Magnificent, Marvelous, Mad Madam Mim's Maniacal Menagerie (Comments Welcome)

[Madam Mim]

So...*taps fingers* This is the journal section... *looks around* I've gone through the first posts of some peoples' journals and it seems to be a combination of actual journaling, writing exercises, and alerts to let partners know when they've flaked. I'm getting mixed messages so tell me if I'm doing this wrong. Please.

*Anxiety intensifies*

No really, I have anxiety. Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder. It's trivialized a lot, which pisses me off because it fucking sucks when a perfectly mentally healthy person is like "oh yeah I totally know how you feel." No you fucking don't. You know what it's like to be anxious, not to have Capital-A-Anxiety sitting on your shoulder every second of the day, hovering over everything you write and say, whispering "should you really have said that?" and "why are you still talking? Nobody's listening."

Short story long: Please tell me if I'm doing a thing wrong, or being weird, or just otherwise not normal. I'm attempting to re-learn normal behaviors and relationships with the help of a therapist, so feedback from anyone is super appreciated because it turns out if you're socially isolated long enough and are anxious enough, learned social behaviors can be forgotten. I can often come off as aloof but I promise I'm just shy and like, super high-strung.

Anyway

This is likely to be a combination of journal and writing exercises, including the (very) occasional poetry. The two coincide more often than I thought. Given my recent state of mind and complete lack of interest in my modern lit class, the first two posts will be centered around mental health because this godawful mess *motions vaguely to head* has inspired me to write. Doesn't matter that I have a completed novel waiting for editing, which I absolutely hate doing but need to. This particularly descriptive writing seems to have been born out of a desperate need to communicate, so communicate I shall.

By the way, the little green thing next to this thread's title? No idea what it is. I think it's either a bug or a cactus, which is cute either way so that's why I picked it. Or maybe it's a cactus bug...

 

[Madam Mim]

I'm 25. I've been dealing with anxiety all my life, and with depression for the past six years. I've fancied myself a writer nearly my entire life. Looking back through my old high school notebooks makes me cringe almost violently because I fancied myself edgy in the worst ways; sad and angry and fascinated with the morbid, without willingness to commit to the goth, emo, punk, or any other sufficiently "dark" stereotype or even asthetic. I wrote as though I were the only one among my peers to feel this turmoil inside when in reality it was that seldom-experienced condition of being a teenager. My parents were still together at that point and I was the typical suburban teen desperate to make my own voice heard; I had never suffered true loss, never felt actual depression. The worst I'd experienced was the repeated leaving behind of everything I knew to move across the country (again), which in an age before the internet was fairly devastating to personal relationships. That's not to say that at the ripe old age of twenty-five I've experienced all of the suffering life has to offer, but a rocky transition into completely autonomous adulthood and then reintegration into civilian life has given me a bit of perspective and in high school I was, to be honest, silly and naive.

The only thing I got right about depression was that it's cold, but even that wasn't entirely correct. It isn't an avalanche burying you sixty feet deep in ice and snow. It's the slow cold that seeps into your skin on a day that wasn't that chilly when you stepped outside but now you're stuck walking into the wind and it feels as though you'll never be properly warm all the way through ever again. Depression isn't the way the pop-punk and goth bands I liked in high school made it out to be; at the very least, it's far less glamorous than their makeup makes it look.

You see, depression isn't black. It's nothing so wonderfully simple and dramatic as that. Depression isn't the festering corpse of happiness, stinking and bloated, wheeled around on a cart inextricably tied to your belt. It isn't a squirming hill of maggots, a death wish, a darkness blotting out the sun. What a relief that would be if it were, to know that there's nothing you can do, no way to fight, no light at the end of the tunnel. No, depression is a translucent blue-brown filter that doesn't block out all the life and joy around you. It's a thick mire through which you either trudge or sink. You may choose to drown or to struggle through the muck in the distant hopes that one day soon, maybe, hopefully, you'll find that grassy hillock in the bog to rest your aching legs and heaving chest before continuing your trudge.

Life isn't the bog.

You know this from your memories of the warm, sunny grass on the side of the swamp far behind, before your foot first got stuck in the mud. There's another meadow on the other side. This must be true, because you're alone in the brown, stinking quagmire but you weren't in the meadow. At least...you don't think you were alone. Were you? The swampy haze makes it hard to accurately remember the meadow, or even the occasional patch of grass; the thick fog creeps into memory and it taints everything it touches.

So you choose to trudge, even though your thighs burn and the muck sucked off your shoes long ago, for the shadow of a hope of a patch of grass.

