More by: Claire

Dear Diary,

 Life lately has seemed intensely difficult. Everything seems to be moving at a pace that seems both uncontrollable and frightening. Winter is stifling and makes even the smallest acts of leaving the house seem ultra important and memorable. Even our cats- usually not deterred by any type of weather- won’t even step foot out the door. As soon as the wind and snow hits their faces they head back to the couch, to curl up with a blanket and wait wait wait. My life has become filled with this all-consuming feeling of not wanting to be alone but not really truly enjoying the company of anyone. Feeling like my heart is racing a million miles an hour one minute and is absolutely suffocatingly depressed the next has become the norm again, and without medication I can expect to feel this way for quite some time to come. Even the smallest things… brushing my teeth, buying cat food, returning phone calls or e-mails, seem almost unmanageable. The only way I’ve been able to continue through all of this is to self-medicate to a degree of relaxation that keeps my moods somewhat stable and at least reduces some of the anxiety. Because that’s really the worst part. I’d take the depression over the anxiety and churning stomach any day. At least there’s something romantic in the depression. There is nothing romantic about mania and anxiety and feeling so angry and irritable at even your most treasured friends that the words you yell don’t even sound like your own. At least the depression feels familiar, and it lets me sleep at night without waking up with thoughts and worries I can’t control. The disconcerting thing is, when I have several days in a row where I feel pretty good and happy and like life is not so bad, I feel somewhat in control and begin to forget. I feel like I can handle the mood changes that are inevitably going to come back. Like I can do anything. Everything is suddenly in order, and I’m productive, insightful, social, funny, and able to handle stress. I get this overwhelming sense of peace that’s almost as unbearable as the opposite- the overwhelming sense of discontent that is the cornerstone of all this shit that I deal with. So why am I writing this down? Why am I writing to you- dear fucking diary- in these times of confusion? There’s actually only one simple explanation that will also be my concluding thoughts on this dreary month…

Religious SS Disorder broke up. Or rather broke up with me. It’s funny in a not humorous way because literally three days before I got the good old “it’s not you, it’s me” talk, I was explaining to someone that my band was literally the only thing I cared about. I was saying how great it was to have a group of people so attuned and into what we were doing, how rare it was, and how fucking lucky I am. Oh how wrong I was! So wrong that I thought it was a joke when I walked into practice and got the news. And losing this outlet, losing the security and passion has been one of the biggest blows I’ve gotten in awhile. And directly contributes to my “fuck everything” attitude. Because finding out that something you believed in so completely was really nothing more than an illusion is too much to handle when the snow is melting and I can’t seem to listen to anything but the talking heads.

Love,

CVG