Plateau

The consensus is that today’s a strange day.

Tuesdays are busy days for me; I work the 9-5 at one part-time job and another five or six hours into the evening at a second. It’s all to save for school, and I usually don’t mind the long hours and the positive effect they have on my paychecks.

But I feel just plain off today. My co-workers have echoed my wondering whether there is something in the air today. I feel…listless. Unfocused. Tired. Heavy-lidded. Melancholy. All-around out-of-it. Maybe it’s the weather, we wondered. The stifling humidity, or the impending thunderstorm. Maybe it’s just “Tuesday” – Monday’s annoying little sister. I feel on the verge of tears and while I can’t complain about my workday, all I want in the world is to go home, snuggle with my cat and hang out under the covers.

I get days like today maybe once every two weeks or so now. And like I said, I really shouldn’t be complaining, because these restless bouts of melancholy are so much milder than the world-ending highs and lows of my anxiety or the self-loathing of my depression, when those were at their height.

But when I’m in the mist of one of these flat, featureless days, I almost find myself feeling nostalgic about my panic attacks and crying jags. Days like today remind me of something that I’m able to forget the rest of time: those lows don’t exist for me anymore (and I owe my life to the therapy and the medication that treated – treats – them)…but neither do those insane highs.

I float through most days with a kind of quiet contentedness, a sameness and neutrality that is both comforting and deadening. Sometimes I catch myself smiling for no reason on the walk to or from work. Maybe because it’s sunny or as I take a moment to appreciate a sight I usually overlook. And I think that overall I can call myself “happy” these days. Which has to be a vast improvement over my state of mind and the state of my life last year. But sometimes I find myself forcing laughter or smiles when everyone around me is expressing joy – not because I’m caught up in their happiness, but because it feels like the right thing to do.

The worst part about a day like today is that it’ll continue until I go to sleep. It’ll sit heavy in my stomach until I go home and let the mindlessness of a stupid television show or trashy novel wash it out. I feel like crying; I need the emotional relief of crying. But I can’t cry. I haven’t cried. …in a long time. I’m blocked up, and I feel as though I’ve stopped feeling.

I Made a Promise to Myself…

This entry will amount to nothing at all. I don’t have anything to say at this moment in time. I’ve just spent the past six-or-so hours writing personal blurbs and essays for various scholarships and contests (in the desperate attempt to make just a little bit of extra money for school in September), work has been painfully slow (read: boring) today and I am still just a tad hungover from a night out with friends last night. All of that to say that I’m having trouble not falling asleep/stringing a coherent thought together…let alone writing anything cohesive or with substance right now.

However, I wanted (needed, really) to write something, anything, as proof of my commitment to return to journaling. A lot has been happening, very quickly, and I’ve been having trouble processing my feelings about it. Most of it is good: I’ve decided to return to school for something I’ve been passionate about since childhood, I’m working two low-stress (sadly also low-paying) jobs trying to save up the money for the former, and am generally finding myself happy and care-free, which is something I haven’t been able to say honestly in a long ass time. But just because I feel like I’ve stepped out of the skin of my depression (a butterfly emerging from a sad, nihilistic cocoon), does not mean I should have ever stopped writing.

Writing about aspects of my injury and my illness helped me make sense out of them in a way that conversation with friends and even my therapist did not. And I think I owe it to myself to continue to try to pin down the thoughts and feelings associated with this period of rapid change, rather than letting them fly loose in my head. So this post is nothing substantial, except the promise to myself to try to get back to writing, and to making sense of it all.

New York / Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of…

I have been absolutely, downright delinquent about writing these past few weeks. It’s not that writing doesn’t give me satisfaction – it does (in fact, it has proven extremely helpful in not only helping me make sense of things, but in remembering the person I was before mental illness became such a big part of my life). It’s just that I told myself when I started this blog that it would not become like so many other things in my life: an obligation, something to feel guilty about.

Finding myself in New York City. Photo taken at Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn.

At one point, at the height of my anxiety, I had become a virtual slave to all of the shoulds in my life. Some of those shoulds were abstract – “I should clean the apartment,” “I should check my work e-mail even though it’s late” – but many were tangible, quantifiable, measured by an army of apps and smart devices. At the time I was training to climb Kilimanjaro, so fitness was important, tied to my summit attempt and personal definition of success. To keep myself accountable, I committed to meeting the daily and weekly goals of a dozen different wellness programs: 10,000 steps per day with my Fitbit, 26 points per day with WeightWatchers, three runs per week with RunKeeper, 90 ounces of water per day with Water Your Body, three gym sessions per week, tied to the Pact app… It was enough to drive myself crazy, and in a way, it did. Meeting the obligations I had invented for myself was exhausting, and not meeting them sent me spiraling into a deep well of guilt and self-loathing.

What I’m trying to saying is that it’s easy for me to confuse what I need to do with what I think I should be doing to be happy/successful/a contributing member of society. When I came back to this space, I promised myself that I would write here only when I felt like it – not out of guilt or to meet self-imposed quotas – and I’ve been so busy living 2015 that I haven’t really wanted to. Haven’t needed to. Which is a small victory in and of itself, I think.

I do want to make note of the feelings I’ve had this week, though.

Hello, 2015.

