A year into protracted withdrawal abstinence syndrome from benzodiazepines.
It has caused anxiety.
It has caused depression.
It has caused great suffering.
But probably the worst is how it has stolen my feelings. All of my good feelings have all but disappeared.
It’s torture.
Day by day in the same greyness.
Day by day in the same emptiness, losing my will to live.
Day by day, every day is the same.
It has nothing to do with character. We often imagine that some people have a lot of willpower, while some have less. We judge people on this basis. That is a terrible oversimplification. The same person has varying amounts of willpower throughout their day and throughout their life. There aren’t weak-willed people, there are just weak-willed periods and moments. Everyone has them. And they don’t mean anything bad. It’s absolutely normal not to have 100% energy and motivation to charge into doing things all the time.
Every year, when autumn approaches, I’m watching every day of the summer that goes by, and I’m afraid. I feel like I’m slowly moving towards a deep, dark hole that I won’t be able to crawl from for half a year. That I will not really be alive during that time. This time every year, I feel like I’m dying a little bit. Then the winter comes, my mood and energy levels fall, and I feel like I’m crawling during the gray, gray days. My motivation and willpower disappear down the drain. I can’t seem to do anything productive. Instead, I just lie down and read or endlessly scroll Facebook. I count the days until the return of spring. Many of you probably know this battle. But while winter blues SUCK, they are ways to make this time of the year at least a little easier.
My therapist often repeats one sentence to me. I believe I would be able to recite it even if someone woke me up at midnight. (Don’t try to wake me up at midnight, though. At least if you value your life.)
The sentence is: “You create what you focus on.”
Let me explain. When we experience something unpleasant, we want more than anything for it to just go away. If you experience pain, you concentrate on the fact of how much you want the pain to stop existing. If you have mental health problems, you often think about how you can make them easier to bear, how to make them go away.
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