I’m on the internet again, this time looking for something homeopathic to fix the depression. Yesterday it was the anxiety. I’m scrolling through countless pages of housewife-homemade-holistic-healing remedies instead of doing what I know is really going to help me. Why? because it’s hard. I want to do what Suzy Homemaker tells me will help my anxiety and eat some cheese–some comfort food, but I know better. It makes me angry that, in more than one place online, I’ve read that eating is a remedy for anxious feelings. Of course it is! But I know better. I know that I must walk out the door and run around my neighborhood and yet I still fight the voice inside that says, “have a snack and go back to sleep until you’re not sad anymore”. Alternately, the Internet does sometime speak the truth and will say that this kind of stress eating will only further the depression and therefore perpetuate the cycle. What they never tell you is how fucking hard it is to change. They don’t tell you how exhausting it is everyday to make the choice again and again not to do the easy thing but willingly throw yourself into the fire hoping to rise again more magnificent. They don’t tell you that you can never stop making that choice; that the negative voice in your head sweetly telling you to eat the piece of chocolate and smoke the cigarette doesn’t go away. It lives inside you–a part of who you are–and some days it’s easier to not listen and others days you feel powerless against it.
But it’s not hopeless, just like learning any skill, avoiding the demons on your shoulder becomes a talent. The voice saying “I don’t want to run” “I want to eat those French fries” doesn’t get to win, because it doesn’t matter what “I want”: my addictions do not make my decisions for me.