Someone once told me that Mars bars used to be called the garbage bar. Low quality chocolate wrapped around the cheapest filling the creators could find.

Cheap and shit and tasty.

I am eating a mars bar while writing this, my second in five minutes, eyes sliding between the stains on the carpet and the off white tacking on the wall where the pictures fell down.

It’s 1am, I got home at 5pm, fell asleep, woke at 9pm.
Missed meeting my friends at 6pm, need to leave for work at 6am.

So there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but think and try not to think and wander back over the same tired topics over and over again.

And eat.

I have been stress eating all day. I have been aware that I have been stress eating all day all day.

I’ve done no exercise today, I missed out on socialisation, and I’m fucking my sleep schedule right up.

I am doing everything wrong, and I’m aware of it.
But at the same time trying to do anything else right now would invite disaster, and I’m aware of that too.

And it’s a really weird feeling.

I think people are about 10 parts meat to 1 part mind, you’re mostly just an animal, or a very poorly made machine, the rational conscious bit isn’t really in control, most of the time.

It can just kind of nudge the meat about a bit, twitch the wheel and tap the brakes and hope the box it’s trapped inside takes the corner.
Having good “mental health” is mostly just keeping the meat between the ditches.

I’ve done all the work you’re supposed to do when unfucking yourself.

Some of it’s mental, conscious, like becoming aware of what causes low moods and learning how to spot when anxiety or self loathing or whatever is twisting your perception of a situation.

And that stuff works, I know what’s going on.

But I guess it doesn’t actually make those things go away, it just means I get these little oddly knowing, introspective moments in the middle of trying not to break down and scream in the work toilets or on the bus over some molehill I’ve turned into a mountain for no reason.

Good mental health is mostly about chemistry, at least to me. Throwing up guard rails, knowing the weights and measures, the recipes for human soup.

You can’t out think chemistry, and I think that’s both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand I can just do stuff to effect my brain chemistry and feel better even if my actual situation hasn’t really improved. On the other hand everything can be objectively going well until some non issue completely flips my mood and results in pathetic behaviour like sitting in my bed at 1:30am trying not to think about how I’m such an inhuman piece of fucking shit and it’s never going to get be-

Mars Bar.
Try not to look at the wrapper as it joins its brothers in the pile.

Right now the meat is telling the mind that everything is fucking terrible and we’re crashing out this time, all gas, no brakes, off the track and into the shit. The mind retorting that things are going quite well actually, and perhaps we actually just need to slow down and sit out in the sun for a bit and try and intellectualise all this back into order is shouted down.

Hence the Mars Bars.
Fuck it.
Third Mars Bars.

A little chocolaty brake lever.
A little log of shit I can push into the meat to short the alarms for a few minutes and which the mind will torment itself about later on.

Empty calories, trash, a bad habit.
I can run 20 miles without stopping.
The Mars Bar makes me feel bad though.

So I’ll just have to read a book or have sex or go for a run or go for a run or go for a run or jack off or sleep for twelve hours or play computer games to 4 in the morning to take my mind off it for a minute.

Feed the meat and numb the mind and hope I can get back on track to do any of the shit I actually really want and need to get done.

I don’t know.
Maybe there’s not much else to it.
Maybe this is what it’s like for everyone.
Keep her between the ditches, she’ll be sweet.

But it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating in a way that pinballing around when I didn’t know any of the guard rail safety valve stuff wasn’t. I can see what’s going wrong but I can’t go straight long enough to fix any of it.

I’m just stuck skidding back and forth between different kinds of catastrophe, slowly trying to arrest myself back into something like a straight line.

It’s infuriating, I know I can do better than this, have done better than this.
It feels like a defeat, veering towards the ditch again, hanging off the steering wheel, barely in control.
But it’s not, it’s just an odd kind of victory, barely in control is still in control, barely in control will get you home.

Just barely, barely in control, one little slip fro-

Mars Bar.
I feel sick.