Now for the less good stuff
Dec. 9th, 2003 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeWell, it's December, and once again my year has been more downs than ups. This is a very long ramble. You have been warned.
January doesn't look very promising. Somehow, my birth month always manages to suck. Well, not always, but that's been the pattern these last few years.
January 2001: have manic break (didn't know what it was back then) and nearly kill self through lack of sleep and far too much work.
January 2002: go into deep depression and attempt suicide twice.
January 2003: have manic break due to Paxil and work, stop sleeping entirely, stress out over work and vomit blood, spend night and day in hospital. Have ex-boyfriend go nuts and make life harder than it has to be.
So, yeah. January doesn't have a reputation for being exactly a stellar month for me. Ironic, isn't it? I used to like January, when I was younger: it was bitterly cold, but the sky was always a fantastic stark blue that hurt the eyes to look at it, and the sun glinted off the white snow, so that everywhere you looked you had to shade your eyes in order not to begin weeping tears that would freeze on your eyelashes. January was always painfully beautiful to me.
Anyway, now I can look forward to Christmas with my parents. It'll either go really well or really suck, depending on whether I can keep my tongue in check and not argue with them when they say something truly appalling. I always seem to be the one who has to make the mental effort to be in a good mood: the minute I'm not in perfect form the whole house of cards comes tumbling down around my ears. Right now I just want to like on the floor and scream and kick like a two-year-old shouting IT'S NOT FAIR! Yeah, I know life isn't fair. You don't need to remind me.
I'm seeing my meds doc today. I'm not sure what to tell him, if anything. I can't tell anymore if the meds are helping. My anxiety levels have been through the roof, but then maybe it's because I'm not too depressed to care anymore. I haven't really been sleeping either, not for months. Not since August. I go for about two weeks with very little sleep until my body just shuts down and forces me to sleep for a really long time.
Also, I'm not sure if my moods are worse or if I'm just more aware of them now. More aware of how abnormal they are. Yes, I know there's no such thing as "normal" but then there *is* such a thing as completely-fucking-crazy, and while I'm not there yet, there are some days when I think I might be getting there.
Then there's that whole trope about not being crazy if you think you're going crazy. The first sign of sanity, or whatever.
This year has not been good, on the whole. Good things have happened, but I kept track of things a little better, and looking back on it I spent more time feeling unhappy than I did feeling happy. This is no one's fault except my own brain chemistry's, I'll hasten to add.
Also, the manic episodes, while they don't last as long, are still pretty intense. The last one freaked the fuck out of me. Paranoid delusions are very high up there on my list of Things That Are Not Good™. Yet another thing to tell the meds doc.
Of course, there's a part of me that is saying that I'm just faking it, making it all up just to get attention. That I should just pull myself together and quit the crap and make something of myself. How the hell did I become so out of synch with myself?
This year has also marked a number of failures, mostly financial in nature, but also personal. I have been in the red more times than I care to count, and have had to rely on others for a good part of the time when I was really becoming accustomed to relying on myself. I became a charity case, and managed to convince the two people in the world whom I most want to respect me that I am not worthy of respect or even confidence.
It's not that I'm not grateful for the help. I really am. Really grateful. It's kept my life from imploding completely. But it also brings with it metric assloads of guilt. I keep thinking that I'll never be able to repay any of the money I've received, and I've never been good at thanking people: I usually say "thank you" for presents and then send a card. That's all. But with the amounts of money involved, it seems spectacularly inadequate. Then cue the wibbling about whether repaying the person involved would be construed as an insult (was it a gift? a loan?) or taken as something that is due? :::more wibbling:::
Work has become a nightmare. When I have work my brain shuts down and refuses to cooperate. When I don't have work I freak out about not having money. I freak out about not having money even when I do have work. When I have work I freak out about not being able to do it properly. That's when my well-developed Inner Critic steps in and wields the whip with astonishing skill, and my brain proceeds to have an even worse meltdown than it was having before.
But wait, it's not over. :P
I continue to live a lie, in the meantime, by not being out to everyone, especially not my parents. The others are my parents' friends, whom I can't tell before I tell my parents. The last thing I want is for them to be the last ones to know. It wouldn't be fair to them.
My meds doc keeps insisting that I tell my parents ASAP, but I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I should tell them before Christmas: do I really want to spend our holiday like that? With them furious at me? My mother would be furious at me for ruining her life (that's how she would perceive it) and my father would be furious at me for upsetting my mother.
Besides, I know that I wouldn't be able to live with their censure. So I'm trying to put that off for a while longer.
I've been thinking of telling them on my birthday. I don't really celebrate my birthday anymore, except to please my parents, so it would be kind of symbolic on a day that otherwise has ceased to be important. I don't know about that, though. Bad things seem to happen on my birthday (the death of my dog, the Ice Storm, and an attempted suicide), and I've already established that January doesn't tend to be a great month, so maybe the precedents should make me leery.
