How To Keep Yourself Alive When You Are Absolutely Miserable

Is your life shit right now? Congratulations, you aren’t alone. I don’t say that to make you feel better. The suffering of others doesn’t lessen your own. I’ve never looked at another person deep in the throws of the pain of existence and thought “Cool, a misery buddy!”. This is just to let you know that you have potential allies out there. It can seem like you are going through whatever you are going through now alone, but you aren’t. It’s hard to see them right now, but when you are ready you will find them.

And, in the meantime, things will continue to be shit. I’m sorry dears, there’s just no way around that. You will have to endure all the tricks our emotions and brains play on us when we’re in hard times. That you no one will love you. That your existence is meaningless. That you will fail and be a failure forever. Those thoughts will loaf around your brain like an uninvited guest who eats all your food and refuses to clean up after themselves. You’ll have to find your reason bat in some forgotten corner of yourself and menace them until they leave. It won’t be easy because you’ll need to mean your threats. Ultimately, you are fighting yourself and we all know what bullshitters we are.

You can only know what is going on in this precise moment and the future isn’t your concern right now. Tomorrow you will have to deal with tomorrow’s problems, but the you of the now can only deal with now. Your focus is what you need to do now. You need to get up, you need to go to your job, you need to eat, and you need to sleep. You need to do something you enjoy and maybe indulge a little bit. You need to survive, yes, but you also need to be alive.

This will be hard. At first, it’ll feel like you’re just pretending. You won’t want to do it or you’ll believe you can’t. You can. The only thing you need to do is start. You will not get the hang of this all at once. Start slowly. Set an alarm and get out of bed at the same time every day. Focus on doing one small thing a day and do it for a week then after a week or a week and a half add something else. Don’t get frustrated if you backslide and forget. That’s okay. Change is a process and endurance is a learned skill. Keep doing these small things and building.

One day things will change. It won’t automatically make you happy or fix everything in your life, but things will change. And that’s all you need. There will be a break, a pause, and something on the other side. The misery will subside and like the bleed valve on a radiator pressure will be released.

Until then my unknown lovelies, focus on getting out of bed, drinking enough water, and not looking too far ahead.

#depression #coping