Since 2009, I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, bipolar disorder type 2 (including hypomania), mild histrionic reaction due to trauma and delayed grief reaction.
There are days when I can’t get up, when everything in my head feels like a constant headache; an after-hours vertigo that stays running long past the dribble of sunlight leaking into my room, pooling on the edge of the carpet, floodlights in my eyes.
It’s like a strange empty feeling blooming somewhere beneath my ribs, swallowing up all my efforts to be good. we call these days the Bad Days. I could stay flat on my back for hours, an inanimate sentient being. Sometimes I start counting every single tile and when I’m done I squint and count the tiny grainy holes in the tiles and then when I’m done with those I turn over to the side and close my eyes and try keeping track of the pinpricks of fireworks that appear when you press your cold palms on your tired eyes. you know that feeling I’m talking about.
Sometimes I feel like the cluttered study table, like the mirror dirtied with fingerprints. the loneliness of objects. sometimes I see you in the corner of the room, shadows skittering across the just of your collarbones, looking like the veritable embodiment of the sunset.
“Bad day?”
The Bad Days happen a lot more frequently at the start of the year, where I’m faced with a clear slate and and endless bottomless stretch of future. They’ve been happening less now, but they still happen, and will probably always happen. Sometimes all I need is space, or I claim to want space but what I want is someone to get me out of bed and make me function again. Sometimes I claim I need space but actually all I need is someone to curl up next to me and not function, together.
The Bad Days are bad, sure, but they’re also just days, just another casual mark on a calendar, and they always end.