(Written in December 2008)
I’m afraid to tell people how badly I’m doing for fear they will be angry at me. I feel like I’m stuck in a narrow hole in a deep frozen place — Dante’s Hell. I feel like it’s my fault for being here, that I should just … decide to climb out. Right. Like that baby down in the well should decide not to be there. But I believe that I could decide and since I’m not doing it, that means I’m worthless and rotten and should die.
How did I get down in the hole? Traumatized in infancy, told by my father that I “want to be miserable,” and then Kayla asking if it did any good to sit with it which flipped me from managing OK to “be with” and accept depression to making myself wrong for being depressed. The first at least allowed me to climb out late in the day, the second just plunged me in deeper. I haven’t come out since we had that talk. I’m really angry at myself and judging myself and I don’t know how to stop doing it since it doesn’t happen in words. It’s just there in my body, a heavy weight, a pressure, a darkness on my heart.
Sylvia Boorstein says “life is difficult and painful, just by its nature, not because we are doing it wrong.”