Thursday 3 August 2017

One Tiny Action

One Tiny Action

Written by Casey Douglass




Yesterday was fairly decent. Well, the couple of rest-punctuated hours in the morning in which I finished a review and wrote another post for my blog. I won’t talk about the rest of the day as it went downhill from there in a whirl of overeating, despondency and sleep. As far as sleep, I slept like a bag of shit last night (do bags of shit sleep?). I feel like I’m pushing through thick water today, barely breathing, barely awake.

Then silly me, what did I do? I browsed Freelancer.com (a place where employers list jobs for freelancers) and saw job after job after job that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Actually, I would now I think about it, I hold grudges effortlessly. Once you rule-out the jobs that pay a dizzying few dollars for an hour’s work, the people advertising themselves rather than being an employer, and all the bollocky naughty jobs like being paid to write positive reviews (something I strongly feel should be punishable in a horrible way), there often isn’t a great deal left. A wave of tiredness crept up on me and I found myself looking for ways that I could find my own clients and pitch to them directly, avoiding sites like Freelancer altogether. If I found someone I wanted to pitch to. And decided on how I would put myself across. And if I finally come up with a tagline for my website that really tells what I do. And if I sort out my portfolio page to show only the pieces of work that I decide, rather than be exhaustive like it is now.

After all of that, I found a few suggestions for Facebook groups for writers. Many of them seemed self serving to the creator, “Join the group, buy my course” kind of thing, but one of the ones that wasn’t in that vein seemed promising. I clicked Join Group. That was my tiny action for the day. I won’t mention the group as it did kind of look only marginally better than the others, but if it turns out to be good, I’m always happy to spread the love by bigging up things I find useful. I’ve got to wait to be approved though, so time will tell. In a groggy haze I floated back to my bed and listened to what I’ve termed my “depression album”.

Bring Me The Horizon’s That’s The Spirit seems to be the one album (that isn’t dark ambient) that really hooks into my feelings of suffocation and worthlessness. They aren’t a metal band that I thought I would like but via Throne, I gradually grew into the other tracks too. I read awhile ago about how the lead singer Oli Sykes struggled with depression, so maybe that helped form some kind of connection too. So many of the tracks echo what I feel, I just get drawn to it (in a nice way) when I get low. I’ve linked Avalanche below, the lyrics “It's like an avalanche/ I feel myself go under/ 'Cause the weight of it's like hands around my neck/ I never stood a chance/ My heart is frozen over/ And I feel like I am treading on thin ice” really hit me in the feels.


That’s the thing with any kind of illness, sometimes the smallest of actions are the only thing you feel capable of doing. I know that after my music therapy I then went on to write this post, which is certainly a bigger thing than the tiny action that started this sequence of events, but at least it proves there can be wiggle room when everything seems stacked against you.