My Depression Works the Graveyard Shift

It’s not like the depression just goes away when the environmental factors do. I wish it did. Wouldn’t that be a fuckin boon? Fix your life, fix your mind. So simple.

In the spiritual world, the ultra-self-righteous mindfulness doctrine says, “fix your mind, fix your life.” Weirdly also not true, as years of devoted practice have seemingly not “manifested” “abundance” in this physical reality. But let’s pretend it is true, like I have been for twenty years.

When “bad” thoughts swirl unchecked, they’re easy to categorize and reframe. In fact, my constant refrain of positive self-talk is redundant. My inner narrative is saturated with affirmations. Dripping with self-love. Overflowing with poetry and visions of grandeur.

Yet. 

Here I sit, at 10:48pm on a Saturday in January as fatalistic as any non-attachment Buddhist guru on her bs can possibly be. I’m exhausted from the nothing. Grateful for the everything, exhaustING the resources & toolkits like healthy whole foods eating, cooking creatively, moving my body, connecting with loved ones, cleaning up after myself, cleaning my actual self, checking all the boxes, meditating every night, starting a new job, starting college blah blah fuckity blah

Nothing really matters anyway does it because at the end of the day both my mind and life are broken, aren’t they? 

Or maybe it’s my heart. Not broken into sharp and bloody daggers, like before; not melted into a liquid puddle of tears, like before; not shattered shards reflecting distortions of what could have been; broken like a sacred relic left on the desert surface, eroded by the weather, dissipating into embers as though it never was. That kind of broken. A hollow, a dusty memory, a name nobody can remember.

Disassociation has always been a relief. It’s a sickness when I seek for it intentionally, clouding up my consciousness with whatever makes the static silence feel like quiet. But when it comes of a sober mind, unbeckoned? Sweet, sweet dimensional fracturing, like watching the husk of my body perform its stupid little life march from some bored and unaffected balcony.

Sometimes the things I think are too gruesome to write, like how my brain just imagined my old and tired body hanging lifeless from the Balcony of Disassociation, like a fuckin white flag warning to those who dare to think at all.

We’ll edit that out later. Can’t be alarming the masses. The masses of nobody who reads a word a write, as one particularly lovely horror story of a boy once reminded me.

Anyway good for me for typing all this out instead of just doing college orientation. Classes start in 24 hours, and I can already feel the trauma of everything I never accomplished crowding the periphery of my brain with black scribbled thoughts about what a nothing it all is.

Falling from Ivy League grace as a very, very sick and alone high school senior. Nobody at my graduation. Nobody by my hospital bed in the months before the cap and gown were donned. 

A wedding full of relative strangers, and empty of relatives. 

And years – decades – an entire life – spent in half-dark rooms by myself praying for relief. Praying to belong. To be somebody.

I am letting out the scribbles so they cannot crowd my thoughts. I am venting my brain so that the blackness can escape, and I know the years of intentional rewiring will take its place. I know I will wake up in the morning and automatically hear/think, “Wow! My life is beautiful and amazing.” Because I wrote the code myself, I installed it, and I’ve been running it for twenty years.

My mom got so many abortions she and everyone else lost count, before she died. I wonder how many times she aborted me – this very consciousness that lives within this body, the light behind the darkness in my eyes, the Master of Rewire that types out all these garbage words that eventually start to shine – and how those false starts and tragic stops became the blueprint for this life I’m living. I wonder which version of me would’ve been taller, or bustier, or cruel. I wonder how many Brittanys she killed before this one stuck.

I’m very grateful. I am so loved. I am surrounded by light. I am powerful, I am beautiful, I am strong. I can do this. I am so happy. I feel so embraced. Everything is easy and good. I can write my story however I want. What I am seeking is also seeking me. 

Nobody is coming to save me. 

It is up to me to carry on. 

And, my favorite, lately, We Will See.

Joy is already on its way to me! and other lies we tell ourselves to fix our mind, fix our lives.

BB 1.11.25