‘This has to stop now.’

There’s an episode in the second UK “Skins” series where Effy lays jostled amongst her bedsheets — her frame so still, her cigarette burns to ash but doesn’t lose its shape — and crippled by her psychotic depression until her beau Freddie arrives and rescues her, declaring, “OK. We’re gonna’ stop this. This has to stop now.”

I probably saw that for the first time in college. Before flashing my ID in bars lost its novelty, before my DUI, before I started practicing recluse tendencies to avoid going out and blacking out and causing trouble. Because then, the meaning of that episodic moment hadn’t registered. I hadn’t felt weighed down by basic pressures that come with the emergence of adulthood. And so, I locked it away somewhere in my mind — like a vault in a bank with columns and gargoyles outside or whatever. It’s a place that just grows dusty … until one day a harsh light shines on reality.

Now, I think of that episode often. I think about having a boyfriend, a man, a person, anyone, just showing up in my apartment, pulling me from my bed, bathing me, dressing me, and pushing me out into the sunlight. But nobody comes. And some days I watch the red block numbers illuminating from my alarm clock change minute by minute, my time to get ready for work melting away. I don’t think about anything except how I can’t get up. Until I just do it. And somehow I go to work. With my mascara blotchy, and my shirt half-tucked, and fingers executing a Kung Fu grip around a giant energy drink. Then, it becomes mechanical. I have a place to be, and I get there. But other days, the days when people are supposed to get up and go out and pay bills, buy groceries, or walk around and just talk to other humans … those days, sometimes I can’t reason my way out of bed.  And there’s no one there to tell me, “This has to stop now.”

I lay in bed for hours, but not sleeping. I watch a piece of broken ceiling tile dangle from above. I listen to the creaks and voices of my neighbors in the other apartments near me. I observe the sunlight alternate shades of yellow, orange and white, through the newspaper pages taped over my window. And I contemplate my motives for waking up that day. Where I am going, what am I doing, why is anything happening? Just a feeble spot, twitching to breathe.

But this aggressive inability to combat my own apathy, my own dissatisfaction, is not without self-awareness. I’m competently aware that I am a challenge unto myself. And therein lies the neurosis — one that nullifies action with expected, but unpreventable inaction, that kills motivation and self-instigation, leaving you a mess in bed clothing. Is failure imminent, will I feel the sting of those consequences?

And the older you get, the harder these things are to break. It isn’t a routine, but a part of you the way being left-handed is. So, you might read self-help books, you might pray or recite affirmations, you might go to counseling, or maybe you rest on your own cojones. Yet, I don’t do any of those. Sometimes I still manage to find hope in fleeting fantasies and daydreams. Like what if that’s the motivation I needed to live my life outside of my inner droidism? What if there’s just a man, any man out there, what if that’s what I need? But I am my own false profit. There’s a but for just about anything.