6 Months In Darkness

It's been 6 months since I've last been on Steemit. Mostly due to the fact I've been trapped in a dark abysmal hole, completely void of all light. I'm speaking figuratively of course, but it has certainly felt like it. I was living in a perpetual state of horror, severe depression, and rage. I felt myself slipping away, I was screaming in my mind, but nothing would come out of my mouth. My eyes were bloodshot from endless tears that never actually fell. My head, pounding like I've been banging it on the pavement, though I haven't been outside in months. Well, I drove with my mind on autopilot to and from work, but never once stopped to acknowledge anything or anyone else's existence. Physically I was here, a productive member of society. Mentally, I was broken. Like I was trapped inside my mind and just along for the ride in this human husk, this fleshy body. Constantly screaming without a single sound.

It started with little things. Just little things in life getting me down and frustrating me. Car insurance bill consistently being ridiculously high, never yielding. My worthless dead-end job that barely pays enough to get by. My truck falling apart and I not having enough money to fix it. Just normal everyday stresses, right? That's life. Well, after a while, those all just become routine and the stress tends to ease up a bit from it becoming almost mundane and boring.

Fast forward a few weeks of that continuous pricking of the soul, my grandmother in law falls deathly ill. I'm driving 3 hours to and from 2 to 3 times a week to visit with her. Effectively diminishing my funds and will power. After being on hospice and in the hospital for a few weeks, the doctor gives the orders that she isn't going to make it much longer and that we needed to say goodbye. The family decided to "pull-the-plug" and with everyone in the room, the nurse comes in and begins pulling an air tube out of her throat that was helping her breathe. Several minutes go by, everyone is sobbing, silent, and the room is drenched with sorrow. My aunt then goes and opens the blinds too a large window directly across from my grandmother's bed. Now, this whole time, my grandmother has barely been able to hold her eyes open, let alone breathe on her own... When those blinds opened, a brilliant ray of sunlight beamed in and shined directly upon her. Just in that moment, her eyes open, she begins breathing better, and soon later begins to mumble a few words. She is instantly a hundred times better!
Everyone eventually leaves and it's just me, my aunt, and my fiance that remain. It's dark now, about 7 or 8 at night. We eventually say our goodbyes and prepare for the drive back home.

Fast forward about 2 weeks later, after everything was starting to look up. We get a phone call. "... Grandmother has fallen and hit her head...". My grandmother was on the up and up, getting better and was able to walk around, there was even talk of her coming home. Then this, she falls and hits her delicate, beautiful head. The blow to the head sent her spiraling back down, and she developed pneumonia and soon passed.
Thus begins my descent into darkness...

After my grandmother's funeral, my aunts and their true colors are shown. It was brought to light that while my grandmother was on the hospital, literally on her death bed and barely coherent, One aunt had tricked my grandmother into signing papers that gave her power of attorney over her last will and testament and she promptly omitted everyone out of the will but herself. After she had gained possession of everything, she put the house and my grandmother's car up for sale, and told the other aunts to come take what they wanted and later told my fiance and I to come get what we wanted. I didn't want anything and my fiance just wanted some photos, cookbooks, and some of the kitchenware. When we're got there, we found the house stripped, almost completely bare and one of my aunts opens a closet with old, slightly to never used kitchen ware and no books. Come to find out, another aunt had already given all the cookbooks and and kitchenware to her daughter, who was never around to begin with. To summarize, we discovered the other aunts were playing their own little greedy games and had already taken everything and told my fiance and I that they had no idea where it all went.
To say the least, we no longer have a relationship with that side of the family.

Now jump ahead a few more weeks, after the deep wound had scabbed over on begun to heal. I start to try and get back into making music. I struggle and struggle with it trying to get back in the groove. I begin having problems with recording vocals and nothing I recorded or wrote was good enough. For some reason, it seemed as though I lost my touch. My vocals sounded horrible, the instrumentals I made were awful. Nothing was working, which just pushed me further into the abysmal depression pit. I began feeling like I just wasn't good enough. I developed this vile character in my head and no matter what I did, it just wouldn't go away. It was like having a voice in my head that happened to be my worst enemy. It kept repeating the same stabbing words over and over.
"You'll never be anything. You will never be anyone. You're worthless. You're just a talentless dreamer. You not good enough to do or be anything great."
Eventually, I started believing it. It was kind of hard not to give in when everything I had been trying to accomplish just kept failing. I was plunged deep into an ocean of great self-loathing. I couldn't stop thinking about how the future in my life was going to be so mundane. So empty. So anticlimactic. I couldn't take it. I broke down and just started sobbing uncontrollably with that same voice uttering those same words on repeat in my head. I tried virtually everything I could think of to try and shut it out, but to no avail. So I began chain-smoking twice as much as normal and drinking. Heavily. It became a daily routine. I'd wake up, do a shot of whiskey, go to work, come home, do a few more shots, then drink an entire 6-pack of beer and oftentimes chased it with more whiskey. I was in a perpetual state of drunkenness like I've never been before. But it worked... The menacing voice in my head became a jolly, bubbly idiot. It was fun to have around, it made me fun. But as most good things do, I began vomiting blood, my lungs and heart hurt tremendously all the time from all the cigarettes, I developed crippling headaches, I stopped eating, and was just in a terrible state of being. I was killing myself. After waking up sober one morning and looking at myself in the mirror, I knew I had to stop or I wasn't going to be around much longer. I sucked it up, stopped all the heavy boozing and chain-smoking, and decided to get back into the music.
I went online and bought a new and relatively good microphone for really cheap. After about a week of playing with the new mic, getting used to it, and made some decent quality demo tracks, I decided I was going to start getting serious about my music again. I was cranking out new instrumentals left and right that were among the best I've ever made. I would listen to them on repeat while I was at work and I'd write lyrics to them, I was excited. I was thinking, "Man, this it. Here's my groove! Rorschakk's back!"
Everyday for about a week was all sunshine and rainbows. After writing lyrics for a few songs, I figured it was time to start recording some vocals with my brand new microphone. Things were getting better... Or so I thought.
Of course, as my luck would have it, upon trying to record vocals forbmy first track, my laptop died. I tried to turn it back on but nothing. I left it plugged in for a while and came back and it turned on, but only for a few minutes then it would die again. After exhausting all ideas and experiencing these new error screens, it hit me, my laptop is done for. My old faithful has had enough and I'm left with nothing, once again...
Down, down, down I go. Back into the blackest hole.

