I can’t write this week.  I’ve tried several times.  Two or three paragraphs in, it falls apart and the message I meant to speak becomes a ball of words with no real significance.  I’m too tangled up inside, I think, to be able to present something linear and coherent on the outside.  I’m a mess.  I’m in a dark and desperate space, and that darkness and desperation are coloring my words.  I never want to speak darkness and desperation.  I want always to speak hope and love and light.

And right now, I can’t.

If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.  That statement runs through my head.  But it isn’t niceties that concern me, since I often offend others with the ways I communicate.  It is the absence of the hope and love and light that concerns me.  I never want to offer the world my depression and my struggle and my suffering.  I always want to offer the beauty and the good, even in the midst of pain or confusion or whatever the day might bring.  And for the moment, I can’t.

I can’t find the positive in the negative that surrounds me.  And I can’t be the positive in the negative that surrounds me.  And I can’t even want the positive in some moments.  I sometimes get so tired of the invalidation and the inability and the incapacitation present in my life that I want to lie down to sleep and not get up again—ever.

Yes, that sometimes means I am suicidal, but it doesn’t mean that today.  It means that being in this much pain and suffering this much mental anguish and being marginalized in such a way is at times unbearable.  I simply cannot imagine coping with it for one more day.

But tomorrows keep coming, so I keep coping.  Even on the days I feel I can’t go on, I do.

Because I also can’t stop.  Not unless I die.  And a life of suffering still outweighs death, whether that is my choice or my survival instinct or the influence of some outside force, so I keep choosing to live on.  The idea that I can’t stop overpowers the idea that I can’t go on.  So I go on.

I can’t keep this up, but I can’t quit.

Where does that leave me?

Stuck in a place I hate, I suppose.  At least for now.  Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow will be worse. I don’t know.

I never know.

So I can’t tell you.