Mental Darkness

Can it consume you?

Photo by Marcin Sajur on Unsplash

I have toiled and laboured through each day for a good few months now. It is far more than blood, sweat, and tears, and there seems to be no end to the prolonged periods of personal darkness. I can understand why, in these moments, death may be a welcome guest for so many.

Being separated from family and friends is often painful, and isolation is a real issue, not just for me but for many. It gets into your head and pierces your heart. A weight is put on your shoulders, and it is literally ‘back-breaking’. The spiral of physical and mental pain, the feeling of loneliness, despair and self-loathing seems to get ever deeper. You may feel like you are having a better day, but something can trigger despondency quicker than any positive thought has ever affected you.

As a man, I feel lost, unable to provide for my family, unable to be a good person. It is hard to reach out to others, and when you do, to believe in what they tell you about yourself. It is easier to believe the negative than the positive, that things will be OK, that things will work out in the end.

It is especially hard when others still rely on you to be positive, to lift them, to support them. Imagine being in quicksand and struggling to keep from falling under it. Now imagine being in it up to your neck, and there are others there with you who are still looking at you, relying on you to keep them from going under.

We all face this at one time or another in our lives. I will venture to say it won’t be just on one occasion, either. Prolonged periods, even with medical assistance, can be catastrophic for the individual and those around them. Yet, we still shun this in society, as it happens to the few and not the many, as if it were a disease for the weak-minded rather than for everyone.

How do you personally feel, react to someone who openly tells you they are struggling mentally, that they are having a hard time, and find it difficult to do the simplest of tasks?

We have to be mindful of this every day, in every situation. It should not paralyse us but make us more complete as human beings, if we are open to really listening to someone and not shy away from difficult conversations.

How are you feeling? How are you doing?

These can’t be empty words, inviting one-word answers, but a door fully open to listening with intent to the person we meet. We should be open and able to accept when someone tells us they are struggling, feeling isolated, anxious, or depressed.

These are not alien feelings or states of mind. Rather, they are totally normal and human, something accepted and understood. If you want to be ‘fully human’, I venture to say that you need to be open to and understand these feelings and make them ‘normal’ in our society.

What triggers these feelings in a person, what makes them feel depressed, burdened, or a burden to others, anxious, unable to cope? There are many reasons, events, and moments that cause it. Sometimes it is not right there and then, but the mind stores them up and can bring them ‘into play’ at some point in the future.

I haven’t slept well for a number of months. I wake during the night, and my mind is racing. I feel like I am a horrible person, that no one wants to know me, that everyone is looking at me, judging me, avoiding me. I will admit I have made mistakes in my life, and I know I focus on them rather than on the positive contributions I make. They play on my mind as if they totally define who I am, and as if my whole life ahead should be focused on those mistakes or guided by them.

I know life is too short to do that, but it is a cycle that is difficult to break. I would not say it is a comfortable place, but it seems ‘easier’ to go back there than it is to move on and focus on the positives. I have no idea why that is. Maybe I am just a fraud, someone trying to be something that I am not, somebody I am not. I know I want to be liked, to be appreciated, recognised. Those things mean something to me, and I guess I can point to times when that hasn’t happened, when I have put everything into something and was passed over, not recognised, not thanked.

Those are more work things than anything else. They put me in a dark hole, a rut, a space where there seems to be no light. Why are people not speaking to me, ignoring me? Why am I overthinking everything and putting myself in this place?

You see, from my experience, you ‘find’ yourself in dark places; you don’t choose to enter them. Somehow you turn round, and you are there, and the door has shut behind you, and there is no way to see it, and often no handle on the inside to open it and get out.

The spiral of mental self-destruction is so easy from the inside, a routine. I push myself to the edge to affirm the inner self-loathing.

Will the darkness ever end?