long time between drinks

I remember the last time I was about to write here, it had already been quite a while between posts.

Ironically, the reason I never got around to writing that positivity-filled post updating you all on my world is because suddenly the fragility of it all became apparent and the mind-world crumbled for a few days or a week and my motivation to check in subsequently died.

And here I am, between smooth sailing once again; caught in the shifting of tectonic plates as I try to calm my racing thoughts and stay grounded amongst my erratic emotions. Right now I am a little down. Winter is officially here and I'm cold and tired and it doesn't help things. I sit with a mindful smile and try to keep the negativity from sinking in.

This the most important part: knowing that how I feel right now is but temporary.
It too shall pass.

This is just a wave and I will ride it out.
It's a long way from where I started. And I guess that's something to be proud of in itself.

On that note, I will update you on one thing: I recently just passed my first year of working in a steady job. That's a big accomplishment for me in recent days. I am lucky. I have good people around me and am part of an understanding team there.

Customer service is involved too. Who'd have thunk it? Me back in the saddle.

So I guess amongst these dreary feelings I nurture a small flame against the wind. It is a tiny, ember of hope and pride and sanity. I am stronger than I ever suspected.

My Black Dog

It's been a few months since I've been motivated enough to write here. Even my personal diary hasn't seen a pen for a while.

A quick recap before I get into the flow of what I want to write about.
In the past 3 months:

• I got the job I was interviewed for last time we spoke. My manager is nice and they are flexible with my hours, since sometimes of late I haven't been up to working (more on that later). The work is simple and repetitive. I excel in the tasks, to the point that it irks me somewhat because I see a lot of coworkers doing the same thing alongside me, but sacrificing good results for speed. It's frustrating to see products going out the door that are woefully put together, yet I've been passive-aggressively told I'm too slow. Sigh. Well, screw you. At least I can see the art in what I'm doing, and I will never be dragged over the coals for creating something sub-standard.
• My second shift in, I was carpooling a workmate and I home when a man using his mobile phone rear ended  my car and shoved us into the back of the car in front of us. My car was a write-off, and after much back-and-forth between the insurance company and myself, I have finally only now bought myself an acceptable second-hand car.
• I started anti-depressants, which is much of the reason I will rant later in this post. I have tried 2 variants of pain-killer/anti-depressant drugs, and aside from having my joint pain reduced I am not thrilled with the results.
• I enrolled in an online course studying Training & Education. It's a field I've been curious about for a while now so with my leftover dollars from the purchase of my new car, I signed myself up to an at-your-own-pace 12month run. The 6month course was cheaper, but I'm a realist. I'm probably already behind schedule.

So that pretty much brings you up to speed.

The weather is slowly turning Springward. I have been feeling the winter a lot more than usual this year: trouble getting and keeping warm, more joint pain than usual, and the to-be-expected Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Today I took the day off work due to a few reasons; my hip is very sore and I need to see my chiro again, plus I had a rough night with a lot of tears and a foot through the wall, plus my partner has had some bad news regarding one of her clients at her work also. So we've declared ourselves unfit for anything too taxing today.
She currently has a workmate over and they are enjoying a cup of tea in the almost-spring weather, talking about the unfortunate events. I took it as a good opportunity to gather my thoughts here, since I was overdue.

When I started working again, we made a game plan. It involved who was responsible for which bills and financial obligations, whilst also outlining what self-care measures we each must apply ourselves to. Mine were to continue to see my chiro, GP and psych, as well as trialling medication to improve my moods and mental state. Aside from the chiro visits, which were on hiatus while I predominantly relied on public transport, I have been keeping up my end of the bargain.

I have never taken anti-depressants before. I was agreeable enough to start taking birth-control pills to counter the PMDD symptoms brought on by my menstrual cycle, but I have been resistant to anti-depressants for as long as I have known about them.

If you had asked me a year ago what I thought was 'wrong with me' I would have listed PMDD, then Social Anxiety, then Anxiety, but I would have bitten your head off if you included Depression in the suggestions.