This post was going to be another overpoweringly negative one. For whatever reason, my brief reprieve from the depressed days of December 2014 were suddenly and unwelcomingly replaced by two days of all-consuming anxiety this week. I’m talking world-spinning-and-possibly-ending, heart-pounding, breath-quickening, pre-anti-anxiety-medication-levels of anxiety. Panic that kept me in bed and convinced that I was dying. I was going to write about that, and maybe wax poetic about the differences between anxiety and depression and the myriad of ways in which both suck…but then I thought, “fuck it. It’s New Year’s fucking Eve. This is not a time for negativity. This is a time for love, hope and optimism. 2014 was shit. 2015 promises to be better.”

Catch-22

I’m not sure if anyone is carefully following this blog or overly invested in its outcome, but regardless, I’d like to apologize for writing a series of not-so good entries about a series of not-so good days and then disappearing for a few weeks. I know that if I did that to my friends, or if any of my friends suffering from depression and suicidal ideation (I know more than one – mine is not a singular affliction) did that to me…I’d be worried, and angry. So I apologize for my absence, if only to myself.

For the record, the not-so good days continued into mid-December. They were indeed not-so good, and sometimes downright bad. They were entire days spent in bed, overwhelmed by the thought of the upcoming holidays, and the pressure that comes with them. Small things, like tidying up the apartment and buying frozen appetizers for the annual get-together of friends at my apartment, and big things, like pretending to be happy around my family (who know about my illness and who worry) and pretending to be “ok” around my partner’s relatives (who don’t know, and who I’d rather not tell). I considered cancelling the get-together, bailing on my partner’s half of Christmas and settling down deeper into my bed until the whole stressful business had passed. I was in no mood for performance art, which is what my smiling exterior can feel like sometimes.

Luckily, that didn’t happen.

A Series of Not-Good Days

I’ve been meaning to write an entry every day since my last. There are topics and themes I’ve encountered and have wanted to explore (I’ve found writing things down, exploring my feelings and experiences in writing, to be so helpful and so clarifying) – the therapeutic nature of a crisp Winter walk, the realization that I use humour to deflect from the severity and awkwardness of my breakdown, the ways in which people misunderstand and misjudge mental illness…

I’ve wanted to write about all of that, and even the tiny, golden nugget of a dream for my future that I’ve been passing through my fingers, mulling over and smoothing down.

But I’ve been too g-d tired. So tired. Down to my bones, skin dripping off of my skeletal structure, tired. Too tired to do the chores I meant to do half a week ago. To wrap. To shower. To get dressed. Certainly too tired to write.

And with that inability to do the things I want, to pull myself out of feeling half-dead, come the bad feelings. The persistent vision of laying down on the cold, hard pavement of the sidewalk of the busy street a block away from my apartment, and to become nothing more than a spirit, a pair of eyes and ears watching and listening to the bustle of people walking by, going about their lives…but not required to do anything myself, ever again, or to even be.

I guess that’s called apathy? I call it a not-good day. A series of not-good days. Three and counting.

Days Like Today

There was so much I wanted to do today. I wanted to write a new blog entry and moderate and respond to some very nice comments on my previous post (thank you!).

I was going to walk to the post office to pick up some Christmas deliveries. I was going to wrap those presents and place them under the tree. I was going to test out the flavours of the chocolate coffee stirrers I am making for my friends as holiday gifts. I was going to take out the trash and the recycling, and maybe change the cat’s litter. You know, be a productive member of (unemployed) society.

Do you know what I did instead? I woke up, watched some bad TV on Netflix, made coffee, made lunch, made some juice, then went back to bed, leaving a big pile of dirty dishes in the sink. I slept for nearly three hours in the middle of the afternoon. Prime doing hours.

It took everything I had to peel myself upright and brush my teeth afterward, let alone put on sweats and run a comb through my hair. Which I just did. (Yay me?)

Who do you think you are?

Do you know who you are?

If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, what would you say? I imagine you might tell me about where you went to school, and for what. You might tell me about your job, or your interests, your hobbies. You might even tell me about your goals, your dreams.

Three months ago I would have answered the question in a similar fashion.

Goodbye, Kili

Mount Kilimanjaro. Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim (www.micro2macro.net) Facebook Youtube (Own work) (GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.orglicensesold-licensesfdl-1.2.html)), via Wikimedia Commons.

I think that as far as depressives go, I’m a pretty cheerful person.

I know it doesn’t necessarily seem like it. So far I’ve only used this space to complain about how tired I am and moan about how I’ve changed and what I’ve lost during this uphill battle versus my brain.

But I swear that while I might not be happy in the sense that people know where they belong and who they are and what they want and are quietly satisfied with those things most of the time (is that even a definition of happiness? That’s how I understand happiness), I am a cheerful person. I appreciate the little things. Like a cup of coffee in my favourite Wonder Woman mug, which I believe you’ve already seen here. Like dimming the lights in my apartment and living by the glow of my Christmas tree and candles that smell like a crackling fireplace. Like taking a walk in the brisk, pre-Winter cold and still being able to crunch leaves underfoot in November. Like drinking a delicious, cinnamon-y, caramel-y holiday tea out of that same favourite mug as I type this.

I get excited about those little things. They make me smile, even when I’m alone. They temporarily bring me to a place of calm and quiet and…happiness.

Sleep Test

This is likely the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like a cyborg.

So it turns out that the term “sleep test” is a bit of a misnomer. With all of the wires, electrodes and medical gel involved, sleep was hard to come by at this insomniac’s sleep study on Saturday night.

And for this anxious baby, the prospect of having to page a nurse to unhook me so that I could use the bathroom was hardly relaxing. Though carrying my circuit board of receptors around like a purse was somewhat amusing.