My Strength

Sometimes I find I cannot write.

Sometimes it feels as if depression is courting me, offering me a hand that promises stability. An embrace that suggests warmth, comfort, and forgetfulness. Not from melancholy, but from everything else. It brings to mind days in bed. An escape from a world at once breath-taking, and harsh.

Sometimes writing feels as if it is drawing me closer to that depression, to the hand that part of me so desperately wants to surrender to. Because it would be so much easier not to fight against it, every day. Every week. To stop feeling like time, which I was always told would be on my side, is only deepening the wounds.

Sometimes writing is just too hard. Because it means focus. It means thoughts. It means spending time inside my own head, unlike mindless TV shows and terrible movies that do not require presence.

And sometimes I cannot face that.

Which means that, sometimes, I forget that writing is always there for me. That it keeps me sane. That the ink that runs through me weaves me together, ties all the strands of me into a whole. That even if I try to run from it, I’ll always find it within me. Supporting, and strengthening me.

And when I am heavy with memories, bloated with loss, clouded with memories of him? It is words that ease the burden.

It may sometimes feel like they bring depression closer. But by doing so they cast his face in light and show me all that is really behind his guise.

For his hold which appears so comforting, is smothering. Depression clings to those that it claims and shaking him loose is always harder than holding him at bay.

I may be tired of fighting but at least I have a chance to.

At least I have my writing.