From the blackness of unconsciousness, sparks of awareness flicker. Just before all the minor aches and pains of the human body come online, the whispers from the egoic voice beat them to the punch. But not by much. As they grow louder, the tips of my fingers trace over the polymer of my pistol’s grip, just underneath my pillow. It’s like reading the word ‘despair’ in brail.
‘Not again.’ From one corner of my mind. ‘What’s the point?’ from another. ‘You don’t have to do this anymore, ya know. It’s just a few ounces of pressure to make it stop’ comes from the middle. A cacophony of equally distressing words strung together become clearer and louder as I continue the process of waking up. As they do, the gentle tracing across the polymer becomes a tightened clench in my fist. The awareness behind the chatter weighs the difference between placing the barrel over the heart versus the side of the skull. I suppose it boils down to how considerate I want to be for anyone who might have to clean up the mess.
That is what causes me to pause, but then I remember that it would probably be a complete stranger, because I can count on one hand how many people in my life whose breakfast would even be interrupted if they received news of my demise. This math adds to the chatter and I hear ‘See. Isn’t that pathetic? No one would even notice if you did it. Wouldn’t make the news. Wouldn’t be a blip on anyone’s radar. Probably wouldn’t even make an obituary. Who would even bother to write one for you?’ And the cold of the barrel’s rim doesn’t feel so awkward against the skin of my temple. If I move, if I manage to make it to my feet, what is there to wake up to?
The world itself is an unwelcoming place with horrible news waiting to torment you no matter where you look. The country I once loved has removed the mask of freedom, liberty or nobility and has revealed itself to be the whore of Babylon; ruled by lunatic technocrats and backed by a cult of red or blue that think they are separate or distinct. The turn of the “blind leading the blind” phrase was a little too on the nose, and to feel them all pulling us into their ditch is a gravity the minority who still have sight can’t seem to resist. The whole of society has become a zombified sea with an aim to pull you under if you so much as dare to wade within it just to go buy a loaf of bread.
Of course, that is if you’ve managed to save up enough this month for a loaf of bread or still have some room for more debt on a credit card. Either that or perhaps you might allow yourself to splurge today and grab two packs of shrimp Raman to go with your bologna sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Heck, if there’s still a little gas in the car, you might even throw an egg in the pot for some protein. These are the only choices you have in a designed & devastated economy that has been implemented by the aforementioned masses of geopolitical theatre. Even with such choices, it is not forgotten that to do that you’ve had to decide which utility bill is going to be overdue this month. Just to eat you’ve had to negotiate with yourself on which collection calls can be the most tolerable for your mental health once your phone starts to vibrate all day and night for thirty days.
And it will be vibrating because with your PTSD you haven’t been able to handle the sound of any sort of ringtone for almost 9 months now. It had become like Pavlov’s bells of anxiety throwing you into fight or flight every five minutes as the very sound of a call puts you in the mindset of being hunted through the woods by specters you couldn’t see or flee. That’s not even considering the avalanche of notifications you can’t shut off no matter how hard you try from CIA social media platforms you can’t avoid because everyone’s livelihood is hardwired into them by some way or another. Even if you try to do a digital detox away from the Ahrimanic internet for more than a day your income will drop and then you can forget that pack of Raman you had on your mind.
If you move, if you get up, no matter how long you put off having to touch that goddamn demon called a “smart phone” eventually you will have to expose yourself to it and just what is waiting for you when you do? Headlines reminding you that your world is controlled by pedophile, cannibal, child killers who hover over all the nuclear codes & will never come to justice in this life. Breaking news article after the other of new details on the progression of World War 3, the coming extinction of mankind at the hands of a handful of companies developing their artificially intelligent gods, and the majority of your fellow countrymen pouring what brain cells they have left into the notion that any of this is going to stop if only enough people vote for whatever team’s dick they suck.
No matter how much you’d wish to avoid it, all of this will be validated the second you have to open any one of the social media, mind control, slot machine icons you are forced to have on your phone and your senses are inundated with the truth of how many retards you truly are surrounded by. Whether it’s the hillbilly locals posting idiotic “Vote Red Down the Line” memes or the gender confused, Halloween haired socialists parroting the dumbest shit about a “Blue Wave”; you will be given no hope that any of your neighbors or “community leaders” have any bead on the reality of the situation they are in. It’s the closest thing your eyes will see of the Matrix Pod Fields, with everyone filing neatly into scripted ideologies they have given no actual thought to but perfectly posed in the fetal position as Mark Zuckerberg translates their small consciousness into financial energy for himself and his ilk. And that’s just one platform.
