My kind of sadness

I know people often think that I'm depressed due to a lot of things in my lifestyle and what's going on in my head, but I'm not. Not clinically depressed. I have a shitty life and a million reasons to wanna kill myself, but it's not the same thing. I have asperger, borderline, chronic tension headache, I'm transsexual which means to me that I hate my body/low self esteem, I'm sometimes psychotic and I get a lot of nightmares, I have a lot of anxiety and have been through unspeakable traumas that may or may not have cause some kind of PTSD.

That does not equal depression. It does mean that my life is shitty, but for other reasons. Sometimes I get suicidal because I can't stand the emotional pain that cutting, medication, booze and cigarettes can't deal with. You can be suicidal and hate yourself and your life without being depressed. Depression is an illness that I don't have.

It would have been easier if was all just depression, but the truth is so much more complicated than that. I probably have every nameable mental illness there is, but I'm not depressed. I'm sad though, and quite a lot sometimes. And by "sometimes" I mean a lot more than the average person. My past haunts me, my ghosts haunt me and I can never fully relax. Not even now, sitting safe by my computer, doing what I love the most. I am so tense 24/7 with my headache and all. I've literally forgotten what it's like to be relaxed, physically and mentally. I can never stop the thoughts and my conversations with Anna are infinite, endless and eternal in its very literal meaning.

Was I ever better? Right after the surgery? Yeah, I think so. I had a really good spring and summer, possibly the best ever. But all good things have an ending, as much as all bad things do. Or they never do, they just take turns. Keeping us alive and bringing us down to earth, drown us and rescue us until something or someone kills us. I have a bitter and sometimes a bitter sweet view of life. For me, my world lies cloaked in darkness with occasional sparks of light. It's not entirely black all the time.

Right now I'm in some kind of limbo, neither darkness nor light. I see both sides in front of me, behind me and on both sides, up and down. But I can see where I'm going, I know that this is the end of something good. I worry about myself, fear that I'll do something stupid I would regret or too damn late to regret, or that I would give up writing again. I really can't do that, at least not the last thing mentioned. I can replace every meal with coffee and thirty cigarettes, I can start cutting every day again, I become alcoholic again, I can plan my suicide when I'm done with the book, but no fucking way I can give up writing.

I can never say that I have some kind of happiness to go back to, in my childhood or later in life, but what I can say, is that after almost 25 years in darkness I got a glimpse of what happiness could be like. I just wasn't strong enough to keep it up. I let the darkness consume me again, but as slowly as possible, I go all in fully armoured and with weapons and hold my breath as I sink into the water once again. And by now, I know how to swim in it, how to stay alive with only gasps of oxygen. I know I can survive much more than I ever thought was possible, so I say bring it on.