Endless Days

There is something terrible about the prospect of endless days, they drift on forever like being becalmed on an ocean. It is no wonder that our oceans include becalming weather known as the doledrums. We are used to living lives where there are always things to be aiming for and things to do. We structure our lives around them, although in truth we structure them around our work. It's the fabric of our lives, the reason for getting up and getting out and doing. Without it what is there?

Friday I woke up and made some breakfast and thought about the things I needed to do. I checked the job sites and found the usual nothing awaiting. I considered a list of things, and thought, not one of them is urgent in the slightest. I I felt the emptiness of the day, I felt nothing. I went back to bed and put the radio on, played some games on the computer, and that was the day done. I spent it in bed trying to wait for the hours to pass.

Depression is like quicksand, it slowly envelops and suffocates you. Yet it has an almost seductive quality about it that lures you into its arms. There is a wonderful description in Shakespere's Hamelt of the drowing of Ophelia and they describe her sinking into the water, "her clothes heavy with drink". It is a beautiful description and one I still cherish. I feel very much alone in all this. There is a silence to depression which only makes those images of quicksand and waters all the more sensible. Perhaps I would be experiencing things differently if there were people here every day, but there are no people and the solitude grows heavy when the spirit dips.

I know I have wonderful friends who have leant me a lot of support, but it is hard to drag yourself out of this kind of inert state of mind. It is a physical thing too, limbs heavy like wading in deep water, there is slow progress and sometimes it seems better just to stop and surrender to the cold numbing feeling all around you.

I've got a home, a computer to write this on, I have some money - at least at the moment - so I have food in my cupboards, I have a place I can go when I can no longer stay living here. Sometimes it seems this is all just self pitying indulgence of someone who really should pull himself together and get on with things. I am trying to do this and I know that I will succeed in this endeavour. However there are times, a lot of times, when it is almost like the stopping of time, a life in stasis, over. It is these overwhelming times that are the most difficult to endure.

Sometimes I look and think there are probably a thousand decisions which could have changed things for the better so I wouldn't be here. The fact is I am and there's not a damn thing I can do about that. The things I wish didn't happen in my life did happen and there isn't anything I can do about what happend in the past. If Marx is right, perhaps I'm doomed to make the same mistakes, but the difference is in the fact that, once they are done, you do know how to deal with them. It won't make the coping mechanism perfect - if it did then I wouldn't need to write any of this - but it does at least give me a sense that there is a light at the end of the tunnel even when I can't see it in the darkest hour. Somehow I know it is out there.