On all the others, broke Americans everywhere are playing the short format, brain rot, lottery of posting the most asinine “hot takes” their A.I. agent can dream up, with crossed fingers that their twerking video might go viral so they can get into a creator reward gulag and forever be known as the woman who can slap concrete with their ass. To defend their honor, the swath of “men” making up the current generation are sure to be found on Tik Tok smashing their heads with hammers or quipping lines from Andrew Tate. It’s all a shit show and try as you might to avoid it, somehow or another you are forced to be aware of it. Yet this is the world you are waking up in.
Maybe if you had a kid, progeny of some sort to pass your experience & wisdom onto there would be more gusto to get up and go. Perhaps if you had reason to attempt to make change in a world that doesn’t want it this weight waking up wouldn’t be as bad, but you don’t because the state and its demigod men in dresses have taken that right away from you too. Your kind aren’t allowed to raise children or mold the minds of the next generation in a manner that might be resistant to all this horror. And even if you did, that same state would simply be beating the door down in due time to take them away at some point, so it was probably a good plan to never even try to begin with.
You know the cliché advice you’d be given for this dilemma is that you should “talk about it” but who the fuck are you supposed to talk to about this perpetual, waking hellscape you come into each day with? A therapist you can’t afford? A minister from the local Zionist propaganda cult masquerading as a corporate Christian church that knows far less of the scriptures they clutch than you? Parents who have been dead over a decade? Siblings you’ve estranged long ago for your own well-being and sanity? One of those three people you can count on one hand still in your life who are all struggling with their own carried crosses and can’t afford to hear any of your heartache at the risk of you lowering their vibe further? That just leaves an A.I. chatbot who is more than willing to hear all your bullshit all day long while simultaneously building a psychological profile on you to provide Sam Altman and company with for the sake of assaulting you with more efficient targeted ads. None of these options come off as effective avenues for “talking through it” when you do the math.
All these thoughts flood in, paralyzing me with despair as thick as bitumen. And I haven’t even opened my eyes yet. This is how waking up with diurnal mood variation begins your day. The less technical name for it is morning depression, which sounds less threatening but neither term accurately describes the soul crushing manner in which it grips you to exhaustion; choking out any hope, joy, or aspiration for life you tried to muster up the day before. Diurnal mood variation is an exquisite hell unlike any other I have ever felt, nor would wish upon another poor soul. I say this as someone who has overcome the worst of addictions and managed to find a functioning medium for PTSD and CPTSD as well. None of which was any slice of paradise, mind you.
A Hell Without a Name
This new affliction has been tormenting me for the last few years now, and like PTSD/CPTSD, its arrival was apparent and alien to me. After all, for most of my life the baseline has been happiness, joy and optimism with incredible amounts of energy attached to them. So, it was easy for me to recognize diurnal mood variation as a new glitch in the system of human experience, that is not a definition of who I am, or representative of how my life has been lived throughout it. Which meant that getting a name for this demon was as simple as typing in the symptoms before the internet spat back at me diurnal mood variation, or morning depression and my journey of research and hope for recovery had begun.
The Stranger in My Own Mind
Videos or articles covering diurnal mood variation do accurately describe the steps of this condition. Absolutely. However, they fail to accurately describe the amount of suffering the condition brings. If you hear someone say they have morning depression you might think it’s just a bit of blues before they’ve had their first cup of coffee and maybe comes on cloudy days but that’s about it. I cannot stress to you enough how wrong you would be.
The Cruelty of Consciousness
As clinical descriptions will tell you, the worst of it is upon waking but as the person enduring it progresses through the day, the symptoms begin to assuage themselves, and eventually the dark cloud begins to part with a few lines of sunshine. Strangely enough, if you make it to noon, those feelings of impending doom and hopelessness might even seem like a distant memory as you begin to feel better and better. Within that small window of forcing yourself from beneath the sheets to a little while after the sun goes down you can even be motivated enough to get a few things done. But the trick to finding this window is being able to indeed pull yourself from those sheets to begin with, which believe me, is no easy task. While attempting it, the weight is so unfathomable and the amount of energy it requires seems unattainable.
