what if I don’t want to make the best out of everything anymore?

retyped from a journal entry, march 2022

There are four steps in griefing your own boring, mundane life. The one in quarantine, mixed with depression and firstborn daughter guilt, and the need to be the most perfect version of yourself at all times — and condemning yourself when you can’t meet your expectations. Which is always the case.

Step one, you cry. A lot. You sleep in your bed until 3 pm. Prior to that, you also spent hours in your bed, only getting up to eat and washing your face just enough to make up for not showering. You find everything you used to do to fight off the depressive episode stopped looking appealing to you. Putting on makeup and taking random pictures of yourself, making pretty pages in your journal, rearranging your room, it doesn’t feel the same. Ever.

So you grief and feel sorry for yourself. You cry. And you purposely listen to songs that would make you heave on the floor at 2 am. You think of hurting yourself, but you remember how long you’ve been clean, so you don’t. You go to Instagram just to cuss at people in your head for having a better life than you. And you realize your days have been a cycle of all of these activities for the past few months. And you mourn, again and again, until being in pain is all you remember of yourself.

Step two, you start finding vlogs on the internet of girls resetting their life. Drinking iced coffee and eating avocado toasts, organizing their life, and studying in pretty cafes. They start working out, and eating better, even reorganizing their room to make a more positive space for themselves. So you think to yourself: “Huh. I should do that”. These girls tell you to romanticize your life because you only have so little of it. They tell you that if you romanticize even the most mundane things in your life, you will start to think that life is worthwhile again. They show their mental breakdowns on camera, they tell you being vulnerable and broken is a part of life, but you will always be able to get up.

Make the best out of everything, they say. Because whether you like it or not, this is your life and it’s staying, so do what you can to love it. And you believe them. So you make coffee at 3 am to stay awake for the next 24 hours to reset your messed up sleeping schedule, and you start working on fixing your life. You take cute pictures of your simple day to day activities, you take up reading again and you review it on your Instagram, you take pictures of your boyfriend on the screen when video calling him because he’s pretty, you write poems about him, you write on your journals again, you tell people that you’re not well — but that’s an excuse to ghost them because you still can't talk to anyone. You try yoga, then pilates, working out to a youtube video, then you fail on your third day streak. You start laying awake at night again, because your body is used to sleeping when your room is bright from daylight, and you start to wonder again: What am I doing this for?

Step three is a lot like step one, but with a remix. You feel all those grief, and mourning, and pity for yourself, but now you add some self sabotaging flavors to that. Because you tried to be better, why aren’t you better by now? Why are you worse off? And you spiral into the most depressed you’ve ever been since that first lockdown of March 2020. And you blame yourself, over and over.

You see, I’ve been repeating this cycle for almost two years now. I know that life turned for the worse for everyone when the pandemic started, but these days; when things just keep getting worse and you have to stay inside for two months straight so you don’t get your family sick, you just lose the direction on what your life is supposed to be. The line between doing your responsibility as a person, a student, a friend, a lover, a daughter, and isolating yourself in the name of healing yourself — just becomes so blurred that all you can see is the shape of what you should have, and could have been.

And sometimes, there’s not much in your life that you can nitpick to make the best out of everything you have. There’s not much to be grateful for anymore, because you’ve made yourself grateful for every small victories and little things you have. In the end, you get tired of celebrating getting out of bed to turn on your Zoom class, or managing to drink more than a cup of water a day. There’s a phase you reach when trying to make your life feel better just creates a new kind of burnout. Because there’s got to be more to life than celebrating shit like waking up, right?

So then we reach step four: mental purgatory.

A brain fog that feels like you’re going through life wearing glasses fogged up by hot breath under your mask. And you live in your brain, running around in circles, wondering for days on end about how you can turn things around this time. Figuring out how to restart again, questioning why you got unlucky in life. You do this while your physical body acts like a robotic replacement that does your daily duties. Wake up, eat something, make coffee, drink water, answer people, half ass your homework, turn on your class, sleep.

What if I just don’t want to make the best out of everything anymore? I don’t know how to.

But maybe in life I don’t want to chase happiness anymore, or to feel full, to feel like you’ve got it under control. Maybe I just want a piece of normalcy, in a world where there seems to be more bad news emerging every hour or so— normalcy seems like a lot to ask.

I’ve already forgotten what normal feels like. There’s got to be a step five to this, right?

Right?…

March 15, 2022