There was arguably one era of my life that was darker than any other time I’ve experienced.

It was plagued with anger, lashing out at family, breaking things in my house, and also a significant amount of sorrow, despair, and mental turmoil.

Without a doubt, I define this part of my past as the toughest thing I’ve ever experienced – it actually stole from me 5+ good years of my life.

At some point, we’ll all face times like this, where we can easily identify some struggle as the hardest thing we’ve ever been through.

However, while I have experience in living through crippling mental illness, this is actually more about the regular, day to day life of someone who is really just doing the bare minimum as a means to survive.

That someone happens to be me.

I went from job to job the past year, it’s been a handful of work I thought would support my lifestyle better.

The self employment route didn’t work out the way I thought it would.

My personality is not really one where I can easily make decisions and choose for myself which direction to go.

While that may sound like a lack of ambition, or maybe like I’m not taking enough responsibility for my life, at the end of the day, I am more of the mind where I would rather allow someone to tell me exactly what to do, and then let me do it to the absolute fullest and highest degree.

I find that the more I try and figure things out for myself, the less happy I get with what I’m doing.

I am pretty great at doing things with instruction, but choosing for myself sucks, for the most part.

Ok, let me shift topics, because this is all relevant on a micro level.

I struggle with basic things, such as brushing my teeth, doing laundry, sweeping the floors in my house.

Sleep has never come easy to me, and there has rarely been an exception to this.

With this in mind, plus the season of extreme mental illness I went through, it might make more sense when I put this in context.

Basically, with losing so much time to health problems, I fell behind in general, leaving me to figure things out later in life.

In my early 20s, I got my first long-term, part-time job.

I worked at the grocery store for 7 years, up until I was able to quit and help my parents run their music school.

Well, that definitely didn’t work out the way I thought it would.

I find that often I’ll be going through the motions, borderline depressed, just doing enough to get through the day.

Nothing really feels exciting.

It gets extremely monotonous, working for $16.50/hr at the customer service desk.

I wake up around noon or afternoon every day, with a couple of hours to do what I need before I head to work.

Without making excuses, I believe that I’m a night owl on the extreme side of the spectrum.

The only times I really feel a sense of joy are when I get paid on Thursday mornings, and when I spend it on the shiny things I’ve got my eyes on from the other days of the week.

Monsters Who Sleep is actually something that I struggle to finish work with, too.

Relating to the self employment thing I mentioned before where I struggle to make decisions for myself, I find it extremely challenging to make decisions for MWS, too, even when it comes to music and creative things.

Honestly, I haven’t worked on new music in several months for this project, because it is that hard to motivate myself to do it.

So, I am left now with living my life every day, not making enough money to live in my own place, or even with roommates, for that matter.

I’m struggling to brush my teeth every night because my energy is always so low.

At the end of the day, I’m also at a place in dealing with my responsibilities at an extremely minimal level.

While I do take accountability for not keeping up with my chores, and other things that should be done sooner and more often for my own sake, I find that I am often so tired that I can’t even force myself to do basic things.

This combination of things – the sleep issues/night owl, borderline depression, low wage, and struggle to make my own decisions in life – along with the fact that I’m now 31 years old, and have to figure this out later than a lot of people, it’s got me where I just have to carry on, no matter how hard it gets.

The economic state in my country, the political climate, the physical and emotional environment that I live in and work in, it all adds a significant amount of weight to the problems I’m facing.

All I can do at this point is the best that I can.

Sometimes that means I won’t have a good day.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t get through it with a smile on my face.

Maybe you can relate.

Either way, I hope this helps you to realize that you’re not alone.