Demon Days

Hey, it’s Beckley.  I haven’t posted anything for a bit.  I’ve been stuck in the death-days.  That’s what I call them, anyway.  There are times when I, and everyone I’ve ever met, just gets stuck in this negative place and fixates on death.  It’s not a depression because it doesn’t necessarily affect daily functioning on the global scale that an actual episode does.  Rather, I think that this is a result of the fact that we all have some form of PTSD or adjustment issue.  At some point, it all becomes overwhelming.  We see the ruin around us, we see the animated corpses shambling, and suddenly everything seems pointless.  You just focus on death and the inevitability of your journey towards it.

So for a while I’ve just been focused on the death that surrounds us.  I’ve been going about my routine, doing my job, helping out, but not feeling much in the way of hope or happiness.  It’s just going through the motions because what else am I going to do?  Everything seems pointless but you keep moving because the only other option is jumping straight to death, and with reanimation being a reality, that death becomes a danger to everyone around you.

Nearly everyone I’ve talked to has experienced this at some point.  This overwhelming feeling of ennui and pointlessness.  If the DSM-V (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the Bible for people in the psychology field and the 5^th edition was more delayed prior to The Fall than Chinese Democracy) had ever come out, this phenomena would probably be named “Adjustment-Induced Emo Disorder” or something like that.  Whatever the case, I think we all struggle with it.

It’s a loss of meaning, I think.  Our world was taken from us and we’re forced to make something new.  And it’s wonderful that we’re doing so, but this is a loss that strikes us to our core.  The years before The Fall were defined by technology, information being readily available, mass communication, and so on.  We have none of that now.  We’re knocked back to a culture closer to the pioneer roots of this country, but with anachronistic technology.  So we’ve lost the meaning we had and that catches up with us at times.  But we snap back.  I guess it’s fitting that I’ve come out of my death-days now.  I didn’t even remember that Thanksgiving was tomorrow until someone reminded me.  Although to be honest, I don’t even know what day of the week it is most of the time.  Without a watch to tell me, I just can’t keep track.  Sometimes I think the only reason anyone does keep track of the days is so we can still celebrate the old holidays.  

And this is an important one to celebrate.  Because despite the horrors we’ve been through, despite the terrible things we’ve seen and done, despite the feeling that life is pointless, we can still be thankful.  We’re alive and being alive gives life a purpose.  And it allows us to pull others out of the depths of their own death-days.  Because none of us exist in a vacuum.  We all need each other.  So thanks to all of you for letting me make Haven my home.