On the virtue of plodding along toward inevitable doom

A friend checked in with me earlier. He asked me how I was doing, because he observed that Robin Williams' death appeared to be "giving you thoughts."

"I don't even know what that means," says I, entirely untruthfully because that's how I roll when someone is, you know, completely right.

"Yes, you do. You're hesitating when you talk. That means your brain is at the limits of your capacity to multitask, which means there must be 140 things going on because 139 is clearly your limit."

Here's the thoughts I've been having today:

How did recovered/recovering addicts feel when Philip Seymour Hoffman died? Did they feel sad to hear of his loss, and then start to feel uncomfortable without really knowing why, and then after about a day realize that discomfort was the result of that stupid addict part of their brain going, "What happens if /I/ slip off the wagon?"

Because those are the thoughts I've been having. Not about heroin, obviously--although, in amongst all my reading and thinking the last day and a half, it has become abundantly clear to me that I have all the hallmarks of someone who would have developed substance abuse problem, and I can say in all honesty that I have no idea how in the world I managed to dodge that rather large, common bullet. I imagine growing up in sheer terror of my mother's capricious wrath had a great deal to do with it. Although I did opine this afternoon that I couldn't discount the laziness factor, and thank gods there wasn't a Morphine Delivery Service or I'd have been screwed a long time ago.

Tangent. Oops.

I needed to keep moving. I was crawling out of my own skin. I went for a ride last night, which is usually how I deal with that feeling, and it only got worse. I felt unsafe in my car. Every person who came up behind me, every person who passed me going the other way, was a threat. A sky so big it was ready to collapse on me at any moment. The air conditioning was too cold, the air outside was too warm. I drove home, ran into the house, and locked the door behind me and there was still this palpable feeling of "lock it HARDER, are you insane?"

A lot of the observations folks who knew him are now making about Robin Williams are hitting far too close to heart than I anticipated. Which isn't to say that I'm comparing myself to the brilliance that we lost on Monday; it's only to say that reading others say things about him that your friends have said about you to your face is really jarring, once you let it in.

And I realized that, beneath the grief of losing a childhood idol, beneath the sadness that comes from the world being deprived of someone who was, in every sense of the words, a gentle genius...I was wondering how long until it happens to me. Is it going to happen to me? Is it inevitable? Will some switch go off in my brain after my children are grown, the switch that I hit when TheSon got to an age where he could remember me and I said, "Okay, now, NO. Now you would damage him. He would remember. He would know." That switch has been clicked for several years now. I've done well with it, all things considered. Can it be tripped? Will I have to do it purposely, or can it be brushed up against in the dark and I won't know it til the room floods with light and I go, "Oh, SHIT?"

This is what's hard to understand, I think, if you've not had severe depression of some nature*:

You do well for awhile. You climb out of it, you're grooving along. You have a good month, then two months, then three. Maybe five. Maybe a year.

Then you have a bad day. A bad week.

And your brain doesn't say, "Okay, this is a bad week, but you crawled out once, twice, ten times--you can do it again!"

Your brain says, "Look at you, you unbelievable fucking failure. You can't even do this right. You got all the way out, and now LOOK what you let happen to you. All that work you did, shot to hell because you're worthless at everything you've ever tired. You break everything you touch."

And you're down there, and you go, "This is it. It's never going to end. I'm never getting back out of this pit. This is where I live now."

Once you DO climb out of the pit again, you can look back and go, "Wow. I had a crappy week, but I did really well the few months before that, and I'm doing better now." And yet...and yet, at least for me, there's still that horrible fear, panic-inducing, breath-stopping. That terror that says, "You were doing great and you fell in. You got back out. You know you're going to just fall in again, right?"

So if you're wondering why I can't "just let it go already," the reason is because it won't let me go. And I never realized it until just a few hours ago, but it's the truth. I will spend my whole life knowing that the longer I keep walking, the closer I'm getting to the next pit. How do you do that? How do you make yourself keep walking when you KNOW you're going to fall through again, it's only a matter of time? How do you climb out AGAIN, knowing it won't be permanent?

I don't know. You just do. Or you don't. There's not much middle ground, I guess. Except maybe being hauled out by your armpits.

I think maybe that's the answer to "why," if there ever can be one.

The answer to "why" is "because I was in that pit, and I heard that voice, and I believed it."