An obligation

My friends say, "I'm proud of you! You're getting the help you need with medication and therapy", when I shared about my MDD, OCD and anxiety. 

But these little yellow and pink pills with the strawberry flavour, rips all my emotions from me.

I am now but a walking zombie, feeling nothing, dazed and lost, tired and drowsy with no tingles of anything other than the incoming feeling of a panic attack to send me heart racing like cardio at the gym.

I feel like my life is but an obligation to live.

I wish I had control over my vital functions like breathing and pausing thoughts, for I'd put a stop to them both at the count of 1...2...3...4; just like holding my breath in the box breathing technique my psychiatrist taught me. 

Hello darkness, my forever friend.

I love the darkness. It's comforting. It's safe. It's real. It's freeing. It's where my insecurities don't hide - there's nothing to hide them or shed light on. Truly liberating. It's my darkness at the end of an exhaustingly bright day.

Being there...A silent good-bye

I promise I'm going to be there for you in any/every possible way that I can.

But.

I can't be there for you the way you need me to.

I'm sorry.

But.

I love you.

Where do you go?

 ...and suddenly there was silence. My tinnitus has been quite the bother for over a ear, I mean 'year' now. The room goes blurry and wavy like I'm in some kind of trance. Such tranquility can only cause terror in me, and did, rightly so. I wasn't shook, but felt stirred - a truly 007 bond-like moment as he passed out slowly in his car - only here I was in my living room, floating, the tube light hurting my eyes as it blurred out and me losing my balance while desperately grabbing on (unsuccessfully) to the wall, the door, (anything please), whilst still deciphering what was going on. I was in this state for a few seconds but these episodes graduated to last for minutes over an entire week. A feeling of nausea lingering all day coupled with these episodes kept me irritated at almost everything and everyone. 

It's terrifying to be in a state of rest yet experience being in motion. A paradox or a cruel joke? Thanks to movies, misspellings have been tied to Dyslexia, but for a stickler for rules of language like me, it's nothing short of a nightmare to be unable to form a word with the right set of its spelling.

Sounds, lights, food, the slightest movements of the head, cell phone screen, everything added to my woe. Turns out it was vertigo.

Some people have height vertigo - when they look down from high cliffs or live in high-rise buildings. To me, it feels like I'm high on life - Stress, Dehydration and Sheer Dumb Luck.

P.S: If there's a typo in this article, you now know why! Spinning off! Bye.

Closure

 My stomach is churning. I feel an uneasy warmth crawling out of my skin, painful, yet it gives me the chills. Tears well up in my eyes -- I can't breathe -- I'm choking on my thoughts - all the bad ones.  What am I feeling? What is my body dragging me like this for? What is all my energy draining into? Oh, there it is - the hand that you see, you desperately want to cling on to - hoping it will save you from the imminent death (of your feelings) - reach out before it's too late - grab the hand.. oh, but wait... it's only a mirage...from your undying hope in humanity... unrealistic expectations that someone gives a damn about saving you from damnation, the very damnation that they imposed upon you - or was that your own doing too? Unconditional love to narcissistic people tears your soul apart, burns every sliver of hope from your system and you condemn yourself to a life of eternal (80+?) misery. As if the mental agony weren't enough, our bodies receive these bad, nasty vibes as food and feed on them until every nerve, muscle, joint, blood cell are burnt black and charred to the point of no recovery. In the end, all we look for is not solace in one another, but an opportunity for closure, the one eluding hand that will never grab yours back.

Misgivings of a pen

Ah the smooth flow of ink gliding over the paper with a lustre that could blind your stationery senses! The smell of varnish rolled out by a tiny little ball demanding your approval. Buying a pen is always satisfying - you know what you want, it's a quick buy and purse-onally speaking, very affordable.

We hoard our homes and office desks with pens of different colours, types, why, sometimes even rank (for those special occasion ones). Yet, it defeats inventory and logic that when you need one, it's never at your disposal. If you do spot one, hiding in some nook, it never fails to fail you - it just won't comply! No matter how much you scribble, it'll always leave you frustrated; I'd like to gently bring the adage - "A pen is mightier than a sword", at this point you might feel like destroying this metaphorical weapon itself.

And then there are days when writing would be absolutely satisfactory - you'd write pages and pages and just when you're about done, the feeling of dread freezes your tired fingers - you know it's happening, but it can't be happening, right? - the ink trails off and you wail in pain (mostly from all the finger numbing writing you did over the past hour or more) - "No, no, no". You beg and plead to the mighty pen, "Please don't give up on me, not now, please..."; Well, we've all been there, haven't we? We know how blotchy that ending is. There's no use crying over spilt ink.

Ink residue that smears your favourite/neatly drafted pages, soils your clothes (the best ones, always), nibs that tear through the page of your favourite notebook as you passionately scribble away; pens have their misgivings, like we ourselves do and sometimes one can't tell the difference.

In this age of technology where the closest thing to a pen is a stylus and paper is an application, the flow of the thought from the mind to the tip of the pen has lost its grace. From a time where the focus on was writing sensibly and staying focused on the task (writing) to avoid strikeouts, we've been taken over by autocorrects and typos, losing all that we've learnt, as basic as spelling a word correctly.

The author and the pen share a bond like no other. If we were to reflect on this, plenty conclusions may be drawn to human mood and behaviour, control and outburst, presentation and failure and a great deal of other things.

P.S: I did consider publishing a photo of this article in writing, but woefully, my pen gave up on me midway.

Bring Me To Life