Feed Your Soul

This has been a challenging week. It has been a long time since I've been in such a dark place - four years to be exact. I fought my way out of that darkness, and many dark places prior, but each time it happens, it feels as though it will never get better. I will never be myself again. 

I don't know how to describe depression to someone who has never experienced it. There's a sense of heaviness - an almost physical pressure on my entire body. It weighs me down. It dulls my senses. Nothing tastes good. Nothing feels good. Colors fade and my world becomes monochromatic - mostly shades of grey. I feel disconnected from everyone and everything around me. I can be sitting across from someone, listening to them talk, yet I really don't feel like I'm there. I laugh when I'm supposed to, but inside I fight back tears. And those tears...there are so many of them. For everything. For nothing. For the fact that I want the pain to go away.

I've felt this brewing inside me since July. It started as a weird, fleeting thought. I passed it off as me being stressed. The sadness would creep in, but I was able to push it away. Stuff it down inside and go on with life. I shouldn't be surprised that it finally reared its ugly head last week. Nothing that strong can stay down forever. 

In this last week, I've had a chance to think about my life and how I've been handling things. It turns out that pushing aside those red flags and stuffing your emotions away is not the way to go - shocking, right? I realized that I spent a lot of time trying to be happy, and trying to make others believe I was happy. I was looking for outside validation to fill some of the emptiness I felt inside. But it doesn't work. Sure, for a short time it does, but it doesn't last very long...and then I'm left feeling emptier.

No one, not even my family, can do that. Sure, they can support me through this, but they can't fill the emptiness and insecurities for me. I have to do that myself.

I need to find my own way, heal my own emptiness, feed my own soul.

That is just what I intend to do.