Hiya. This is my first blog. The words "How do I make a blog?" were spoken, so I'm not sure if this'll be the thing for me, but let's assume the important part is the writing and go from there. Let's talk business.
As I hope you've gathered, I suffer from depression. I have for as long as I can remember; it runs in my family so some of it's from that, some of it's from the way my life has been, and some of it is just, i don't know, the way my soul came. It's been worse at certain times of my life and better at others, and I'm trying to recognize it and deal with it responsibly, for myself and, I think more importantly, for the people who love me.
I've been in therapy at different times, and it's something I think I need right now and out of which I hope to get a lot, this time 'round. I'm currently working on finding medication that works for me; I tried Zoloft, it worked for a while and then seemed to stop, and now I'm trying Cymbalta, which seems a little more effective but, oops, my prescription lapsed.
Which brings me here. Among the many ways my depression makes my life difficult -- all of which, lucky you, I'll be sure to talk lots and lots about -- one of the toughest to deal with is how it affects my sleep. I've got a lot of anxiety and, on bad nights, it keeps me up for hours. Plural. When tossing and turning, all of my problems and anxieties and doubts, my self-loathing, swell up and swirl around my head like a vicious storm full of monsters, because THAT's a thing. It's horrible, and terrifying. These are the worst moments of my life, and they're like, once a day. They feel unending. I dwell on thoughts during these hours of which I'm extremely ashamed, and in the days since I've been off the Cymbalta, these thoughts have been so bad that I realized I needed to do something constructive with them to stop them from becoming destructive. So I thought to do this.
A casualty of my depression, alas, is my writing. All my crazy issues make me doubt myself and fear taking the step of writing, of starting, attempting something that means so much to me and, according to my brain, inevitably failing. I'm too much of a coward to face that failure, and there's a snowball effect of letting that fear grow and deaden my wish. The snowball's become an avalanche. So, here I am trying to fight that fear by facing it. It's a start. I don't even know if I'll ever even share this with anyone, but I'm writing, and I'm talking about this stuff. I'm trying. It's a start.
When I wake up, I can't get up. Getting out of bed seems like the worst and most impossible thing, and I've wasted hours and days of a wonderful world because of this cowardly but desperate impulse to hide from it. Sometimes things turn out to be not so bad, but often they don't. "Now and again, it seems worse than it is, but mostly the view is accurate"...thanks, Conor. I've come to consider this sleeping business, the torture that comes with the simple acts of going to bed and getting out of it that most people get to enjoy, to be representative of my struggle with depression as a whole: of what is meant to be easy, being painful and so very hard.
This is a project not of bemoaning sadness and whining and woe-is-me-ing, but of thinking about the sadness and coming up with a way to get better. I don't want to waste those hours; I want to enjoy them like a normal person. I'm trying really hard to take active steps to make myself happier, rather than sit around feeling sorry for myself and hurting the people I love. There are a whole lot of things that go into me getting through this, and no one thing will be a magical fix. It will take therapy, probably medication for a while, thinking, trying, talking, crying, writing. Sleeping. Waking up.
