Empty head
Some days I get up and I just feel empty. Purposeless, useless, tired, aimless. I don’t know what to do with myself. This is one of the many ways that depression can affect a person.
I woke up this morning to my 3 year old (Joella – aka Jo, Joey, JoJo, pain in the butt…) having a tantrum because her shows were not being turned on. This was not the fault of the people trying to appease her, but rather she got up a bit earlier than they begin. (Thanks, Nickelodeon, for waiting until 8am to start Nick Jr shows.) So Joey proceeded to scream and whine just as my husband began preparing to leave for work.
Not my favorite way to wake up.
Still, I didn’t feel all that bad, necessarily. It was just annoying.
I laid there a bit longer and contemplated getting out of bed, eventually deciding to skip the shower and just throw on some clothes and go make coffee, cleverly slipping downstairs just moments before 8am and serving Joey her cereal.
Most days, I go to the kitchen, get some breakfast and coffee, eat, take my coffee up to the office and sit at my computer to drink it while I surf the web and make my plan for the day.
Then there’s days like today. I ate my breakfast, I got my coffee, I sat down at my computer… the internet seems to have nothing to offer me today. I don’t have anything to say on twitter. I don’t know what I want to do when the coffee runs out or even while I drink it for that matter.. I feel empty.
I’m going to try to describe to you what dissociation feels like. (Dissociation: is a partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s conscious or psychological functioning.) Many people liken it to a feeling of being ‘out of body’ or beside yourself – watching yourself from the outside. I don’t feel it like that. For me it’s more like a feeling of not existing. I usually explain it more as being a ‘lights are on, but nobody’s home’ kind of feeling. I don’t really feel far away, but rather as if I’m not there at all. I’m not anywhere. I don’t exist.
It is a very odd feeling.. even more so when you are aware of it.
I have two pieces of art that I am currently working on.
They’re sitting here in the office, waiting to be finished. Normally, I would putz around online, and then get to work on some writing, editing, or art work. But today, I’m not feeling it. I look at those works in progress and I don’t know what to do with them. Much like the portion of the painting where my daughter will be, I feel like I’m simply a missing part of the picture of my life. I’m just not there.
I know this feeling won’t last. It is not permanent. I know that at some point today, I will reconnect with some part of myself and we will get up and move on from the stagnant state. But in the meantime, I will sit in this foggy abyss and feel as if time is standing still despite the hours passing by, and wonder what to fill that empty part of the picture with.
