MAJOR TW (mental illnesses)

It feels oppressive lately. Blindly ticking things off a schedule, halfheartedly, just because I want to tick the entire thing, and hence check out the boxes, even if I had dome the things without much consent or interest.

These boxes that I drew for monthly tasks, daily tasks, twenty or so of them to include in my 24-hour day. So, my mental exhaustion was surprising and contradictory, considering I was the one who set those tasks out for myself. It is the 15th of December, 2019, a year is coming to an end, and I feel like so will everything else on Earth. Well, not because I’m a sociopath, but it is a strong gut feeling. I’m standing at the precipice of burnout, having bitten so much more than I can chew.

Every day I take on more tasks, not knowing when to say no when to stop. I think I can juggle everything, but it did not mean that it didn’t drive me nuts.

I have had zero creative outlets lately. And for so long, I sit down wanting to be productive and head out having done nothing. I beat myself up for my inadequacies. I should really be better than this. And yet, my mind and heart are so utterly exhausted. Lately, I have also developed body dysphoria. I cannot look at myself in the mirror without coughing out a little hate.

I used to think I was one of those people who had come to terms with being themselves and loving themselves. Well, I still think I am, but in love with a far away version of who I will be, who I have the potential to be, and not this version of me whose empty eyes gazed back every day. Maybe that is the cause of the hate, holding myself to the high standards I’ve set for myself and always, always coming up short. It makes me want to lash out at a lot of people, and at a lot of minor things. Well, lately, I have been.

But I do not feel any better. I fact, I feel like I’m drowning every day. I feel that I don’t belong. I’ve read that almost all of these symptoms are of anxiety. A friend even pointed out that it might be of depression.

Ask everyone else whom I interact with and they will surely say I’m one of the most outgoing people they have ever met. I’m good at masking; good at pretending. I do not lie, but I deceive, with slender word-plays and elaborate loopholes. Maybe all of this makes me a horrible person. That’s what I have been beating myself over every day, for very long.

Hindsight isn’t an amazing superpower to have. I don’t think I am stuck in place with regrets, though. Always jotting down plans, consequences, and places I will be in if I chose a particular course of action. And yet, you cannot keep devising plan after plan when every single thing you’ve thought would happen doesn’t, or even if it does happen, in some brutal mockery of it.

This does not mean I have stopped. I still make plans. Still, schedule, as if it is a ritual every day. But, I think I have reached a point of a standstill when I can see that not much that I do can change what’s to come.

I mean, why work when you’ll definitely not end up where you want to be? In contradiction, how could you know if you will have achieved it if you just stop trying?

Every thought contradicts itself, and the next, changes course entirely.

What am I working towards? Am I working hard enough?

That is all relative because however hard I try, there will always be someone more talented. An impostor in my own skin, these thoughts don’t leave me alone.

I have knowledge without depth. Ideas and personality formed from a culmination of all sorts of inputs I’ve got in my life. I fear I am not original. Accepting compliments for the same leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I feel like sometimes, I am not even a real person. Just a shell that manages to tick off the daily tasks.

So, I try to be the most genuine person anyone has ever met. Earlier comments about hiding parts of myself notwithstanding- I hide only the darkest parts of myself. The side that will make people pity me. The side that is so swathed in the darkness that the glimmer of hope that people speak of, there is zero hope of even encountering it.

I have a pile of books waiting beside me, yet, encountering them is the last thing I want to do. Well, I do not know what I want to do. Always stuck in a negative spiral of emotions and I fail to see the way out. Not always, no, but on days like these, when nothing seems to go right.

Maybe it is easier to say “this will pass” and look forward to a future than deliberating, as I have been doing for countless days, but ignoring and wishing these thoughts away doesn’t do much to silence them.

It's funny how well I seem to pick apart and arrange, categorize and analyze what’s going on inside, but in reality, I sit with a blank expression, scratching away conflicting thoughts trying to make some sense of them.

Small blessings, that the tear-stains on my pillow are near-invisible.