Chronicles of a Procrastinating Novelist Volume 39 : I Want a Future
by B.L. Aldrich
So COVID happened.
It goes without saying that the pandemic, a globally traumatizing event, impacted each of us in a myriad of ways. For this fiction writer, 2020 and 2021 were massive career failures according to my usual standards. The composition, revision and submission habits I spent years developing stalled entirely. Instead, there opened a massive rabbit hole down which my mental health plummeted as soon as I stopped drafting long enough to let the neuroses creep in. Turns out, despite appearances to the contrary, which I have actively propped up, my “happy family” and “excellent raising” were less than they were cracked up to be, and simply fleeing 1,300 miles away couldn’t erase thirty-five years of accumulated anxiety, religious trauma, and resentment. So when panic attacks, paranoia, and a depressive relapse all hit like a truck during the pandemic, I did something that I’ve been wanting to do since I was a teenager, but my religious raising and psychology contemptuous father painted as a non-God-reliant way to manage my deteriorating mental health: I started therapy and began taking anti-depressants.
I do not exaggerate when I say that literal DECADES of fighting a diseased, chemically imbalanced brain changed overnight. I went from obsessive hyper-focusing on everything negative in my life, from spinning endless disaster sagas about the outcome of any conversation, from spending hours paralyzed in my apartment binge streaming Doom Patrol just to distract myself, to a clarity I’d lacked since my college days. Medication began to rebalance my brain. And with the rebalancing, I regained my analytical mind, my objective mind. The mind that was able to take a step back and look at a bigger picture and gain insight. And so in therapy, I started to look backwards. Where did the chronic anxiety come from? Where did the conviction that I’m a selfish, self-absorbed know it-all failure and filial disappointment come from? Did I make it all up? Was my chemically imbalanced brain to blame for misinterpreting the events and pains and victories that finally lead me here?
If this sounds like a massive build up to a blame fest, it’s not. Not that there isn’t blame enough to spread around, but I have found that most of my issues stem from a chemically imbalanced child’s attempts to cope with her circumstances. And those circumstances were complicated. They didn’t set out to become a sea of resentment and toxicity, but they morphed into one. What they categorically were not were sunshine, daisies, white picket fences, and a perfect, happy, Godly family. That is the truth I’m sick of ignoring, and the lie that I refuse to continue to tacitly support through silence and omission. The repression has made me sad, fat, crazy, and actively suicidal. It turned my sister into a closeted people pleaser who attracted abusive personalities like maggots to a corpse. Therefore, socially horrifying as my decision to air some of the ugly bits may seem to some, if I don’t get this crap off my chest, I’m going to kill myself because I can’t withstand the mental strain of keeping up appearances anymore. And despite being suicidal in the past, and even carrying out a cry for attention driven half-assed attempt, I don’t actually want to die anymore. I found out that I can treat my disorder. And treating my disorder gave me a future again. I want that future.
Now, of course my version of events is just that, and can, and likely will, be disputed. But I do have one ace in the hole so to speak that gives me the confidence to say, I’m not inventing my hindsight view of things. You see, I wrote it all down as it was happening.
A new series is coming to this blog that no one reads or cares about. I’ve been re-reading my diaries, and so I’m going to review them. Just short summaries with some choice quotes thrown in. But If I’m going to learn to change the damaging habits of the past, I’m going to have to dig into it. Much as I’m loathe to become yet another privileged millennial crying whoa-is-me-I-was-fed-and-clothed-and-housed-and-churched-but-I’m-still-fucked-up, I’ve got to own me if I want to get better. And I do. I truly want to get better.
Thank you for reading,
B
