Dark Desire

I wrote this on Monday but it shall be my post for Tuesday.... Not surprisingly I have had a lot of mixed feelings about actually posting it but writing it was pretty cathartic. The sensation of relief involved in all this is strong.....

I am currently undertaking The Artist's Way and one very simple but difficult aspect of this is the morning pages. This is just to write three pages of stream of consciousness stuff each morning. Any time of day or amount of writing is good but first thing is best...

Last week I suddenly found I didn't want to do them any more. They had been positive and good until this point. I found myself waking up as normal, way before my alarm, looking at the time and turning over to go back to sleep rather than get up and do my pages. I avoided them every which way I could.

Half way through last week I found a dark mood descending and it has stayed with me, pretty constantly since. A few morning pages and then more avoidance. The ones I did were whiny and whingy and not so nice. In an effort to keep going, tonight I did some and I don't like what came out. In fact I find it very, very upsetting. I am on week three and this includes shame and this definitely fits this category.

I am a very logical person. Analytical and incisive, I find my emotions the hardest thing to understand. Most of the time, I don't even get to feel my feelings, so good is my logical mind. Sometimes this causes problems. Sometimes I find myself not sleeping and I have to think, oh something is going on, what is it? what am I feeling? I can be very out of touch with my emotions.

I didn't fit as a child and kind of separated myself off a bit. I later suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a rape and have had repeated and severe bouts of glandular fever. I am no stranger to depression, that mild miasmic all pervasive sort that doesn't respond to drugs (thankfully and no doctor would bother suggesting I tried them again, such was thei r impact). When it comes down to it, my head handles it, sort of.

So tonight I was surprised and upset by what appeared on my pages. I have always been proud that, although things had gotten pretty bad for me in the past, i had never, ever thought about killing myself. I have always considered myself to be the sort of person that if I did think about it and decide to do it, I would and I would succeed.

So imagine how I felt to discover that I was wrong. I had wanted to die, desperately many times in my life. I think there might even be some small part of me that still does, that just doesn't understand why I am here, that feels like a useless waste of space. My mind discounted suicide before even realising that emotionally it was what I wanted. Talk about shame.

It is probably twenty years since I first began feeling like this and over ten years ago that it reached it's height. I think by shamefully refusing to notice this feeling, I have kept it, rather than letting it go. By not seeing it, it has always been there, even when I have dealt with all the root causes (maybe, who knows with the way my head works), I kept the feeling.

Now it has popped out, so unexpectedly, does that mean it gets to leave? I really, really don't like this one, is it good for me? I have no idea, only time will tell....

It is the ghost of an old feeling that has been there causing pain because I couldn't focus on it, to work out what it was. Don't be reading this and fretting because the feeling belonged to a very young and naive girl who spent too much time being ill and then found out the world didn't work how she thought and that it could be a very nasty scary place. It doesn't belong to an intelligent woman who enjoys a strong faith, many creative outlets and a wonderfully varied life in a beautiful part of the world with a wonderful man.