Leap Of Faith

*note: I wrote this yesterday, when I was very scattered. I’m feeling much better today but in the interests of writing honestly I thought I would post it anyway.

What exactly am I running from?

Melancholy has been my default setting for as long as I remember, so why am I suddenly so scared to fall back into its familiar grasp? I mean, some of my best writing has come from looking through the lens of soul crushing depression.

Yet somehow, I feel it is because I know deep down that I am living within my final hoorah, my last high before the deepest fall, the one that takes me to oblivions edge and finally crosses over it.

I want it to go on and on, the high. Like when I was a manic teenager at a party and always had to push things to their limit, wanting to the fun to go on long after everyone else had gone home. I mean, who doesn’t love feeling good? Particularly when the alternative seems so unthinkable.

My GP asked me what I am going to do when this high ends and the crash ultimately follows. I replied earnestly, “this one will never end, it can’t.”

She then said, “but do you have a plan for if it does?” Of course my mind flashed to suicide as it always does. I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by plan in that context, I hear the word ‘plan’ and I automatically thing about the 1000 ways I could end my life, but other people don’t have that word association, so I figured she probably just meant plan as in plan to call someone/ take meds etc.

So I replied “I don’t know, I just know I can’t go back to that…”

Then she asked directly, “do you have a plan to end your life when it does?” So that was what she had meant after all. I didn’t quite answer her question, instead I told her how I have had so many plans over the years, one for every possible scenario, I have self-sabotaged so completely over time by informing myself that I could choose to end it with anything, pretty much anywhere at anytime.

I told her that as I looked around the room we were sitting in I could already end it right now if I had to, see that ball point pen on the desk? Into my jugular within seconds, I’m out the door and locked in the toilet before you can even figure out what happened. But I want to reduce collateral damage, so I probably wouldn’t ever do that, but I can get impulsive and if it came down to a point where I felt backed into a corner, I would be open to it.

She understood what I was saying, and thankfully she didn’t hear what I wasn’t saying.

I have been flying high for so long, enjoying life, the world, the music, the colours; I have everything I could ever want, I am rich with contentment, I am complete. Honestly though, I feel like the brakes are broken on this rollercoaster, it’s picking up momentum and I am terrified it will crash – but the only way to get off is to jump.

The reality of the other people in my world, the other lives that may be affected by my decisions slowly falls away until it is visible, but unseen, an irrelevant presence like dust from the road hanging in the air long after the car has passed by.

I simply can’t bring myself to take the meds, the low is trying so hard to swallow the high right now and if I take the meds and they take the grip from the last of the high then there will be nothing left except an endless fall into an empty chasm of silence.

I realised that I am watching myself from a distance now, I hear my thoughts as though my own voice is narrating them rather than experiencing them. The tide is turning and it’s coming to drown me, I don’t think I can outrun it for much longer.

So yes, I guess I do have a plan, well it’s me, so plans. I’m taking a (metaphorical) leap of faith, leaping on my own terms with the intent to fly and even though the result may look different to you, to me and in my reality, which in this instance is the only one that really matters, I know I am invincible anyway, an immortal collection of energy particles entwining with the world, immeshed within fabric of the universe.

So I know that whatever happens in the end, I still flew.