#mentlaillness

It frustrates you. Your inability to do the normal things that everyone can do. It kills you inside makes you feel as though you can’t be a functioning adult. Just earlier you were sitting outside with the dogs, smoking like usual and your mind wandered to the chores you have yet to do inside. By “yet” you mean have been pushing off for awhile. Yesterday was a good day because you finally folded that laundry that has been sitting in the basket for two weeks and the laundry that has been left in the dryer for about a week. All because you were almost out of work socks and ran out of sleep shorts or loose boxers that you wear to bed. You can’t go back to wearing your boxer briefs to bed anymore they feel stifling. None of that really matters because you pushed through and you did it. Of course the newly clean clothes are now residing in the basket and dryer but this is a cycle that is bound to continue indefinitely. The day before that you had cleaned the bathroom and moved the dirty dishes from the sink and into the dish washer. They had been sitting there for a week but once they were gone it felt like you could breathe again. The bathroom hadn’t been really cleaned for probably almost a year but you never really let it get all that dirty. A couple weekends ago you finally cleaned the dining room of the boxes that had started to pile up. You went on a cleaning frenzy because you felt that you couldn’t breathe.

All of this looks good and sounds good on paper. It doesn’t negate that feeling of inadequacy. Like everything in your life it goes like tides. You can’t clean your house or take care of yourself until you can for one day. Today you almost cried because you couldn’t thinking. The issue was the litter box. It is always the issue and for some reason you can’t figure out the best method to clean it and the mess the cats have made on the floor in front of it. It makes you feel like you can’t breathe, you can’t do anything about it. Logically you know you can. You know you can clean it up like you do every other time but right now you just can’t. It just sits there and taunts you. A reminder that you can’t take care of yourself why would you think you can take care of your pets. It’s a spiral thought process that lead down very dark paths. If you can’t take care of your self, you can’t take care of your pets, if you can’t take care of your pets your pets will go without things that they need, if your pets go without their needs being filled then you are abusing them, if you are abusing them then you don’t deserve to have pets, if you don’t deserve to have them then you should surrender them, and if you surrender them then you’ll never see them again, and if you never see them again and they don’t need you and they aren’t around to comfort you then what do you have to live for? 

It’s an illogical spiral that makes assumptions that you know aren’t true. Your pets don’t go without they always have food and water and attention. Yeah there are some days you forget, there are stints you can’t clean the litter pan or are so wrapped up in whatever is going on you don’t realize how bad it has gotten, and yeah there are somedays that you just can’t have them around because they sounds and the needy form of love is too much for you and you have to hide yourself away in your own house. But you also can’t imagine life without them.

You always hear people discuss the spoon theory. It makes sense to a fault. The main fault is that you can’t wrap your head around certain intangible things. How many spoons do you get? How much is each task worth? You know it’s all relative but that doesn’t make the concept any easier to grasp. You’re an adult, with a full time job, a mortgage, a car payment, insert many more bills here not to mention more obligations. You’re an adult who has to feed themselves, bathe themselves, has pets to take care of, and lives alone. You can’t be rationing out imaginary spoons to decide what is worth doing because it isn’t a choice anymore it is necessity. So you do you do everything, all day, everyday you have no down time you have no relaxation and things start to fall by the wayside but what can you do? Sure you can deal out the spoons to the most important matters: work, bills, pets, food but even that can become too taxing. Dwindle it down then: work, bills, feed and water pets, frozen meals and skipped meals. On the worst of days you’re lucky to get even a bit of it done but the only thing insured to be on the list is work and boy would that take so many spoons.