I began drinking again, not as heavily, but I was drunk more often than not. Heavy depression set in, just knowing that theres no way in hell I can afford to fix my laptop and I can't even entertain the thought of just getting a new one.
At this point, I've just given up. The relentless stresses of life constantly bearing down on me. Everyday is something new. Something to scratch away at my soul. Everyday is someone wanting money, a new part breaking on my truck, a surprise inspection at the apartments I don't technically live at, another random ass-hole at the gas station. Just non-stop corrosion of my will to be here. All that coupled with the continuous failures and losing the people close to me caused me to mentally check out. I was but a zombie for several weeks. I didn't talk to anyone, didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything, I just went to work and back home. Just like a good little cog-in-the-wheel working class American. I admit, I wish I was able to do that on command. Something about being able to just take a vacation and leave completely without actually leaving, I find to be very alluring. I was there, but I wasn't. My responses were like generic responses that would answer any question. Something like; "Hey, what are you doing this weekend?", I'd give a look as though I'm thinking then respond with a vague response, "Oh, you know. Not much. Maybe a little something.", which kind of answers, but doesn't really. That's how I went through life for the next few weeks. Muscle memory and vague generic phrases.

Once I got back from my little hiatus, I thought to myself, "OK, we're back. We can do this. Just work and save enough money to fix or buy a new laptop and we'll be on our way!" and this worked for a while. I wasn't happy, but wasn't so depressed. I felt I was getting better, I felt that things in general were getting better. So here we are, about 4 months and 15 days after the initial plunge into the darkness and I'm told my father was in the hospital, his voice is gone. I thought, "oh, strep throat, he'll be ok."... nope. My father has come down with something that the doctors don't even know what or how it happened. His vocal cords are paralyzed.
Jump ahead a month, doctors still don't know what is going on with his vocal cords, and I begin researching myself. Come to find out, this can be caused by strokes or some kind of damage being done to the vocal cords. Losing your voice isn't too terrible, but what worries me the most, is if they become completely paralyzed, he won't be able to eat or drink without choking. So now I'm in a constant state of worry. Then as to be expected, things get a lot worse, real fast.

My step-father is rushed to the ER. He's having sever and constant chest pains, he is then looked over and admitted into the hospital.
They run several tests to try and see what it is going on and over the period of two days that they are doing this, I'm feeling like I'm going to have a heart attack myself! It was like night and day, one day everything is alright, the next, my world is engulfed in flames, such is the way things tend to be with me. So they finally find what it was, turns out he just had a large ulcer where his stomach and esophagus meet. When I hear this news, I'm filled with joy and glad to hear it's not heart problems. But again, as things tend to work out for me, once I get comfortable or happy in the slightest, something has to go wrong. I get a text about a week or two later from my step mother.

My nephew had drown. I can't even begin to describe the feeling I felt deep down in my gut. The pain that I know my sister is feeling, the pain of losing her 5 year old baby boy. It resonates through me. I can feel her tremendous sorrow. As if that wasn't bad enough. I muscle through work and comes the funeral 5 days later and I get a text from my father.

Turns out she was fine, but it's just one thing after another. Now, as of 3 days ago, my fiance had to go to the hospital and come to find out, she's "severely anemic". So much so, she can barely walk a few steps without becoming intensely exhausted and her heart starts to beat at extreme rates of speed. As of yesterday, the doctor put her on some medications and said if she doesn't get better in a couple days, she's going to need blood transfusions immediately...

Well, here we are now, today on October 14th. Just admiring the view from down here in the blackened abyss. So far it has been a quiet day, and my mind is racing. Stuck on an infinite loop of every decision I've made, every time I've ever screwed up, every little decision that pushed me further from my goal in life. Sitting here pondering what to do next and what might happen next.
I don't know. We'll see.

P.S.
I don't mean to come off as if I'm complaining, this just was me thinking of a way to vent out all this built up tension, and you know what? I have to say this did help a little bit.
Sorry for the depressing rant.

'Til next time, stay cool.