There are many days you feel you are on your way to the top of the world, like nothing can beat you. You are productive, creative, the work load decreases in a flash and the day ahead opens up to one of adventure and amusement with much energy to do….well, whatever it is you really want to do. I love those sorts of days. Today being one of them.

Unfortunately, they seem to occur after the rather unfortunate and unwanted incident known globally as – the bad day.

Its hard to explain a day in the life of “Sarah’s Brain”. It is a rather complex fellow, and dare I say – has a mind of it’s own.  Its a circus fiasco at the best of times, and involves a constant waiting for the punchline and a cream pie to the face. There are laughs for sure. Some you partake in, others at your own expense. You drawn on the make up much like the clowns and put on the smile for the world to see, just as long as they don’t look too closely. The eyes always give you away – the murky grey nothingness of where the glisten of your soul used to be. But only the season professionals and season ticket holders seem to spot those. Throw in a jazz hands and no-one is any the wiser.

So, on days like today, you regain the glimmer, and you want to make damn sure you make the most of it, taking tentative steps back to the limelight, carefully, constructively, finding yourself balancing on the tightrope of the ‘middle ground’, trying your very hardest to maintain balance as to not to fall back into the pit of despair. Or of course, fall the other side of the rope, which is equally as concerning – the other side where certain manic episodes are lurking, waiting to take your sanity…and every penny to your name if you are anything like me.

So here we are. Balancing. Neither here nor there, taking one step at a time – with the end of the rope (and rapturous applause) just in sight. Though of course, it is never quite that simple. There always seems to be a fellow clown bearing banana skins ready to slip you up along the way.

Its at this point, I need to clarify something, perhaps for those that don’t know me – and perhaps even a little to myself too, for reasons I will highlight in a mere moment. I’d like to think of myself as a good friend, and a good person come to mention it. I will help my friends when necessary, with advice, tough love, a shoulder to cry on. I’ll be there, with a bottle of wine/chick flick/fresh baked goodies and do my best to help where I can.

But when it comes to the balancing act of my brain on days much like today, I am suitably less help than others. On days like today, I am best suited to keeping myself to myself, as to not evoke a fall in either direction. The ‘fog’ of depression is fading through small bursts of sunlight, and it would only take the smallest of things for it to return and to plummet me back into darkness once more. And I really, really don’t like being in the dark.

On days like today, I will try and do what is best for me.

I can try and explain such things to these “banana friends”, but they don’t quite seem to understand. If anything, assume that you’re actually a pretty rubbish friend after all, and chuck down a skin just for good slippery measure.

Which leads me to my question I am sending out into the webisphere and to you lovely people that take the time to read my random ramblings and meanderings:

“Where is the line – between self preservation and just being cold hearted and deemed in no uncertain terms – a bit of a bitch?”

What if you find yourself confronted with another clown, equally as painted and pretending, and looking for help and no-where to go? Do you forgo your own survival, knowing that you’re maybe, just maybe strong enough to take that extra little slip in place of them, or do you side step the set back and for all intents and purposes, give them an ill-intended shove off the balance bar so you can stay upright?

Depression itself is a notoriously ‘selfish’ illness, making you introvert and intent on surviving your own demons and desolation, so maybe my view is not as unbiased as first thought. Perhaps my own strategy of self preservation is one not so balanced after all and maybe, i’m a little closer to the edge of falling from the rope than first thought.

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What do you think? Leave me a comment!