Day 29 – Tomorrow, Today, and Now of Zombies

Zombie = When you’re on meds for depression, your energy drops to 5%, and you start alternating between power-saver mode and hibernation.

Dear Reader,

I’m annoyed, angry, and frustrated! To a person watching me, I’m probably as tranquil and calm as the reflection of the moon on a river. Why? Because if I’m not in bed, hibernating, I run on power-saver mode, which means I can’t expend enough energy on flailing my arms wildly or screaming or punching someone in the face. I just can’t, even though I want to, because doing so will leave me exhausted. The funny thing is that I finished reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and it feels like I’ve been whining just as much as that petulant rascal.

Back to the topic now! So, I have known the difference between today and tomorrow. We all get told that stuff early on, right? Tomorrow never comes, act today, yada yada yada! For an entire month, after becoming a zombie, I kept telling myself that I’ll work from tomorrow. In the beginning, everything was perfectly timed, and if I followed my schedule I’d have had ample time to get everything done. But, damn it, I kept telling myself I’d do it tomorrow. The workload kept piling up, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, way past the deadlines (I’d never missed a deadline before), till I realised I couldn’t do it and cancelled all the projects. Even after that, and after a long rest, I wanted to get back to work, but when was I going to start?

Tomorrow, I told myself. The tomorrow never came for a month, and I realised I had to start working today! So I started telling myself I’d work today, but to work we need energy, and when we don’t have energy we rest. So, I decided to rest for a bit after breakfast till it was time for lunch. Then I needed to rest after lunch because having lunch made me tired, or, perhaps, the tiredness never really went away. I’d wake up around 7 or 8 in the evening, have dinner, procrastinate, till I went to sleep. This went on for about a week or 10 days, till I realised that ‘today’ wasn’t working either.

So, I decided if I wanted to get back on my horse and start working again, I had to start working right now. After like 3-4 days of this ‘now’, I finally made a post on this blog, but didn’t start working. My mind goes blank, refuses to work, because it’s on power-saving mode. The lines between Tomorrow, Today, and Now are all blurred for us zombies. Anything and everything we do is a feat per se! That includes taking a shower.

I get mad at myself too. I do want to start working again. But it’s just not that easy. Some of the side-effects of the anti-depressants go away in a few weeks, and some stay and are not necessarily pleasant. As for me, I have a constant pain in my joints. It’s bearable but it varies in intensity all day long, and it makes me not want to move, and when I do something as simple as go take a walk, it gets worse.

I know I try. I know I’m trying. I also know I’m failing at it, continuously and repeatedly. I don’t even have the strength to get angry. What I don’t need is reminders from others, because I continuously remind myself.

I’ve written this post, not because someone reminded me that I need to work or am not working, but because I’m the one constantly reminding myself that I’m not working, in spite of trying.