Hell to the fucking no.
It's been interesting to watch unravel and uncoil itself. It's been weird over the past few months. Things have been so all over the place that I find it interesting that I'm not more beside myself. Or at least still curled up in a ball somewhere.
But I'm flourishing. I'm growing through my mental illnesses rather than be squashed by them. It's funny, over the past couple days, I've started falling apart again. I've started cracking from all the stress in my life (both personal and at work). I've started falling into the much too familiar hole that tries to suck my soul dry.
And that's okay. Shit happens. And it's hard, and dirty, and grimy, and just the worst. My brain wanders in the dark shadows and finds the monsters lurking. They all get together and run rampant through the light, tainting it, trying to destroy it. And it's a mess.
But I'm learning to not hide it. I let it out. When I'm feeling that way, I tell those who are close to me. I give them warning, I give them that head's up. I want them to know that I'm a little more unpredictable than normal. I've been called dangerous and volatile on normal days, if you needed a comparison.
And some of that has to do with having depression and anxiety. I've learned so much about myself from actually HAVING mental illnesses. I know what I'm capable of. I know what I can overcome. I know what I can survive. I might not do it gracefully all the time, but I stumble my way through.
We've all heard that stupid cliche, "You can't have a rainbow without rain."
That's dumb. I'm sorry. I read that as, you have to look for something beautiful in the misery. You have to find gold in the shit. And, fact: there's not always a rainbow when it rains. That's science right there.
But, let me twist that just a little bit.
Darkness abounds, but only in the light. Fact: You can't have shadows without some sort of light. You can't have dark spaces without a light sources casting them. Sure, you could argue the point that darkness is the absence of light. But this is my blog so go argue that point on yours. And even then, how do you know what darkness is if you've never seen light?
I'm sitting in a dark spot. I'm struggling to crawl out of the shadows. But I know, even if I can't always see it, that there's light somewhere out there. There's a source that's casting that shadow I'm stuck in. One of two things will happen.
One: I'll crawl my way back into the sunlight.
Two: The sun will move across the sky and move the shadow for me.
Either way, I know that the only reason that I'm in the dark at the moment is because of all the light I've found...