:::faceplant:::
So, yeah. That's partly what's going through my brain today. Sorry if it wasn't uplifting. :P
January doesn't look very promising. Somehow, my birth month always manages to suck. Well, not always, but that's been the pattern these last few years.
January 2001: have manic break (didn't know what it was back then) and nearly kill self through lack of sleep and far too much work.
January 2002: go into deep depression and attempt suicide twice.
January 2003: have manic break due to Paxil and work, stop sleeping entirely, stress out over work and vomit blood, spend night and day in hospital. Have ex-boyfriend go nuts and make life harder than it has to be.
So, yeah. January doesn't have a reputation for being exactly a stellar month for me. Ironic, isn't it? I used to like January, when I was younger: it was bitterly cold, but the sky was always a fantastic stark blue that hurt the eyes to look at it, and the sun glinted off the white snow, so that everywhere you looked you had to shade your eyes in order not to begin weeping tears that would freeze on your eyelashes. January was always painfully beautiful to me.
Anyway, now I can look forward to Christmas with my parents. It'll either go really well or really suck, depending on whether I can keep my tongue in check and not argue with them when they say something truly appalling. I always seem to be the one who has to make the mental effort to be in a good mood: the minute I'm not in perfect form the whole house of cards comes tumbling down around my ears. Right now I just want to like on the floor and scream and kick like a two-year-old shouting IT'S NOT FAIR! Yeah, I know life isn't fair. You don't need to remind me.
I'm seeing my meds doc today. I'm not sure what to tell him, if anything. I can't tell anymore if the meds are helping. My anxiety levels have been through the roof, but then maybe it's because I'm not too depressed to care anymore. I haven't really been sleeping either, not for months. Not since August. I go for about two weeks with very little sleep until my body just shuts down and forces me to sleep for a really long time.
Also, I'm not sure if my moods are worse or if I'm just more aware of them now. More aware of how abnormal they are. Yes, I know there's no such thing as "normal" but then there *is* such a thing as completely-fucking-crazy, and while I'm not there yet, there are some days when I think I might be getting there.
Then there's that whole trope about not being crazy if you think you're going crazy. The first sign of sanity, or whatever.
This year has not been good, on the whole. Good things have happened, but I kept track of things a little better, and looking back on it I spent more time feeling unhappy than I did feeling happy. This is no one's fault except my own brain chemistry's, I'll hasten to add.
Also, the manic episodes, while they don't last as long, are still pretty intense. The last one freaked the fuck out of me. Paranoid delusions are very high up there on my list of Things That Are Not Good™. Yet another thing to tell the meds doc.
Of course, there's a part of me that is saying that I'm just faking it, making it all up just to get attention. That I should just pull myself together and quit the crap and make something of myself. How the hell did I become so out of synch with myself?
This year has also marked a number of failures, mostly financial in nature, but also personal. I have been in the red more times than I care to count, and have had to rely on others for a good part of the time when I was really becoming accustomed to relying on myself. I became a charity case, and managed to convince the two people in the world whom I most want to respect me that I am not worthy of respect or even confidence.
It's not that I'm not grateful for the help. I really am. Really grateful. It's kept my life from imploding completely. But it also brings with it metric assloads of guilt. I keep thinking that I'll never be able to repay any of the money I've received, and I've never been good at thanking people: I usually say "thank you" for presents and then send a card. That's all. But with the amounts of money involved, it seems spectacularly inadequate. Then cue the wibbling about whether repaying the person involved would be construed as an insult (was it a gift? a loan?) or taken as something that is due? :::more wibbling:::
Work has become a nightmare. When I have work my brain shuts down and refuses to cooperate. When I don't have work I freak out about not having money. I freak out about not having money even when I do have work. When I have work I freak out about not being able to do it properly. That's when my well-developed Inner Critic steps in and wields the whip with astonishing skill, and my brain proceeds to have an even worse meltdown than it was having before.
But wait, it's not over. :P
I continue to live a lie, in the meantime, by not being out to everyone, especially not my parents. The others are my parents' friends, whom I can't tell before I tell my parents. The last thing I want is for them to be the last ones to know. It wouldn't be fair to them.
My meds doc keeps insisting that I tell my parents ASAP, but I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I should tell them before Christmas: do I really want to spend our holiday like that? With them furious at me? My mother would be furious at me for ruining her life (that's how she would perceive it) and my father would be furious at me for upsetting my mother.
Besides, I know that I wouldn't be able to live with their censure. So I'm trying to put that off for a while longer.
I've been thinking of telling them on my birthday. I don't really celebrate my birthday anymore, except to please my parents, so it would be kind of symbolic on a day that otherwise has ceased to be important. I don't know about that, though. Bad things seem to happen on my birthday (the death of my dog, the Ice Storm, and an attempted suicide), and I've already established that January doesn't tend to be a great month, so maybe the precedents should make me leery.
:::faceplant:::
So, yeah. That's partly what's going through my brain today. Sorry if it wasn't uplifting. :P