Better to have loved and lost: a snippet of my heart.

You’ve heard the old saying, it’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? Well I call bullshit! 

Have you ever been in love with someone so much it’s painful to look at them, at the same it’s so overwhelmingly superb you’re unable to look away? It’s the perfect combination of ecstasy and agony. 

I’d rather never have had that, than to feel the perpetual ache left behind –the pain without the pleasure. 

I remember the first time we met: those azure eyes; a smile that lit the room on fire. When he looked at me, I felt like a giddy schoolgirl. That wasn’t love though. 

I remember weeks of flirting. Weeks of electricity-filled glances, light brushes of hands, perfectly timed quips, and those eyes. I remember those eyes burning a hole through my resolve. That wasn’t love though. 

 

And I remember the first time we kissed. I don’t remember what we were talking about, or how we came close enough to one another for a kiss to transpire. But I remember his hand on the back on my neck, his fingers tenderly curling through my hair. I remember his lips, soft and yielding. His tongue, gentle and caressing. I remember the burning that filled me, my heart swelling to the point I thought it would burst from within me. I remember the detail of every sensation, because that was the moment I fell in love. 

So yes, most days I wish I had never met him, never loved him. If I never knew him, I would not have to live with the searing pain he left behind when he died. 

The Fruitful side of depression.

There is a fruitful side to depression.

Amid the fog of despair, the crippling numbness and soullessness, the dark vortex of depression feels constant, endless. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, because there is no tunnel, only a perpetual riptide dragging you ever further from shore. You clamber to stay afloat in an ocean of dejection. No longer can you see the land, the solid ground of happiness, ambition, future. The sharks are circling, licking their lips at the life you bleed into the water, and you are tempted to let them take you.

Before you give up, before you stop struggling to keep your face above the surface, and sink into the abyss, bleeding and broken and letting the sharks devour your forsaken carcass, look up. The lifeboat is there. You may not see it at first, but keep kicking, keep your head up until you do. It will come. Don’t seek it out, don’t waste the precious little energy you need to keep afloat searching for the lifeboat. Just stay afloat, stay put and keep your eyes open, it will come to you.

When at last the lifeboat arrives, it appears not as a lifeboat, but soon you recognise it. You feel the tug as it slowly drags you back to shore. Do not toil to hold on, or you risk expending the little energy you have left and letting go before you get to shore. Simply let it take you, keep hold with a gentle grip and let it take you. And enjoy the view as you are towed back to the coastline of a contented future.

This may all sound a little too metaphorical for your liking. And if you suffer from depression, believe me, I know you’re probably reading this and thinking, it’s all well and good to say this crap, but this doesn’t do a thing to help me! I ask you to reread the last sentence… “And enjoy the view as you are towed back to the coastline of a contented future.” 

I’ve been there, I’ve been out in that ocean, and I couldn’t see a way back. I couldn’t see how the numbness, the emptiness of my soul, could ever thaw. But it did.

For me the lifeboat was a combination of moving closer to the support network of family and old friends, a little bit of yoga, and the acceptance of a death I had spent years trying to overlook.

When you find your lifeboat –and you will– the thaw will be slow. It will take time to heal from the amount of bleeding your soul has done. The reason I want you to read the last sentence over and over, many times if you need to, is because that’s where you will find the profit behind your years of suffering. Enjoy the view. Enjoy the view of the world around you, and you will find new wonder in the simple things. Enjoy the view of the people around you, and you will see you are not alone in your struggle. But most of all, enjoy the view of yourself. The blood in the water is you, parts of you that have been exposed. After years of pain and anguish, you can see inside yourself. Examine these parts of yourself, analyze them, decide which parts you want to let go and which parts you want collect on your way back to shore, and put them back in place. And they will be even better than before. You will be better than before.

This is the fruitful side of depression.

You will come back to shore knowing yourself in a way someone who has not been there can never do. So hold on, your lifeboat is coming. Hold on, and you will come back to shore and you will love yourself. This is your reward

As long as you don’t forget to enjoy the view.

Journal: The ugly truth about single parenthood.

02/02/14

Do you ever wish you could just run away from your life? I do more and more these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love my children more than life. But I hate the fact that my whole life depends on what mood my son is in. I hate that I can’t have a date without my fourteen year old daughter throwing a complete mental because she doesn’t want me to date.

I just want to run away from it all –from the pain, from my family, from my so-called friends, from my children. The hardest thing in the world is raising children completely alone! I know a lot of people who think they are doing it alone, and think they understand being a single mum. But they have no idea. To do it alone, I mean truly alone, means having the sole responsibility of family income; having to make life-altering decisions without any help, advice, or input from any other person, and feeling the anxiety that if you make a huge mistake you have to clean up the mess alone; it means having no one to talk to at the end of the day, when you are feeling defeated, not even a friend; it means never having a break, no night out, no lunch with friends, no job options, no dates; it means being defined as one thing, one title… Mother. 

If anyone thinks being a single parent is a choice, they are dead wrong. No one would choose to spend every day in a struggle of guilt and desperation and loneliness.

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a mother. Sometimes it would be nice to have a break. So I want to run away, from my children, from my family, from my so-called friends, to a far away land where the possibility of an independent me lies. A me without restraint, a me without ties binding me, a me without judgements or preconceived notions of what I should be or do.

I want to be more than just the single mum with an autistic kid and physical limitations. I want to be a successful mother. I want to be a career woman. I want to be in love and be worthy of love. I want to be ME. I want to be Alana! And if I can’t do that, I don’t want to be.

But try as I might, I can’t be these things. So I want to run away.