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.