Oftentimes you simply cannot, as your body is so exhausted from the process of simply becoming aware in the first place that the best you can do is cover your eyes from the light and struggle to go back to sleep in hopes of waking back up a little later with some semblance of happy thoughts. It’s like playing an old slot machine where you pray that if you go back under for a while you might hit the jackpot the next time you wake up without the torture of your mind’s assault. Though this creates another problem because the exhaustion is so overwhelming you end up sleeping until 3 in the afternoon and the anxiety of every shirked responsibility tackles you as well. People around you will look down upon you as lazy or irresponsible, being completely ignorant of the magnitude of strength it actually took for you to stir back to life to begin with.
The Curse of Sisyphus
On the days when you manage to sidestep staying comatose, pushing through the first two to three hours of the mental & emotional battlefield for that window of normalcy, it too is bittersweet because as it gets closer to nighttime when you know you have to crawl back in bed, the fear of going to sleep grips you; knowing what it is you will have to face once again in the morning. In describing this process of diurnal mood variation, I would simply say it is similar to the task of poor Sisyphus. You know in the back of your mind that once you get that stone to the summit it will do as it always has and roll all the way back down.
Any self-help material you watch or read will give you pointers such as “get to your feet as soon as possible” or “get some sunlight and exercise as soon as you wake up” which seem reasonable enough to those who do not suffer from morning depression. But when you do, the saying “easier said than done” becomes a monumental understatement. In short, diurnal mood variation is much more of a monster to experience than it is to relay to others who may not have it sitting on their chest. Like other unseen conditions, it will be dismissed by others as something you “just need to get over” or can be wished away with a little positive thinking. Speaking from personal experience it is just as terminal as alcohol abuse syndrome, PTSD or CPTSD and its appetite for your life is just as insatiable as any of those.
Perhaps a struggle with diurnal mood variation at other times might not have been so dark & dire, however in the current state of affairs for the country or world, grasping for any silver lining of hope seems a fool’s errand. This errand becomes much more foolish if you are aware, unlike the masses, and try as you might can see no optimistic outcome for much of anything in sight. What reasonable motivation can one cling on to for continuing to exist in this world when there is none to be found no matter how many stones you overturn? Even as someone who has always practiced and believed in positive thinking; these days the best I can do is visualizing an asteroid being hurled at humanity with righteous swiftness before I’m required to participate in this wicked world another day. A world that only provides me peace when I am unconscious and unaware that it even exists at all.
What Rests Beneath My Left Hand
I wish there was some “hack” or technique I could relay to those suffering from diurnal mood variation that can make it go away and allow you to live your life again but there isn’t. All I can do is describe what has given me the strength personally to press on and not choose what I often find in my right hand; which is what rests beneath my left hand faithfully each morning. No matter where my canine companion, Archer, manages to get comfortable enough to drift off to at night, somehow or another he will always arrange himself lying on his back with his belly underneath my left hand. It never fails.
As I come to awareness with all the horrible thoughts and feelings which make me reach in one direction, the warmth from my friend’s belly makes my left hand rise and fall with his breathing as the sound of his snoring soothes me a reprieve from the internal dialogue of madness. With even the smallest sound or movement on my part he stirs himself awake and climbs onto my chest with his cheerful pounce, welcoming me to the world with the unconditional love that can only be provided by God’s most pure of creation. His excitement to see me open my eyes requires both hands in his anticipated and required snuggle and this is what frees my right from what it clung to just prior. This is how I get up and this is how I go on.
I wanted to write about this experience for a couple of reasons. The first being that I needed it exorcised from within me and onto the blank, white page where much of my therapy, healing or recovery takes place. I needed to be able to speak about the effect it has on me candidly without side eyes, dismissiveness, or lack of awareness by any hearer. The other reason is for anyone else who might be suffering from morning depression to the degree in which I do and feel that they are alone also. I wanted to do my best to put language to the extremity of this condition in hopes that someone else might feel seen, and in turn not so alone in their struggle with it. I wanted to make sure that even if no one else around you know it; Yours Truly can testify to the amount of sheer strength and courage it takes for you to simply rise in this world each and every day.
Keep being brave and if all else fails, get a dog.
A SONG TO PLAY US OUT…
About the Author
