Or is it just that kind of person that decides "I should be a doctor"? Or is it specific for those who work with us head cases? Most eye doctors and general physicians and people who work in the ER and stuff have seemed less inclined to treat their patients like crap.

Anyway. I told her about my sadness and frustration and feeling of meaninglessness and powerlessness. She didn't seem to like my attitude, questioning wether I actually wanted her help or not. I told her about my past and (some of) the difficult things that had happened in my childhood, youth, last few years. She asked me why I was bullied in school. She asked me why I got locked in a small room by my teacher. I felt exasperated. I told her I wanted to quit my meds. She told me she agreed and that I should switch to a different kind. The switch would make me more depressed and my suicidal impulses would be more difficult to ignore. She told me to go back to the psyche ward if I felt more suicidal. I set my suicide-o-meter to alert me if I got too suicidal. (No. No I didn't. There is no such thing. As a chronically depressed person it's difficult AS FUCK to tell when a feeling is right or wrong, true or imagined, real or just a product of the depression. Too suicidal? What?) I explained to her that I couldn't afford to commit myself again. That the last time, more than a year ago, resulted in bills I still haven't been able to pay and a "marking in the register" that means that I won't be able to rent a car or buy a house or shop on credit or get a loan or anything for several years. She said that didn't matter. I almost laughed. Almost. Death would at least solve my economical situation. 

I told her that I wanted therapy, not just new drugs all the time. "Oh, has no one explained?" She asked superiorly. "The wait for cognitive behavioral therapy is several months long." "Oh," I answered, "but I don't want cbt. I want ordinary counseling. I want to talk to someone." 

She looked at me. Arms crossed. Face empty of emotion. "No." She said. She explained that I needed cbt and new meds. Not talking. Cbt and meds. 

I told her several good reasons why I needed not cbt. I don't want it, I don't feel that behavior is the reason for my depression but the other way around and I don't think changing my behavior will effect my depression, several doctors (nice ones and superior ones) have recommended counseling and not cbt for me, et cetera. 

"No. Cbt will help. Cbt and new meds. Your depression stems from your behavior."

I felt stunned. Why force me to wait for months for a form of therapy that I don't even want? While at the same time making me more suicidal? (I kind if feel that suicidal is something that you either are or aren't. Like pregnant. Either you manage to stay alive and then you deserve applause or you don't and then you deserve sympathy.) I told her I personally would prefer counceling if that was at all possible. "I'll raise the question at the next staff meeting" she said, which I've heard so many times I know by now that it means yeah whatever kid you're not a doctor and I am. 

She gave me the number for a suicide prevention thing or whatever. I left feeling like shit. Why where you bullied? Well gee wiz missus doctor mam, I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE. I still wonder. Why do I inspire hatred in people? Why did my teacher lock me up? Why do "friends" still turn around and stab me in the back? What's wrong with me? I don't know. All my life I've been trying to conform, change, fit in, not be awkward and scared, be nice and pleasant but also cool and confident. I'm great at small talk. I think. But still people start hating me. All my life. Hate. 

So yeah doctor. Cause I suck maybe? Cause I'm just not likable? Cause I'm some kind of freak?

Today I started taking a lower dose of my meds and in two weeks I'll have quit them completely. After that I'm supposed to start taking that other kind. I don't want to. I probably won't. If she calls me before then telling me I get to go to counceling, then maybe I will. Otherwise I'll give up on a system that has abused me for three years and start trying... Homeopathy or some shit. Needles maybe? What's that called? The Chinese thing? Or maybe like telephone healing or vitamins or working out or whatever. 

Probably just painting and painting and painting. Like now. But without welfare and meds. (You can't get welfare in Sweden unless you look for work or have a doctor saying you're not fit for work, and if I don't take the drugs that will make me want to kill myself even more they'll just say that I'm not trying to get better and thus I'm obviously not depressed enough or something like that. And I won't try to find a job that I know I can't do. I can't get up in the mornings, I can't see any meaning with life or being awake or eating food or breathing so I know I won't be able to go to work without constant panic attacks. I get panic attacks from trying to go down to the shops for heavens sake. I'm pretty sure I know my depression by now. So yeah, my future holds zero income, again, and with that comes total freedom from having a place to live and I'll be homeless, again. I guess just talking to that doctor for 40 minutes made me more fucking suicidal, yay! 

Seriously. I'm in a catch 22 and I can't see how I'll survive. 

guesting my own blog!

So I have a pod now! And I wrote a guest post on it.

Death is your gift

It's not that I want to die. I just wish I wasn't alive. A little bit. Just not be a part of this. This life, this horrible world.

I'll be dead one day. I'm looking forward to that day and hoping its final. 

Broken forever

It's Sunday. Fittingly the sun is shining. The sky is blue. It's a crispy, bright, beautiful winter day in southern Sweden. 

I slept for 12 hours. I woke up past noon and I still haven't really made it out of bed. I made coffee, took my meds, ate some cereal. But I think I should probably do something. Get dressed maybe. Get out. Take a walk. I don't know. I just don't have the energy. Motivation. 

I feel like a broken person. I am a broken person. I can't do what people are supposed to do. I feel like a ragdoll in a world of robots. They all function. They all get out of bed. They all have lives. 

I try to move but my body won't respond. I play stupid, simple games on my phone and listen to music. Sometimes I sit up for a while but not for long. Sitting up is difficult and heavy. I crawl back in under my covers and read a cracked article or something. 

I feel utterly insignificant.