I was/am swamped in self-stigma about Depression.

"No, I DON'T have Depression"
"I'm just tired/sore"
"I was fine until *insert reason here*"

Depression, in my mind, was/is the unkempt, dressing-gown draped, sad-and-sorry moocher who sits on the couch and watches TV all day. 'Every second person has fucking Depression. I don't have that!' I would spit the word out, as if it were a sour dob of snot on my tongue. My denial would/does frustrate me into a rage, lashing out at the label, fighting with all my strength against being associated with the pathetic images of Depression my brain held.
At the same time, I was ignoring every other day that I had spent in my pyjamas eating biscuits on the couch, staring blankly at the television watching movie after movie after movie. I was raging against an image I was filling nigh perfectly.

Some days are better than others, like the adventures in Depression themselves. Some days I exhaust myself into a sullen acceptance, and I retrospectively recognise all the signs from the past 15 years that undeniably pointed to the black dog* but I had looked the other way. My first clear memory of being depressed I was about 12 or 13, but I'm sure it even pre-dates that.

I came up with a story to cover my inexplicable 'down days' growing up in a close-knit school: Someone had died, it was the birthday of a lost loved one, I had a cold, I didn't sleep well, etc etc etc. I knew that if I just said 'I'm feeling a bit down' the next question would be 'why?'... and I didn't have an honest answer. I knew that was crazy, to be sad for no reason.

Other days I lock myself up, numbing out everyone around me as much as I dared. I kept up the facades to friends and family, so that they wouldn't pry. It's something I've noticed a lot since those years: my motivation for keeping it together was/is simply to avoid all the probing questions that would follow if I didn't.

I ruefully chuckle, even now, and think "What a reason! The only reason I don't snap completely is because I don't want to have to deal with the aftermath? Meaning, were there no aftermath, I would let myself go entirely?"

It's a sad realisation, to know that you're only passing for okay because you're not committed enough to the crazy label.

I feel like I'm in a painful purgatory. The good days taunt me with the possibility that this could be a reality: a happy, normal life, I'm capable of so much. Then the bad days swamp me and my brain laughs at having imagined anything so foolish.

The anti-depressants aren't working, and I go back to the doctor in a few days to discuss another option. They are actually making me worse. I have been lower in these last few months, on these pills supposedly designed to do the opposite, than I have ever managed by myself. I had been reluctant, but had been swayed into giving them a try, if nothing else, to at least write off the possibility that this could be what I need to feel better.

It's horrible, to have to feel so bad before you can say with certainty 'I knew this wasn't the answer.'

I had rebelled against them for so long, and the possibility that I may indeed need them, and now that I had finally been convinced by my partner and my health team to give them a try, they turn out to exactly as I had anticipated: a waste of time, a waste of money, and filling my body and brain with chemicals that alter me.
I have seen too many people I know and love become completely different people whilst taking medications and it had frightened me to think the same could happen to me... and yet here I am, on the end of a 3 month rollercoaster involving meds and withdrawals and moods like any crooked ferris wheel.

I tell myself to snap out of it. The stigma and my self-talk get together and tell me that I'm just weak, and a normal person wouldn't be reacted to the things I do the way that I do. It doesn't matter what anyone else says to me to make me feel better, my spinning thoughts command my attention far more than any outside voice.

My partner tries to help, but her voice simply adds to the constant noise in my head and I am quickly overwhelmed and get snappy. All I want anyone to do is to hug me, regardless of what good advice/intentions they may have.

I am an audience of one to a very loud disharmony. Like trying to listen to a live band play a song while wearing headphone that are playing a different genre of music entirely. The constant duality is tiring, and it's hard to explain thoroughly because no one hears it but me. The word 'hear' doesn't even seem to fit because it's not how I imagine hearing voices to be, just thoughts. Like when you get used to playing a particular album, and you expect the next song before it even starts playing, so much so that your brain actually starts playing it in your head... and then something else starts playing because this is a mix-tape not your favourite album, and for a moment you get confused because your brain is singing one song and your ears are hearing another.

