N.K. Murray

I have started to write this 100 times. The thoughts, my thoughts bounced around in my head, dancing with my demons, and generally creating a swarm of letters that meant nothing.  That murder hornet-like swarm of nothing didn’t just buzz around annoyingly – hell, if it had, I likely would have been okay with it. Instead, it became this cacophony of screamed nonsense getting louder and louder until. . . well, tonight. 

2023 kicked my ass. Actually, I sometimes wish it would have only kicked my ass – instead it macerated me into this grey mass of flesh that used to be me. The details are unimportant. They aren’t, really – they are the very crux of everything that got me to this point, but for the purposes of me sitting here right this minute writing, they simply don’t matter. I would love to say I handled it well. I would love to say I am sitting here on my couch watching a Sunday Night Football enlivened by the challenges I made it through this past year, but in reality, I’m exhausted. In all manner of ways, I am exhausted. There may not be a word strong enough to say how mentally shot I am. 

For background – I have struggled with anxiety and depression since I was a kid. I’ve tried therapy a couple of times – 0 out of 10 stars and wouldn’t recommend for me. (That’s a whole other conversation for a different day.) I had convinced myself that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to deal with it. I have been on a parade of pharmaceuticals touting their ability to rid me of my anxiety and depression over the years, and was so sick of how shitty I felt at one point that I stopped them cold turkey – the #1 no-no of these types of drugs. Since then, I’ve taken a single anti-anxiety med, which when taken at night, has a lovely side effect of helping me sleep.  I’m certain that I could have tried other things; after all, the tech changes so rapidly in this space, but it was a point of pride that I was relatively unmedicated. But I KNEW something else was wrong with me – I wasn’t just anxious, and I wasn’t just depressed, even though either of these can be crippling on their own, let alone together. I knew something else was causing me to feel the way that I was feeling and to make me do and not do all of the things. 

I’ve spent the last year researching, recognizing, and being diagnosed with ADHD – at 45 years old, mind you. All of the things that I thought were just because I was fucked up and strange and different, now made sense. Of course, I look back through my childhood in these vignettes in my head and it’s enough to make me want to scream until my throat bleeds and my head splits open from the massive ‘I told you so’. All those times I felt different and was told I was anti-social and weird was simply my brain processing my reality differently than others did. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why Poe resonates so deeply for me. My favorite poem of his (and likely not the one people would think of as my favorite, considering my tattoo choices) is and has always been ‘Alone‘. Specifically the line – ‘and all I lov’d – I lov’d alone’. I’ve always had to justify why I was and am the way I am, and have always have had to explain why I loved or hated something. Just loving/hating something, just being the way I was and am was never enough – I had to make sure that everyone else was comfortable with it because it wasn’t what they liked or were like. . . because maybe then they’d understand me.

Poe’s poem felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was easy to wear my oddity like armor and feigning like it was fine when I wasn’t invited to play in the reindeer games, so to speak. When that got old, I put on this mask of normalcy because that’s what was required of me to get through my day. If I wanted to do more and be more, I had to BE more. Except it was never BE more for me. . . it was BE someone else. I used pieces of myself that were acceptable to help me fit in, hiding the pieces of me that were less desirable. I believed my masking was giving me what I wanted, and allowing me to be who I wanted. I occupied myself with more and more things and activities to fill the gaping holes left by the pieces of me that I lost, and the people in my life who are no longer here. 

I’ve been trying to bring the ocean to the desert. And I failed so epically that if I hadn’t been so distraught by the constant effort I felt compelled to put into it, followed by the utter futility of the whole fucking thing, it would have been comical.

Things changed so drastically that I felt like I had been swept over Niagara Falls and shattered on the rocks below. When 2023 came in, it was only a question of which battering I was in for mentally each day. Was I the scow holding on for dear life for 100 years and finally becoming unmoored in the rapids? Was I stuck in the maelstrom of our Class VI rapids, heading towards Devil’s Hole? Or was I just going to be stuck in the water heading towards the falls over and over again in my head. 

My head was not a safe place to be. Not for me. It certainly wasn’t safe for human consumption – my dark thoughts will travel. Much like Belle Gunness, they poisoned my life and those in it.

And yet, through the haze of those dark thoughts, I recognized something that I hadn’t before – call it a cross between self-awareness and acceptance that there are things in this miasma of mine that I cannot change. My depression has days where it acts like you’d expect it to – and days where it doesn’t. I realize now that my ADHD feeds the anxiety and depression, and vice versa – or perhaps it’s that they are now so intertwined that I can’t tell which is which or what is what. This year has certainly been enlightening, and if nothing else, has certainly allowed me to prove to myself how fucking strong I truly am.

I have also realized that I can’t keep being a macerated, grey lump of depressed/anxious/generally neurodivergent flesh. That’s not to say I can’t be depressed/anxious/generally neurodivergent – I just can’t do it the way that I have been doing it. It’s not healthy – not for me, not for those around me. And the only way I can fix this, is to channel my inner Elle Woods.

So, for 2024 –

1. I need to get off my ass and do the hard thing (working out) because it makes me feels better when I do – even though my demons scream at me to stay sitting and stewing in my terrible thoughts. I’ve signed up for my 2nd Run the Year Challenge (2024 miles in 2024), my 12th Ride for Roswell, my 5th Dunnville Grand Tour Virtual Challenge, and my first in-person Dunnville Grand Tour. While they aren’t the Empire State Ride, I figure they are enough to keep my demons occupied this year.
2. I need to write more, because the more that I get the words out of the typhoons swirling in my head, the more I can logic them into something that makes sense, and thereby starving my demons of the things that set their table. I’m endeavoring to write here more on a weekly/biweekly basis. Hence the website redesign – the previous one wasn’t working for me. Fingers crossed this one is better.
3. I need to re-learn how to work with my demons, instead of constantly fighting them. Those little fuckers need to be retrained, and the only way to do that is to mute them when they are being unruly, and applaud them when they don’t make my life hell. 
4. I need to stop doing things that don’t serve me and my demons. Too often, I have over-extended myself to do more and be more for someone else to my own detriment. I have to draw a line in the sand. Hard stop.
5. I need to hold myself accountable, because it’s less painful than having someone else do it, while also being excruciating in its own special kind of hellish way.
6. And most important of all – I need to give myself some grace. What I didn’t say at the start of this, is that while 2023 ate me for breakfast, I let it. I let it consume me. I let it batter me into bits, because it was easier than trying to fight against the currents in my head. A friend told me today that I need to stop with the negative self-talk, and she’s right. And I have to stop allowing my current state of mind feed the demons who are constantly trying to feast on me.

I have big plans, ones that I can only accomplish if I get out of my own way. I plan on using my site to help me accomplish those goals. If you’d like to follow along with my dark thoughts on social media, feel free to follow me on instagram @darkthoughtswilltravel. I also have an Apple Music playlist that I’ll be messing around with as the mood strikes me. I can’t promise pretty pictures, nonsensical pleasantries, or shiny, happy, poppy shit, so if you expect that, well, clearly you don’t know me very well.

So – if you’ve made it to this point, what the hell is wrong with you?! 

Kidding. . . kind of. Please consider this my thank you for reading what I’ve written, and know that it means the world to me. I can’t express how incredible it is to know that I have people who support me.