depression hates a moving target
I've been avoiding writing. Paradoxically, it's when I am avoiding it that I know should be writing. Avoidance, for me, always meant I am avoiding confrontation with myself. There's always something I don't want to name yet, and writing will force me to name it.
How much more will I write about depression? It feels incessant, like tracing the same wound over and over. What enrages me is how, every time I try to shove it into the past, it drags me back, erupting through my chest with a perturbing violence that shakes my core.
These days, I imagine another me, the me who's stopped trying. I am not gentle with her. Not this time. I shake her by the shoulders, force her to get up: When will you get it together? How do I put some sense into you? There’s something violent about the way I fight her, something desperate. Maybe because I know she’s not really separate from me. She's me. The part that no longer wants to move.
I know better, though. Don't I? That depression hates movement? That it feeds on this exact inertia, on the long, airless hours I disconnectedly spend rotting in bed half-alive, waiting for something to change without lifting a finger. It thrives on my stagnation, when I am too paralyzed to fight it, because I am too busy fighting myself.
Depression hates the smallest acts of motion, I think. It hates when I get out of bed before noon, when I write even one line, when I send a message or wash the dishes or look out the window or talk to a friend. Hell, it hates when I still believe in the idea of a future for myself.
Movement is resistance. I don’t have to sprint. In days like these, I know even crawling counts. Even when I don't believe it will matter. Because as long as I am moving, it can't fully consume me. I will find a way out of its grip even if it kills me.
Depression hates a moving target. And so I keep moving.