The Spiral into the Pit

Originally from Tina B ALIVE

I’m a pretty positive person. I also like to think that I’m fairly logical most of the time. But I go through these fazes of feeling hugely sorry for myself and crying for no particular reason. The fact that I can’t understand it or battle to explain these fazes to myself only makes them worse. I then feel frustrated and irritated with myself for being so silly and weak. The worst part is that I hate silly and weak people. So how do you deal with the fact that you’ve become something you hate? It’s pretty much a downward spiral that becomes difficult to get out of.

People tell me that, considering what I’m going through and dealing with, it’s perfectly acceptable and even normal to feel sorry for myself and to be upset. But I don’t think that it is. Especially because there are people in the world that are so much worse off than I am. How do you make people understand that? Then you feel bad for being angry and upset because of that. Again you come back to the downward spiral. I know that no one ever said it was going to be easy, but does it really have to be quite so hard?

I’ve thought of hundreds of ways to try and explain these fazes of despair and self-pity and all I can come up with is the age old cliché of the bottomless pit. Which is daft, because every pit or hole has to have a bottom to it at some point. But if you can picture the cartoon image of someone falling down a hole so deep that you can no longer hear them screaming and don’t hear them hit the bottom, that is a lot like how I feel. Imagine how terrifying it must be to fall for so long that you begin to wonder when you are going to hit the bottom. I guess that’s when fear becomes impatience. So maybe I’m still OK as long as I’m scared. Maybe you give up if you don’t have any fear or despair. Maybe it would just be easier if I didn’t have so much time to think about it.