Some peo­ple turn to pills and things
To help them through the day
To take them up or down or just
To ease the blues away
But me I real­ly want to feel
The ups and downs of life so real
Happy or sad emo­tions reign
My tears flow just the same

—Lamb, I Cry

I had been try­ing to write this for near­ly a month, but could­n’t get it down until I real­ly lis­tened to the lyrics of I Cry on the walk home past the pow­er lines. I decid­ed to split this up into two sep­a­rate entries, after real­iz­ing that I have two sim­i­lar ideas in my head, but two very dis­tinct issues. Perhaps it just took a few extra rough days of work to force me to think about this. All the things falling apart that I have to fix, respon­si­bil­i­ties, dead­lines, and tons of oth­er mis­cel­la­neous things are def­i­nite­ly mak­ing me think of ways to get the ten­sion out of my arms and shoul­ders.

Sometimes, when I come home, all I want to do is get piss drunk or mind­less­ly stoned. Maybe go reck­less­ly buy a bunch of things I don’t need, to make myself feel bet­ter for that lit­tle amount of time. Sometimes I just feel like doing some­thing irra­tional, even though I have no idea what or why, sim­ply because I believe it would get my mind of things. And yet I don’t do any of this, espe­cial­ly when I’m hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly bad day, because I don’t want to be depen­dent on any­thing.

I don’t want to rely on nar­cotics, or mate­r­i­al goods, or self-muti­la­tion, or any­thing at all to make myself feel bet­ter. I want to be sure that I can han­dle things, no mat­ter what, on my own. I force myself to feel every stress­ful, mis­er­able, for­lorn emo­tion, so that I know that I can get through them.

Sometimes, every day can be a test. Music and writ­ing are the only things that I allow myself.

And some­times I have to tell myself that it’s enough.