DEPRESSION

At times it happens so sudden that you only notice it when you are about to hit rock bottom. In that void of darkness clutching at straws and trying to still your sudden plunge into that chasm that will only hold you down, strip all the light and joy of living from you and leave you  empty. Depression!

I haven’t written in a while, I can feel the tugs of creativity  at my brains every morning as I turn and turn in bed trying to find the perfect position to enable my falling back to sleep, damn morning sleep is so sweet. I can envision the words playing out of reach in my brains, I can feel the urge and itch in my fingers down my gut and I can feel my brain working overtime trying to create characters and plots and themes. The saddest thing though is all my characters are depressed. I think in drab colors, grey and more grey, I think of days filled with rain and endless mists. I think of characters who are suffering in swamps without end, plagued by the cold and nameless monsters. I see a world without joy without color without any zeal.

I should be at that point in life where I am bubbling with energy and striving to climb mountains and exercise the testosterone in my body, I should possess the energy to hurl a spear across six ridges as a one Ted Malanda would put it. Yet a lethargy has taken over my mind, slowly chipping away with judged blows that I cannot seem to parry. Life is moving past me in a slow flux, and am not moving with it, I feel stagnant in a world without chains. The wise say the limits of this world are your brains imagination. So what am I to do when my brain is slowly embracing my claustrophobia, closing in on all the expanses I possess and slowly stifling me down to that unthinking stage where I move through life like a zombie?

Time and time again, books have helped me snap out of it. Burying my nose in the characters that are fictions of some writers’ imagination and living with them in their world helps give me sanity. Books have given me a whole new world I can escape to. Books give me a sense of empathy and a freedom to practice my emotional wiles. My favourite writer is unarguably Stephen king and lately I sadly find myself criticizing him. I have read over 20 works from the fellow and I have come to notice a few things that I’d like to ask the fellow should I meet hi. His works though as strokes of pure mastery especially the Gunslinger series. Why does he always have the character of little boys who are plagued by some troubles, family or so and why do these young boys always survive any circumstances surrounding them.  His characters are almost predictable, you can almost anticipate having someone in an abusive relationship in his books, someone with a dysfunctional family, a complete phsyco.

In one of my class assignments, I am supposed to write a personal discourse on the book Things Fall Apart. The article should be at least 1000 words long. I first read things fall apart when I was in class seven, when I was starting to fancy myself as a young writer and had graduated from reading the fantastic seven sth(cant rem the exact title) Goosebumps and was penning compositions that had teachers praising me. I find myself trying to recollect my thought and trying to see if I can put together an article without actually reading the book again. I simply feel lazy. I have no idea why sitting down to do a class reader seems such a big deal yet I daily tuck away pages and pages of fiction in my brain.

Am trying to kick the habit as it were. (the phrase kicking the habit leaves me in stiches, think of a nun’s habit). Am trying to start living, I realized with a start that it has been three months since I last wrote something that appealed to me, I read Tony Mochama’s article where he describes himself as a Tsar of sentences, (hats off dude, you continue to inspire us) I picked up one thing from the article, you writing id directly proportional to the amount of works you read, quick question Tony, does that apply in vice versa? In all the time I have been away, I have read the whole of Terry Pratchet’s Discworld series, Patricia Mackphilips  on Morgon of Hed and numerous other stories.

Time to go seek out my friends and start living, get a girl laugh with her and see if I still have my mojo open the windows in my house sweep away the cobwebs and get a breath of fresh air. Hell, in might even eat a fruit today. The clouds are chasing each other in a sky that is largely blue. Sometimes I do think that it would be fun to visit a shrink.  Then again I think to myself, therapy won’t work on me!