What It's Like to Want to Do Something, but Mental Illness Holds You Back

How can the forces within work so directly against one another?

My mind runs and runs and runs, high on the desire to complete each task that fills the endless list of “should do’s” or “want to do’s.” It plans for it all. It plans for the daily and it plans for the future and it plans for the passions — the writing, the art classes, the singing, the reading, the cooking, the strengthening, the therapy, the traveling, the career chasing, the world changing.

And the obsession becomes world altering.

But it stops there because the body is numb to it all. If there is no feeling, there is no way to be shaken awake. There is no ear to hear the screams for something to happen, for anything to change.

And so you look up from the bottom of your life, willing your feet to step up. You look up at all of it and you know you should be sitting up there in confident control over the life you so desperately want to own. That throne sits empty because the queen of it all cannot will herself to care about the kingdom only she can help.

Follow this journey on the author’s blog.

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Thinkstock photo via domoyega