text: You’ve been comatose, sleepwalking through every joyless day. Every wall of your mind is painted grey. There are bad days and then there are worse days. On the worse days, everything hurts. Every small action or inaction gets you. You can be decimated by the most impersonal acts, your head working on them, twisting them into something painful that cuts you and keeps cutting you. Does that person like you? Probably not (and here is a long list of reasons why and here is a series of interactions with them that you fucked up). Does the world have to be so full of pain and anger and hate? (Well that’s a whole other kettle of fish but unfortunately human conflict feels tediously inevitable and therefore so does human suffering and this is a thing you can’t change even if you want to and that makes it worse and so on and so forth). On days like these you wonder how your brain got to be this broken. What on earth is it trying to achieve pursuing the same self-destructive pathways time and time again? The first time you had that unpleasant, unhelpful thought, you pushed it away. Why did it boomerang straight back, replaying in your mind as frequently as a Place in the Sun plays on Channel 4? (Why are trivializing your clearly problematic state of mind by comparing it to a mediocre day time TV show? Why are you alienating all your readers who aren’t British, or who don’t spend an uncomfortable amount of time watching day-time classics like you? Are they classics, or do you just not have a life? Why do you assume you have readers when nobody really likes you and you’re an awful writer? Etc etc.) On the merely bad days, you are visibly alive but invisibly dead. It’s curious that everybody sees you and interacts with you as if you exist. Well, it would be curious. Curiosity involves some level of engagement, and you are no more capable of engagement than a banana. Or a fish. (Like your curiosity, your desire and therefore ability to think up interesting comparisons has deserted you. Therefore, you are no more capable of thinking up an original metaphor than a banana. Or a fish.) Realistically these days are probably worse than the worse days. Your total detachment from the world around you is frankly terrifying and would probably scare you if you were capable of feeling that emotion directly. Compared to the worse days you’ve already experienced, though, these days feel like a welcome reprieve. You float through them glibly. You smile at people and interact with them disingenuously. At some level you are aware that there is a mental cost to your insincerity. Being fake, pretending that you are a normal, emotionally functional human is problematic in and of itself because it only increases your sensation of detachment. You watch yourself as if on screen, buzzing around, smiling and laughing at everyone and everything (kind of like Jasmine Harman on A place in the Sun). Inside, your emptiness expands (probably not the case for Jasmine Harman). Which one is the real you? Actress you performs in the real world. Real you hides away in your head, dwindling away to nothing until there’s only hollow you left. (You know that it’s a real option to share your apathy with the people around you instead of pretending to be Jasmine Harman. You also know that people can’t relate to the way you’re feeling and in any case will find it hard to process, perhaps blaming themselves, which is another thing you don’t want to engage with right now. You would also have to make a difficult decision about how to relay the news. Do you opt for dispassion, therefore embodying the very lack of emotion you are trying to express to them? Or do you opt for a glib, superficial delivery that takes some weight out of the message? Option 1 is probably the easiest delivery but the intensity of your message, combined with the strength of your soulless gaze and impassive tone you’ve used to deliver it, might be a bit strong. Option 2 might soften the blow but if someone tells you that they feel nothing with a rictus grin pasted all over their face might that actually be worse?) And then there are days like these. The sun erupts over the horizon, obliterating the darkness that you thought was you. You’re drenched in halcyon sunlight, illuminated in glorious rays of warmth. You thaw slowly. Degree by degree, dispassion fades. Where there was grey, there is hope. Today will be better. Maybe every day can be better. Tiny you imprisoned in a slither of your head is melting. You begin to embody yourself, your whole self, your whole possible range of emotions. You had forgotten that life could feel so intensely full, so intensely radiant. You feel like you are overflowing. You’re no longer watching someone else interact with the real world from a little corner of your mind. You exist in the real world now. You interact with joy. Every encounter is painted in vivid colour. Every experience excites you. It’s like you’re discovering the world for the very first time. These are the best days. These are the days where your hibernation ends and your life restarts. On these days you don’t look back on the grey days. You simply enjoy them. The grey days will return. When they do, perhaps you can retreat to your dark little corner of brain and bring this memory with you. Perhaps it can replace the black thoughts that overwhelm you. Perhaps it can remind you that there is hope after all the apathy. Perhaps, just perhaps, it will remind you that life is worth living after all.