A Muse's Musings

A raw look at depression.

The thing about depression and past suicidal tendencies is that once you get past those tendencies (if you’re lucky enough to get past them), the pain still exists-you still feel your insides ripped apart and a continental divide in your soul but your yearning to ‘escape it all’ is-as you now know-ridiculous. And yet the heart and soul-wrenching pain remains. So you’re stuck feeling hopeless, alone, hurt and lost and you have no way of dealing with it. You still create physical pain to remind yourself you can feel and thus you’re still alive, but you can’t leave the world and die because you know that’s not only cowardly but no real answer to anything. You’re left in this horrible limbo of I-hurt-but-I-don’t-know-how-to-get-through-it. When you don’t want to take pharmaceuticals to ‘fix’ the problem it only makes it more difficult to find ways to cope. A person who suffers from true lifelong depression always battles this angry fight of ‘why am I so sad? I have no real reason to be, yet my heart hurts SO much.’ You feel guilty because you know others are so much more ‘worse off’, so to speak, than you, and the guilt of feeling like a selfish coward makes you even more depressed. The cycle traps you and you seek any way out other than suicide that you can. You turn to alcohol, drugs, self-mutilation, isolation….anything to dull or quell or hide the pain you feel yet can’t explain and don’t want to accept. And you battle it your entire life because you never know how to explain to others the pain you feel because you have no tangible ‘reason’ to feel that way-true clinical depression hits you at inopportune times and when you’d never expect it to resurface and you’re left feeling alone because you feel like you should have a ‘reason’ to be so sad. But you don’t. You just feel so, so, sad. It is loneliness at its worst-you can’t relate to those who are lonely because of reason a, b or c-you’re just lonely and sad and hopeless for no explainable reason. You don’t know why. And you feel like even more of a coward by not having a solid excuse for being so sad and hopeless. As though pain should be able to be labeled in order to be significant.

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
-Charles Bukowski

Bukowski Always Speaks Truth

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

the writing of some men

down here on heart attack and vine
our ghosts of memories 
past
serenade us gritty tales of all
we’ve lost
all we gained before
we lost it
our laureates of the
downtrodden
thewhiskey and wine soaked souls 
tell us what matters most-
how to love and lose
how to fuck and bruise
how to bleed 
for days
in awe at our own mortality
we’re still angel-headed hipsters
and we still know to write
is to be afraid
but to write anyway
these ghosts tell us
what matters most
and we walk that path
we tread that water
we drown, blissfully derailed
and are reborn
we live and die
in the bottom of a rocks glass
and tattoo our truths
on all the bullshit
that surrounds us

‘It puts hair on your chest!’
says the grimy local
to the middle-aged female tourist
who turns her nose up at the taste
of the New Orleans in her drink