Dark Days

The reason I haven't been writing much is because I am experiencing a bout of depression.
You can call it postpartum.
You can call it anxiety induced.
You can call it Seasonal Affect Disorder.
It doesn't really matter what the source is.
What matters is that right now, I am having trouble sleeping.
I can be exhausted beyond belief, but the moment the baby falls asleep and I'm alone in the dark with my thoughts, my brain begins obsessing about death, suffering, the meaninglessness of my life, the pointlessness of having brought a child into this cruel and horrible world.

I lie there for hours with my brain running this indoor track marathon.
When I do fall asleep finally, it's often into nightmares. Sometimes it's into anxiety riddled dreams that I technically wouldn't call nightmares but certainly aren't restful.
For the last month, I wake up just as tired as I was when I went to bed, and it has nothing to do with the baby.

During the day I feel my brain scrounging through itself for creativity like  a spoon scraping the concave, glass sides of a peanut butter jar. Is there anything left? I ask myself. Scrape scrape scrape...
A tiny rind of an idea comes up, and I attempt to execute it. Often, it is thwarted by the baby's schedule, or the cold weather, or transportation, or money, or simply as soon as I get started I decide I don't know what I was thinking trying to do anything to begin with.

A lot of times this is even when I try to play with Baz.

I want to dance with him, so sing songs, set up fun imaginative activities, but he is still so little everything gets jammed in his mouth and he either fights me to smash things, rips apart whatever I was trying to build, or stuffs things in his mouth and I either have to shove my fingers between his teeth and get bitten several times to save him from poisoning himself or choking, or I have to accept that whatever he just swallowed is either going to be okay or warrant a trip to the hospital.

Lately it's a cycle of horror.

I can't help but feel like with the current political climate we are all going to die.

Climate change, missile launches, terrorist attacks, nuclear arms races, oil conglomerate battles, pollution, all of it.
Everything I read basically leads me to the conclusion that at any moment we could go up in a ball of fire and if we're lucky, we'll get maybe twenty more years before we wish we had.
It all leads me back to the same questions over and over.

What am I doing?

How do I help?

How do I protect my kid?

What if it's already too late?

This is where I am right now.

I don't have the answers.

How is anyone getting any sleep right now?

I feel like no matter what I do, I'm doing it wrong, and yet if we're all about to die, shouldn't I be living life to the fullest? Shouldn't I be taking Bastian on all the adventures there are to have? Eating ice cream for breakfast lunch and dinner? Dancing and screaming and playing until we fall down?
And yet I can't.

It hurts too much.

It hurts too much to think of how beautiful this world was at one time, and how he's never going to see it like that.

And right when I've stopped crying long enough to actually engage with my child, he starts trying to electrocute himself on the computer printer, or pull the shelves out of the bureau down onto his head, or goddammit what did he just put in his mouth?!

I keep fighting to keep my kid from killing himself, but then I just don't have the will to do anything else because I don't know why I'm doing it.

People tell me its' always been this scary.
People tell me there's no getting over it, we just have to.

Well you let me know how that's going, will you? Because I'm still over here, not sleeping.