Musings of a Melancholic

 

Some days you wake up and you just know that today is a full on battle against your natural self. I suspect I'm melancholic by nature, though not necessarily pessimistic, and very much given to feelings of thoughtful sadness or sorrowful thoughtfulness. Something like that. Added to the mix is the deep physical exhaustion of the immunosuppressed and you tend to feel the weight of the world on your shoulders when there really isn't any need to worry. Add in a wonky gut which is a second brain, and the challenge is to not get depressed. This is exhausting.

What to do except to recognise this as part of who you are, to love yourself as is, to tell yourself that you must rise above it because you have people in your life relying on you turning up at your best and being there for them when all you want to do is be left alone, curl up and cry, or just swim in a pool of your own deep thoughts, speaking to no one, and emerging from time to time to ask why it's so quiet and if solitude is necessarily lonely. But none of these are the best of activities to indulge in for long. And so I ration my giving in to my truest self, and am sad, weepy, and pensive for short moments, willing myself to smile, to be present, to be there for others so that they are not drawn down by my melancholy. This, too, is exhausting.

Some day it will just be me, sifting through my feelings, one by one, watching myself react to thoughts as they flutter across my mind playing on a screen like a B grade movie on a loop, and I'm hoping I'll like myself then, when I can give in to being me on a full time regular basis! Aiyoh, that sounds potentially exhausting!

Musings of a melancholic... there's a title for a sad book! Just so glad not to be surrounded by any perennial optimist types who perpetually see the glass as half full despite their gulping away even as it's being filled. Such anathema to my soul! I think I look at the glass as half empty and ask where it's all evaporated away to, and why does it have to be a glass, in the first place, and what was ever really in it?

Oh look, a butterfly. A happy distraction on a cool morning waiting for the sun to warm everything up in its gaze, and hoping my sorrow will thaw too.

Thanks for reading,

Pav