I had periods in my life that depression debilitated my will. The light, life, all of it, felt like it was not there, and at the same time, it was all there and pressing the air out of me. Like a good Marine I obeyed my superior, in this case my shrink, and injected my life with routine like walking the dog everyday for a couple of hours. The same route, the same stick to throw. All this outside, and the world, that had made me sick, was also the thing that healed me at the end.
In life, the things you love, are often also the things that make you sick. An obvious one is off course unhealthy snacks, a cigarette or driving to fast on your motorcycle. You can also think of the relation you have with you parents, friends or your wife or husband. The unhealthy things in the first category are never healthy, they are tolerable when you reduce the intake to a minimum, and if you like driving fast, you should go to a race track twice a year. The second category can also be toxic at the same time that you love them.
With your friends and family you might take a little bit more distance, if you feel that gas is building up in your stomach, but if you are married, and also have kids, it becomes much harder to put distance between you and them. A lot of people will choose the easier road that leads to a divorce, but if you use the same routine that helped me getting over my depression, confronting it all in a structured way, you might find the reason again why you once loved this all.
There is a reason why you loved your life, wife, husband and kids once. The reason is… that you loved them…and there is nothing rational about it. Al the stupid things you do in life, you do because you love it, not because you thought your way into it. And because there is no reason for it, there is no reason to stay with it, or with the person you once loved, if that love is gone. But I once lost my love for life, and life has also no reason, but I found the love for it back again when I walked the dog.
My girlfriend and I, we are no sentimental fools or hopeless romantics. We have our routines that guide us like the white road marks besides the road do. This guidance helps us, specially when it is dark, you can see where the road ends, and the ditch starts, and steer the relationship down the road with more ease. This way I also have more time to look to the side at her, like I did in those first days when the car was still in cruse control.
The poem is from Day 1324, November 2019
Nochrisis 