I feel like Alice falling into the rabbit hole... Falling with me into the chaotic darkness are characters from (my) books (that I've written/ am writing), loud music, voices saying the most awful things, memories and echoes of things that are long past yet haunt me still - the cacophony is a familiar but overwhelming soundtrack to my descent into my very own Wonderland of nightmares.
Then to live in it becomes the norm, and before I know it, six months are passed and I have no idea what has happened except that I did virtually nothing but live in a numb and frightened nightmare the entire time.
It's always a familiar path to that rabbit hole, and sometimes I can even stop myself falling in at all. Most times these days I get stuck in "Wonderland" for a while, looking back up the rabbit hole, wondering how I fell down it and trying to work out how to get back out again. At least it doesn't happen that often anymore, though. Not only that, but there is the added helpfulness that life down the rabbit hole doesn't last very long, and is no longer as extreme, intense, or horrific as it once was.
But falling down into into the nightmare of "Wonderland" is always a frightening feeling, even if it's now probably the most familiar thing in my life - the one thing I seem to be able to count on... I try and reassure and remind myself now that it's never going to be as bad as it once was to experience, and I no longer end up cocooned in a catatonic trance of numb misery and paranoid terror for months, or years, on end. I even remind myself that I'm now flying solo and coping with life - and the mild "relapses" - relatively well without medication (which always proceeded to make me feel worse, as my physical reaction to side-effects were never positive). But it doesn't make it less frightening because that is my experience of it, and what I fear is that it will happen in just the same way again. It hasn't for years, but it just might.
So now I fall down the dark hole again. The cacophony of noises is (quite literally) too loud in my head to hear life outside of it. Sometimes I really am not aware that life actually is going on outside of it, and above me as I wonder about, lost in Wonderland. My mind is not really any longer my own, and I struggle to understand what is going on around me, as I genuinely cannot any longer comprehend what "reality" as everyone else sees it (and how I usually do, when I'm not busy doing this). Everything looks as though it may very well be in a dream, looking slightly distorted, colours dulled, and not quite conscious of what is going on at any particular moment. And at this point, sleep generally ends up being barely more than a pipe-dream, which obviously does nothing to help the situation at all.
In times like these, I get more than irritated by people complaining of being "depressed", or even using it as an excuse to hide from work and claim welfare for when they know nothing about the real suffering that goes on behind the mediocre words. As if it's simply "the blues", and not a matter of being depleted in required brain chemicals for synapses to function at the required level of "OK", resulting in living in what feels like a horrific nightmare every second that you simply cannot wake up from. I get irritated that those who haven't been down their own version of the rabbit hole, who throw it around like it means nothing - if they knew what it was like to live here, they would all shut up very, very quickly, and run away from it just as fast.
I wish I could...