Sigh.

And this is where the exhaustion settles in.

I'm tired of explaining myself, tired of trying to find the magic formula to 'get well', tired of labels, of justifications and explanations, of the black dog and all his friends. I'm tired of battling myself like I have these nearly-two decades.

I forget what my initial point was. Or if I had one.

For now I will simply leave you with the hardest words I have ever spoken:
I have Depression.

Black Dog Institute - What is Depression?
 

Unmedicated.

For reasons I won't go into, a few days ago I stopped the pills I had been taking. Whilst I didn't consider them 'a cure', I had been noticing that since beginning them a few months ago I had had less outbursts of frustration and anger and tears.

This mix of having the drug fully out of my system by now, and the return of chronic backpain since last week, has led to a relapse back into the above. Yesterday included abruptly pulling over in the car and walking down a main motorway, headed for the nearest sidestreet, to escape the circular argument I was having.

Whilst the day was punctuated with moments and outings and friends that broke the tension and provided distraction, the storm inside me continued to rage. When we returned home my irritability rose back to its high level again. I tried to strike a deal. My partner wanted me to stop shouting at her, and I wanted her to stop talking at me. Her afterthoughts kept coming, so I sought refuge on the couch for about half an hour.

Painkillers and exhaustion led me to drift off for part of that, and afterwards I returned to the bedroom and we slept.

After a sleep in this morning and phonecalls and appointments to arrange an end to my pain, I tried to lay low (literally), but almost everything my partner said to me set me off.

About 20minutes ago she left me. No, not for good. For the rest of the evening to just us some time apart.

Although the space is something I thought I had wanted at the beginning of the day, or yesterday when I was having a worse-off time of it, there's an empty feeling that she made the call.

I had gone out this afternoon to see the chiropractor because of the immense pain I've been having over the last couple of days, exacerbating things, and she had gone out to do the shopping.
I was glad of the break, and the treatment taking the edge off my pain and therefore my mood. When we were both home again, we had reset. So it came as a surprise to me when she announced that she was going to a friend's house to get out of my hair.

I'm split-minded on the matter.
Part of me is relieved: we can have some time to ourselves and not worry about bothering or hurting one another.
Another part of me is sad: sad that my mood has made it come to this, that she feels this is the right move - uncharacteristically so, and that my evening is now going to be spent with my guilty reflections.

My trademark guilt hasn't yet overwhelmed me, but I expect it to hit me later on. Probably as I grow more tired.

I walk into the kitchen to start preparing dinner, missing my partner, and I look at the chart on the fridge. It lists a wide array of human emotions with little faces showing the expression.
During the day I'm supposed to move a magnet to the one I feel represents me best at the time.
My therapist has also encouraged me to do a similar exercise at various points throughout the day where I identify how I'm feeling without naming it as positive or negative, assign it a shape and a colour, and identify its location in my body.
For example "I feel sad: it is a blue square in my throat."

This is supposed to ground me and tune me into my feelings, and the magnet chart is to help my partner observe where I am on the scale. But the problem is on days like this, I don't really feel much at all until the boiling point. It's like on a scale of 1 to 10, everything below 7 is 'indifferent', and anything above is 'pure raging frustration'.

No gradient.
This is kind of why the colour/shape exercise is something I need to do.

But first things first:
Since the last 36hours is a clear indicator that they were doing something, let's get back on the meds. I can't do this until tomorrow morning, and even then it will take a while to have any effect. My partner said she will aim to come home when I'm already asleep.

I feel lonely. It is a pinkish maroon hexagon in my chest.

Melting

A heatwave is hitting the country this week. We are slaves to the sun. Scurrying from it like mice from the human who enters the kitchen for a midnight snack.

Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's hormonal. Whatever it is, I've not been quite right the last couple of days.

Today I broke especially hard. The trigger conversation was relatively significant, so I don't feel quite like I've popped-off at something undeserving like I can do, but the level of my reaction shows I've been burying this oncoming storm for a little while.

