Published: 2018-06-19 16:17
Edited: 2025-02-24 18:52
Status: 🌲evergreen

how to keep writing when you want to die

Reading time: 3 minutes

Being suicidal isn't fun.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Stating the obvious here.

Water is wet, bears are catholic, the pope shits in the woods etc.

Given the choice, basically no one would choose to want to kill themselves all the time.

But for those of us who suffer with severe depression, that feeling is something we have to live with. It's part of our reality.

And yeah, it does feel a little ironic saying we have to live with something like suicidal thoughts. But the truth of et is that you either live with or you... don't.

It's as simple as that.

And if you choose to live with it, a choice you have to keep making every single day, over and over again, practicing until choosing to live is second nature, you have to learn to live you life as well.

It's not enough to simple survive; the only way to truly deal with being suicidal is to choose to and learn how to live. And that means doing all the things you would be doing if you didn't have this fucking thing to deal with.

For me, that means writing.

If I'm living, then I'm writing and if I am writing, I am living.

But even people who don't have to deal with their brains constantly going "but what if you were dead?" find writing difficult, so how the fuck do you keep writing when that's a thing your brain keeps doing?

You take it one day at a time.

You learn to accept that sometimes there are days where all of your energy is going towards not going through with that thing that's in your brain.

Sometimes days or weeks can go by where the inly thong you do is survive.

But even when I was at my lowest point, when things were at their worst, I wouldn't go more than a few weeks without writing.

Even last February, when the suicidal ideation very nearly got the better of me, I managed to write more than 4000 words.

It's not a lot, not compared to what I know I can do when my brain isn't being such a shitweasel, but it's something.

And how many people don't even manage that even without the added hindrance of a brain that's trying to kill them?

Spoiler: it's lots.

And in the year that followed my lowest point, I consistently managed at least some words every month.

Because I refused to let the demons in my brain take this thong away from me.

They couldn't take my life away and they sure as fuck weren't gonna take my writing away from me.

I couldn't write every day---I still can't---but I could still write some days.

And that was enough.

Those 4000 words got me through last February, and every month where I managed to write some words was another piece of timber in my barricade.

My word count became a metric for my recovery.

I have the graphs for the past year and a half; the number of words I managed to write each month almost exactly mirrors the deterioration of my mental health, and it tracks my recovery.

Last May I wrote even fewer words than that February, an unexpected bereavement stalling the progress of my recovery and setting me back a ways.

But I still got some words out. I didn't let it derail me entirely. And now I'm at a point where I have pretty consistently written about the same amount of words per month for the entirety of this year.

It hasn't been easy.

I've fought tooth and fucking nail for each and every word I have recorded. I've wailed in frustration that I can't spend more time per day with fingers on keyboards, or that I can't write every day for very long without having a massive crash.

It's been hard, without a shadow of a doubt.

The key has been patience.

It's a difficult thing to master, when you aren't certain you'll survive the day, to accept that writing can always happen tomorrow.

There's a sense of urgency when your mental health is so low, a feeling that if you don't do something Right This Second then you'll lose the chance forever.

So accepting that bad days happen, days with no words happen and I can always get back to it tomorrow, has been enormously difficult.

But it has been the key to everything.

Because if I can trust that tomorrow might be a day where I can write, I can start to trust that there will be a tomorrow.

And I have slowly learned to trust that there will be a tomorrow, and a day after, and a day after that, until I've got to the point where I can make plans for five years from now.

Plans that include writing. Because as long as I am alive I will always be writing.

I am a writer. It's part of me on a fundamental level.

For me, learning to live again and learning to write again have been one and the same thing, and as I've got better at one, I've git better at the other.

I'm looking forward to the point where I'm writing as much as I did the year before my breakdown, because then I will know I am completely free.

It might take me a long time to get there, but that's okay. I know I can do it now.

Originally published at medium.com