doing the rotten work (i'm the rotten work)
In my recovery from depression, the most profound, painfully sobering epiphanies I had is that I am responsible for myself. Not the chirpy "I got this!" No, it's the daunting realization that no one is coming to save me unless I choose to save myself.
After my diagnosis, I clung to the naive supposition that a label and a prescription would cure me. I believed recovery would arrive naturally, gently if I followed the right steps. I had no grasp how much labor was involved, how tedious, repetitive, and humiliating it would be. Being alive felt like homework. There was so much work to be done.
It felt like rotten work. Except I was the rotten work. (Rotten work: work that is wretchedly bad, unpleasant, or unsatisfactory; miserable. It was the only phrase that captured what I hadn't yet been able to name: dealing with myself felt like sifting through something spoiled, decayed, unbearably heavy. The worst part was that I couldn't walk away. I was both the person doing the work and the mess being cleaned up).
But even when I am the work, I still have to do it. Every day, I am faced with the conscious decision to treat myself with compassion, to resist the deeply embedded reflex to self-punish. This isn't some empowering mantra. I fail at this more often than I succeed. I still default to shame, still weaponize my own thoughts. My inner critic remains cruel and oddly persuasive. Kindness still feels foreign, something I have to practice, even fake at times, until one day it feels like mine.
I recall confessing to my psychiatrist that I want to separate from myself, but no $100 therapy session will make escape who I am. I cannot therapize my way out of the labor. The real, rotten work is in the in-between, the kind no one sees: in the silence, in the choices I make when no one's around, in how I treat myself when I am falling apart.
My realization doesn't mean I arrived at peace. It means I began the long, jagged walk towards it. Some days, I crawl. I regress. I don't even show up. But still, I return. Even when the work is rotten and even when I feel rotten, I return.