Having an obsessive mind is like being trapped in a maze you can never get out of no matter how hard you try. It's like those dreams you have sometimes, where you know you're supposed to turn left but you just can't help turning right, or you know you should run away but your legs don't move. One of the doctors I went to once told me that the neurons and whatnot in my brain were "stuck" on their circuit. That is what an obsessive mind feels like. As much as you don't want to fixiate yourself on one thing (or one person), your mind always switches back to it. An image that comes to mind is a light switch (similar to my whole metaphor of the flick! in my brain). As soon as you try so very hard to turn that switch off, it just automatically flips right back up again.

What I've learned is one of the worst feelings in the entire world is the feeling that you have zero control. The feeling that your brain is the way it is because it is that way, and you can't do a single thing about it. If you start screaming and crying, you can't help feeling that way. If you want to cut yourself, you just have to, there is no escape from it. I used to feel as if I was just a doll in someone's sick little game, that I was being moved around by something and laughed at as I was put in torturous and embarrasing situations. One day, someone woke up and thought, I think today I will make Krista crazy.

I have since learned that I do have choice in the way I want to feel in certain situations. But there are still those moments where I don't understand why I am acting the way I am. And then I sit down, and do what Deb told me to - think about it. Ask myself, am I choosing to be depressed right now, and if so, why is that?

I never had such a vivid imagination as I did when I was depressed. I expressed in ways I never thought I could before, mostly through poetry and journal writing, but also through drawing, painting and collage. I was always cutting out pictures. I even glued leaves into my real journal, to prove some grand point I had thought of feverishly one night, of how love shouldn't be like a plant that is so beautiful and crisp when it is young, but then withers and crumbles into brown nothingness with age. I wanted to believe that love just didn't do that, that with age it should only become more beautiful. And yes, I really did think this out and sought out particular leaves that expressed these thoughts, and I spent an entire night making that journal entry perfect, when I should have been studying for my Sociology test the next day.

My mind was full of metaphors and images, but mostly gruesome images. I was walking to my car one day after buying some food and all of a sudden I was struck with an extremely vivid image of a man coming behind me and slashing my throat. It was so real to me that my hands started to shake and I rushed to get the keys out of my purse to get into my car, thinking someone was coming up behind me.

Cody still hasn't talked to me.

I have to let this go, right now. I will call him another night. Even if it means panicking about it in bed for the rest of tonight, well...at least I'm in bed, and I'll eventually fall asleep.

I wonder how I'd feel if I were to go back on medicine again.


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