It's exhausting, working so hard to move so slowly, and all you want to do is sleep, or to just stand and stare into space while you allow yourself to slowly sink into the murk. But by God there's a meadow somewhere on the other side and you're gonna find it! So on you go, and eventually your feet start to find something solid. You crawl out of the mire like some primordial slug and lay on the grass of the hillock that feels so much like a meadow you fool yourself into believing that it is. The haze clears for a while and no, you're not alone. But eventually that little island of sun in an overcast murk returns back to the morass. This leaves you to sink or trudge again, the grass lost to memory in the blue-brown fog, feeling somehow even more exhausted than before, in the maybe-perhaps not-so-vain hope of finding that meadow and never setting foot in the bog again.

The grand trick of it is that on the outside the bog doesn't look like a bog. On the outside it looks like laying in bed with the covers up to your chin until you're certain you've become one. It looks like a few days without a shower because after you fulfilled your obligations to society for the day, you just couldn't bring yourself to leave this committed relationship you're in with your bed and/or your couch; it's starting to get serious, and they need you. It looks like binging on prepackaged cookie dough and some pita chips with hummus because that's so much easier than actually making an effort to nourish this body that houses a brain that's betrayed you.

It looks like hoping your loved ones will understand and will help, even if you can't find the words or the courage to ask them for it. It looks like hoping if one of your loved ones finds themselves in the same directionless swamp you can offer a guiding light out, but being afraid that you won't be able to because you're just. so. tired. from feeling. so. much. Or nothing.

Some days, when going about your day as just another face in the crowd, you can feel the bog physically pulling at your feet and can't wait to get home so you can go bond with your bed and hope that sleep brings a grassier tomorrow. Some days you just stand with both feet in the muck, staring into space, slowly sinking; other days are a determined trudge, occasionally with someone else pulling at your hand. I think so long as we have more trudging days than sinking days, eventually we'll get to the grass on the other side of the bog.

 

[Madam Mim]

There's something about vinyl static over the deep tones of old blues which is so keenly able to invoke agonizing anxiety in those of us prone to such things. There's something deeply unsettling in the deep, steady thrum of the bass or sax at the pace of a heartbeat interrupted by the shrill of the clarinet or trumpet. Even more awful are the long, low bass notes joined by drums or brass instruments determinedly entrenched in the lower registers. It smacks of Death with a capital D, of that slow trudge to the inevitable at the pace of that bass, of that moment when our heartbeat joins those of all those who came before us. And the static muffles the brass sounds of those who came behind, dancing above without a care for the steady, relentless bass. It catches your breath in your chest and makes your heart race, as though it can outpace Death if it can run faster than the bass dirge. But that's the heart's folly. It's like trying to run from a particularly terrifying nightmare and getting tangled in the bedsheets. Not only is it useless, it simply confounds matters even more. And it's a shame that it should make us--me, for I'm not entirely certain I'm not alone in this--feel so.

The hipsters say that the pops, cracks, and fuzz make the music better, and to an extent for some sorts of music that's true. For me, for blues, it's awful. That isn't to in any way impune either vinyl or the great Satchmo (or any of the greats, for that matter). It's simply to say that they do their jobs too well.

I feel too much. The life and death of a struck animal dead on the side of the road--deer, raccoon, fox, cat, dog, possum, anything--I feel in the moment I notice them. The tense silence in a classroom of people who may have the answer but are too afraid to speak up in case it's wrong; the lonely waste of a daytime liquor store occupant; all the aches and pains and joys and sorrows that come from music and art...I feel it all. All the time. It's too much input for this delicate electrical sponge that pilots my body. So instead the signals get all twisted and bent and, regardless of source, comes in deformed and transformed into that bass dirge and I see Death everywhere. It hovers over my family and my pets, threatening to take them from me maybe not soon but still too soon. It haunts the public, where one slight mishandling of our multi-thousand-pound weapons or being in the wrong place at the wrong time can blink a life out in an instant. Perhaps worst of all is that it hangs on me like a robe where I can never quite forget its presence even in the happiest of moments, reminding me that soon--too soon for my comfort, anyway--all this will be gone and replaced with...what? And that's the terrifying part, that despite my belief in a higher power there might just cease to be consciousness and all of this is rendered meaningless, spitting into the face of the law of conservation of energy. I don't know, and I hate not knowing.

But I'm not eager to know the Universe's final secret. Plot twist: we're living inside whatever another universe calls a black hole, and it's turtles all the way down. It feels cowardly to not be ready or willing to know that secret, or not having by twenty-five made my peace with its inevitability despite it being the first real, true worry I can ever remember having in a life inundated, maybe even defined by them. By worries, I mean, not by secrets of the Universe. So then the question becomes: when will this New Orleans funeral march--this awful thrum that rattles around my brain like a fly trapped inside tapping against a window--turn into that lively celebration? And who was it put in the ground?