Mental illness has a way of fucking with your perception of time. Bad times seem to go on forever with no end in sight. When you look back, you remember mostly the bad times with the occasional glimmer of something good, which inevitably feels like something irrevocably lost. You’re never going to feel that way again. You’re stuck in this now, for the rest of your life, probably. Feelings take over even though you know time doesn’t work this way, and what you feel like is haunted by disappointment and despair and desperation.

Well, that’s where I’m at currently. I’m in one of the bad times, where it becomes difficult to write and nothing really feels worth doing. I’m good at writing in two different headsets: when I have enough space and clarity to examine something calmly and thoroughly – or when I’m actually in the middle of a meltdown and I’m typing through tears and shaking fingers.

I’m writing this in the middle of the BFI, waiting to watch a film in a couple of hours, and I feel empty. This is one of my favourite places in my city. It’s like an adulthood equivalent to the Barbican, which has been a touchstone since my childhood. I started coming to the BFI after moving out and it’s remained somewhere special ever since. I’ve come here with lots of different people – many of whom aren’t in my life any more – but this place has always stayed mine. Somewhere comforting, somewhere reliable. I’m grateful for that.

I keep returning to gratitude. I found some peace the other night reading through old memos and saved quotes. It’s weird how I saved phrases and advice years ago when I was in trouble, and these same lines help me today. It’s weird how so much changes over time, and how so much remains exactly the same.

Over the past week, I’ve had multiple moments of utter despair. I’ve cried a lot and I’ve found myself wishing for an easy way out. A return to an old status quo, to curl up in a miserable safety blanket.

But I know myself well enough to know that I’m incapable of choosing that path. I don’t think there’s any pain I’ve known that compares to how I’ve felt when a source of hope and joy also turns out to be a source of heartbreak, toxicity, or suffocation. There’s definitely something in me that seeks out the Cathy and Heathcliff of it all, but I’m trying to find a balance. In part, it’s why I’m here, in one of my favourite buildings in London. This place is the right kind of comfort but it’s also testament to my adult life. This place goes beyond comfort. It has sharp edges. It’s seen me through all of the heartbreaks and murmured hopelessnesses. It tells me that life is hard and unstoppable but the horizons are pink.

Remember that I have survived. Remember, too, what I still want.

Now, I choose the path that might lead me to what I still want. I choose the path of fear and uncertainty. When I poke at the heartbreak, that’s what I find nestled underneath the surface, tender and oozing. I’m afraid. I am scared of being weak, I am scared of not being good enough, I am scared of being honest and alone.

In gratitude, I find some strength. In a screenshot of one of my own text posts from last year, I found a kind of poem: everything is difficult and maybe it doesn’t make any difference, but maybe it helps just a little to remember. That I am not homeless, that I am not broke, that I am not in an abusive house, that I am not in a relationship with a man who makes me feel small and worthless, that I am not alone. Maybe it helps just a little to remember: I survived.

When you’re in one of the bad times, everything feels pointless. For me, reality is distant. Cause and effect is a dream. So it’s good to remember, even if only for this minute, that I am choosing to take care of myself, instead of looking for care in poisonous hearts and flaky feelings. I choose to turn to my friends and trust in their love, instead of trusting in a mental illness that insists I am alone and forgotten. I choose to remain raw, tearing open the heartbreak so that this fear is dislodged and cannot fester. I choose to bandage my own wounds, feeling my pulse racing in the face of uncertainty, and I choose to take my next step forward anyway. I choose to survive.

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by old Tumblr text posts and a history of cinema.

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