I've been struggling to find extra work for some time now, and each rejection - or day gone past that I do not succeed in being able to bring some extra money in to alleviate my partner's finances - weighs heavily on me. I'm full of guilt. A little tightly woven ball of shame.

A couple of days ago I trawled through job opportunities and open positions and applied to everything I thought I had a shot at until I was drained. Then all the energy I had left for was to curl into a ball and wait until my partner got home. Then she had the tiring job of piecing me together again.

I tell myself that I'm letting her down, that I'm being selfish and lazy. On my good days I've proven that I can function to a tee, so why can't I drag myself out of the haze when I, when we, really need it?

Right now I have a list of phrases, that have slowly been becoming more prominent, circling my head. Their content is made slightly comic when placed with the background noise my brain is also providing.

I have recently noticed that I always have a song in my head. Always. Whether I'm aware of it or not.

"Put On A Happy Face" from 'Bye Bye Birdie' is the tune my mind has latched onto tonight, prompted by a resurfacing memory entailing a highschool  teacher launching into a revue of the song, in an attempt to cheer me up in homeclass. It didn't really work, but it did illicit an in-grin for a flittering moment at her approach.

The darker part of my brain is repeating the black mantra. I hear it a lot on down days.

I'm hopeless. I'm useless. I'm worthless. 

Now, put the two bits of 'audio' together. Quite something isn't it?
Sometimes the sheer irony that my low mental health states can manifest in are enough to make me laugh out loud. I must have yet a third stairwell of the mind somewhere that houses a smirking clown at a record player.

He cues up an LP and yells down the corridor: "You think that's crazy? Listen to this!"
And we both laugh.


To lightly touch on the subject again of needing cheering up in highschool: I have only recently admitted to myself that this is something I've struggled with for over 10 years.
I vividly remember someone using the term 'depressed/depression' and I was very fervent in brushing it off. The stigma. The pointed stigma stick jabs at me with every syllable.

Everyone has fucking depression. I'm just one more fucking loser whose life is seeming unnecessarily shit when it's not and we're all of us too goddam nuts to realise it. People with depression struggle with stupid things that aren't hard and now I'm forced to see that I'm fucking one of them after all.

Years I denied that possibility. A whole decade on and off. Even very recently I would bite your head off if you even hinted I had depression-anxiety, not anxiety, social anxiety, or PMDD.
Right now, I don't know what I am. Or if I care about the label so much. It could just be that this is one of the drops, the troughs, of the PMDD... or that could just be the wishful thinking of the stigma talking again. Who knows? All I know is I hurt, and I'm hurting the people around me.

Tonight to escape the warmth of the house we went to the beach and sat as the sun handed over his shift to the moon. We sat, my partner and I. Not quite communicating, but talking in a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of way.

Then something gave and sometime later saw us intertwined in a huddle on the dark, cool sand, moonlight on our backs, and me sobbing from my stomach into her.

My self esteem is down, and that in itself is highly uncharacteristic, but all these layers bear down on top of that. This shame, this guilt, this fucking frustration.
I'm a weird mix of being so angry and frustrated I want to punch the wall, but so unmotivated and lethargic that I don't see the point of doing so. It keeps me acting normal, which is a plus, but drains me to no end.

I hate playing on the fence. My good days tease me with a taste of what it would be like to be fully functional and having a grasp on my emotions and thoughts. To be chief of my state.
The days that this is taken from me, it's like I've been robbed. I could cope so much better with the unnecessary despair if that were all that I knew, if I were not taunted by the memories of what I could be, what I could do, when the veil was lifted.

Sometimes I'm a tiny bit jealous of those who crash. The ones who fully give up and let the spiral take them. But it's not in my nature to go down so easily, even if I could.
I remember lamenting in my highschool journal that I felt like one day I was going to snap in class and hit someone, or simply storm out of the lesson, or maybe even just shut down entirely... but the thought of the aftermath (not the punishment, but the questions, the probing, the trying to ascertain what was going on inside me) just seemed too much bother, too daunting.

