Fighting is an everyday task and to those who don’t deal directly with depression, it may seem a little less demanding than it actually is. Depression is exhausting, and it isn’t polite enough to knock on the door or even wipe its grimy little feet off before it takes a step inside. It just treks on in, black sludge and all. If your lucky, it will leave. When it does you are left with about a million [or so it seems] tiny black footprints to clean up. Sometimes, there isn’t enough time in between its visits to clean up the gunk before depression rudely barges in again.
Exhausted
Tears
Doubt
Vulnerable
Stuck
That’s only some of what it will leave you with,
if it decides to be nice.
As a skateboarder fighting, I still get depression even when I skate. Although we can use skating as a tool to help fight depression, it isn’t the cure [in most cases]. If you have skated with me, you probably have figured out that I am the biggest cry baby out there. You might have also figured out that I do care about what everybody thinks about me. I think I cry just about every single time I skate down a new road, even if its way below my experience level. I also cry if I fall, take the wrong line, make you take a bad line, have to decide between wheels for a hill, setting up new bushings or trucks, in pack runs, in solo runs, and sometimes even when I succeed because it still wasn’t good enough. Depression makes you a little harder on yourself than the average bean, and I want people who don’t suffer from extreme depression to start realizing that. I am not a freak, I am sensitive. My life is a confusing mess most days, and although skating makes me happiest beyond words, it also makes me sad at times.
If you are fighting as well, remember to focus on yourself. Don’t worry about others for right now, there will always be time for that. Be entirely selfish and get better because this is the only way you will truly heal and then be able to help heal others. I call this process being sacredly selfish ;]. No one heals the same and don’t blame yourself for that if others seem to go through the process sooner, we are all different.
To those who have been there for me, I love you. Thank you Jaden for creating this platform for people like ourselves to express ourselves. We fight together.
|
