Spin Cycle.

I want to live via a Magic-8 Ball. The simple decisions of life are like walking into a biker bar wearing only 3 strategically placed napkins. They spell trouble, in large doses. It’s partly the Depression making my head a little fuzzier than most. I’m filled with tantalising, terrorising nothings, resembling little so much as the dryer lint that builds up after a particularly vigorous spin cycle.

Things that are of no more importance than said lint end up being terribly difficult. I um, then ah, then um some more just for fun. I’m equal parts tentativeness and ambiguity.

My world is a permanent rainbow: There are the grey bits and the even greyer bits, subdivided by yet more grey which moved in next to Mr and Mrs Grey. It’s existence reduced to a paint by numbers game. What the hell happened?

Back and forth I go about the all important questions like should I have chicken or beef for dinner, should I draw the blinds, should I walk to the shops? These are stupid things to be indecisive about. I have no trouble giving definitive answers to the big things in life. Someone asks me what I’m doing to combat global warming, I know what to say.

Someone wonders if I want a piece of pie, and I draw a blank. This is not a monumental choice. Nobody cares, I whisper but it’s only a whisper.

The pounding of my heart tells me that these things matter anyway. At best, I stare and move my head in some apparently definitive direction. Did I say yes last time? We’ll go with that again.

I hate the small steps, which is a problem when you’re talking about recovery from a mood disorder because boy, is that ever about small steps. The smaller the better according to my therapist because small is supposedly manageable. Except if you’re me, and it’s totally impossible.

I have the focus of a lemming when it comes to the basics of life.

I want it all, and yet I want none of it really.

I’m this way and that – pushed, and pulled and pounded by the petty. And in this state of perpetual potential, I am petulant. In the untapped everything I find that nothing much matters.

I know this – that the answers to these sorts of questions will not make any difference to anyone but me, and that’s the problem. There are no guidelines to follow. There is no right answer, only choice. Freedom, yes but also definition.

We shape ourselves by these little things, and there’s the rub. My mind rebels against its very form and function. It hurts a little to try and pin myself down. There is no science to these parts of life, and so they don’t compute.

I can’t seem to keep a leash on the part of me that should know the answers to these things. It wants to run, and keep running until the world finally stops asking because there is a large part of me that quite simply doesn’t cope.

I don’t entirely hold with the notion that it’s the thought that counts. We can’t forgo these little steps or things are that much worse, so I hope that change is in the performance of each act. Change that will alter not just the outward nature of things but the what and how I see because sometimes, just sometimes but often enough to count I’m an optimist in sheep’s clothing. I care.