What an odd motivation to keep yourself in check.
Not because you should, but simply because you're lucid enough to just not want to deal with all the explaining. Like a cop letting an assailant go simply from dread of all the resulting paperwork if they arrested them.

I have too much of a grasp left to let it go entirely. I can't just snap and go catatonic and live in a padded cell happily never after.
And so I'm stuck in this kind of limbo. This feeling of imminent breaking looming over me at times, and the small regular meltdowns that take the edge off the pressure cooker inside my mind.

It's pressure cooker days that are the gambles, and usually when I try to keep to myself. I have too much guilt as it is, without lashing out at someone (else) that I care about, or embarrass myself by having a complete crying fit at a party or dinner out.
So, I send in my apologies, and nurse the injured bird of my mind, and watch and wait to see which side of the edge I teeter to.

It's tiring, being mindful of just how mind-full you are.

Jekyll

I have begun a hardcopy journal again. This is something I haven't done for many years, and this kind of medium is probably the reason, but I'm using it for the cracked-pavement-honesty that I can't bear to have linger in the cyberworld for an undetermined amount of time.
Things that I know about myself, the unclear-label condition of my mind, and how I need to face these issues/how they affect my relationship.

Today I had a job interview. The first in a long time that was any kind of work I know I could do. I will know within the week whether I'll be offered the job, and I shall have to knuckle out if it is indeed right for me. Even if not, it feels good just to have the maybe.

I have been feeling very unlike myself for quite a while, and I've been trying to reconnect with that sense of 'self'. Doing things the 'old' me would  (journals, job interviews, performing onstage) has felt very akin to sliding on a long-lost but well loved pair of old favourite shoes. Relief.
The sheer relief to feel like me.

I am looking into the possibility that my anxiety is not a cause, but an effect, of my upside down mind lately. Right now my doctor and I are working on finding out if Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) may also be a factor. The more I learn about it, the more I see similarities in my mother's traits. I used to think she was just a little nuts as well as having nutty hormones, but I'm learning (both via this research, and in my physiology classes) that hormones can very well be the culprits that drives one nutty. These things deserve way more respect than we initially imagine.

They mess with my state of Jekyll.

When we were first discussing it with a new counsellor (since the last blog post re: my counsellor, I have not returned to her, instead my partner and I are seeing someone else together), I told them that once the clouds of the condition have passed and I am released from these personality-changing imbalances, I feel just that: released.

The cool, soothing wave of cold water that floods over me, like a shining, silver, fish that has had that searing hook removed from its mouth, and handed back out of the burning, dry air... slid back into the stream.

That is the feeling of finally waking up after a week or more, and finally feeling back in my own skin. It lasts only a moment, but it has built up... making the short transition something to savour as much as can be done.

Until then, I simply watch from the shadows, as the Hulk smashes and yells and sets fire to the forest around me. I barely choke on the smoke. I'm cloaked in apathy, straining against a chain as a tiny sliver of me tries to scream and tell the Animal to stop. I see my hands but they are not my hands, I hear my words but they are not mine, I feel the anger but I know that way back here in the shadows I am not angry. I try to plead with the Monster, and tell it to stop, to look at who you are hurting but it shouts back at me that it does not care. It douses me in apathy again and numbs me down as best it can until only the innermost core of me mourns.

And this is the unfair part. Between the rampage of the Hulk, and sweet release of the Silver Fish, that innermost core - the one most like myself, with my values and my beliefs - has her shackles removed and is finally allowed to see and feel and touch the damage. She dips her hands into the embers left behind and cries like her soul is ripped out. As she picks up the remains and tries to mend all that's broken - and it can take some time... at any point Mr Hyde can re-erupt - she slowly turns into the Fish, and hopes that the stream is not far away.

Then that morning comes. A brief release as the Silver Fish swims away. And Dr. Jekyll is back.


This is me every other lunar.
At this stage there's not much else I can do but to know what's coming and prepare for it, stay as conscious as I can, and plod forward.