Proper Dose

This is my 7th revision to this post. The first draft had about 2,300 words that was essentially a mock-therapy session between me and the my keyboard. After months of agony, depression, and a long self-induced period of isolation I’m now happy to report that I’m doing okay. Each time I went to revise this post I came back with a better positive state of mind & mental attitude. As I write this I’m feeling better than I have in well over a year. I’m on a multi-day streak of my old habits, good habits: waking up early, eating well, exercising, writing, drinking lots of coffee. I’m feeling grateful for my life for the first time in ages.

There are no justifiable excuses for all the poor choices I made during the last year, only calculated reasons drawn from analyzing my own timeline. The last month has been spent in isolation, working hard to achieve a peaceful state of mind and a sense of mental clarity. Last year my irrational fears ballooned into a great, terrifying monster. So often I’d feel absolutely helpless, finding myself lying awake at 5am every night dutifully tearing my own confidence and sanity apart with knives of guilt and disappointment, only waking up the next morning to continue the destructive behaviors. It’s one thing to give up your rational decision-making and put yourself on auto-pilot, but it’s a crying shame to criticize the results of the autonomous behavior while sitting in the passenger seat, doing nothing to change. My erratic and careless behavior has left me worse off than I was a year ago. There are many things I’ve lost along the way: my camera, career prospects, goals and ambitions, other important things and aspects of my life that fueled my thirst for living. Though I feel a great sense of loss and sorrow, I don’t feel sorry for myself. I let this happen. I’ve come to terms that in order to move forward I must admit fault, make my apologies, and start over from scratch. Lately I feel okay with this idea. I’ve relocated to Columbus to give myself an opportunity to work on myself and get back on my feet. I feel confident in my ability to slowly improve myself and get back to a feeling that I miss so dearly; a feeling where I felt confident, hopeful, and most importantly: happy.

I try to be as open as possible about my own struggles because I feel that being transparent about mental health is incredibly important, more-so now than ever. We live in a hyper-sensitive time where our own individual sense of self-worth is influenced on a grandiose scale, mostly by strangers on the internet through very curated outlets. In my own time away from the internet I remembered just how much of my mood and feelings are affected by what I see in all of my feeds. It’s imperative to be cautious and aware of the effect social media can have on your mental health, so don’t forget to step away every once in awhile to remember who you are and what you love.

I hope you’re all well 💛

Jake