[Just as a reminder, this is a writing exercise. I may be putting a lot of myself into this post, but it's not a cry for help... unless you can cure the common cold. Again, this is just a warm-up exercise. Much love, Drew]
MY ROLL: 14 / DEPRESSED
Internal sickness is part of my life. External sickness makes it worse. You can fight an external sickness. So far, with antibiotics and sheer stubbornness, I've managed to beat external sickness every time.
That doesn't make it my friend.
Getting externally sick can pull shutters down. The inside blows. There's no party in here. When I get sick, it makes me want to destroy everything I've built. Who cares whether I'm a natural storyteller or not, whether I'm meant to use this opportunity, it's meant to use me, or we're meant to use each other? Being sick makes me question myself. The problem is, nothing is worse than it was when I was healthy. I'm sick all the time. You might say sickness is my norm, the background of my life, like a charcoal painting I'm dueling with my eraser. Long live the white space (let's call it what it is: negative space). Negative space is my breathing room. I erase parts of myself, breathe, and the white space turns sour. It becomes negative space, and I let myself fill it up, just to have something to do with it.
This whole sickness mess makes it easy to cut people out. I become a hero by saving other people. Shut them out, spare them, and (of course) earn a little reward. With them gone, I am isolated. I can write. I can feed this pride machine. If pride is good at anything, it is good at keeping me going. It keeps me writing. It makes me feel like I'm going places others are too scared to travel. Well, I might be going places mentally, but does that mean I should? I'm able to think up a story and follow it to completion, but does that mean it's a story worth telling? Is the story just for me?
This is the problem with being sick. I sneeze, I sniffle, I cough, and I feel the burning fever behind my eyeballs. It sucks, and I want to leave it on the page. I want to empty it out of myself, the way I empty myself into my stories. I want to feel like I have no more words and no more sickness. But the sickness remains. This sneezing has lasted a week. The coughing just started. How long will I be sick? How long have I really been sick? It's hard to tell, when the only noticeable change I see is the fact that I take Alka-Seltzer and Mucinex on top of the pills from the shrink. This sickness will pass. I will be back at it again, and I will be content... because when I'm physically well, my SSRI's aren't haywire, and I won't be writing shit like this.
Mister Cold, you are my devil's advocate. Mister Cough, you are the bringer of codeine, the mad chemist who ruins my equilibrium. Mister Bacteria, I command you to wait until I'm in an old folks home. Mister Writer, you little human sleeping in my brain, I need you to wake up, dust it off, and ignore the black goop at your feet. It's all good.
