Reading while dead

Reading while dead

Friday 19 July 2013

When I feel like this....

I've been down, but now I seem to be at my lowest... Suicide is always the last thing on my mind, I always say "I want to see how it ends" - but just now, as far as I am concerned it can go to hell... they can all survive without me, they will have to not have me holding up the sky for them.   Of course I'm not suicidal, just incredibly angry that life is being such an utter bugger, that my ideas of life's "ups and downs" seem to have erred on the side of the positive or over-optimistic - and the rollercoaster seems to be racing for the bottom.

There hasn't been a sudden shock, like divorce or bereavement - sad though it was to lose Ed - and in some ways our financial problems have temporarily slightly eased up - so why now?  The mysteries of depression.  I started crying in the Belgian Bar at lunch time - I don't know why.  It wasn't the latest blow - that some one wanted us to reduce our invoice by £1,000 - I felt calm enough about that.  It's only money after all.  I went and got a short notice appointment with the GP.  He said he wouldn't prescribe anything, wanted to do a thyroid test on me (why?) and to get me some counselling - I cried in his consulting room, he passed me the tissues.  He was very nice, he's a good doctor that one.

It's a bit like the depression I had last month over the advertising - almost exactly the same dates of the month too - residual hormones? I tried to talk to Mark about it, how I felt he never noticed me, or anything about me. He said it was because I had pushed him away so much in the last few years.   I said I thought things were getting better - he started to talk about himself and how he felt.  I said he would never know how I felt if he always talked about himself.  He asked me if James was always sympathetic.  I honestly can't remember - but I never had these real deep sort of depressions when I was with him.  Afterwards, yes - and the beginnings of feeling low - but nothing like this.  Is this the same depression as the 2010 one? Or a separate one?  I suppose it derives from the same circumstances - money, relationship problems, feeling unloved, by M and the boys to a great extent.  And the lack of success with the book is peculiarly awful.  I know rationally that it still has a chance of finding an agent, that it may well find one imminently - but there is just this awful fear that all this work and time and energy will have been wasted - no, not wasted, the conventional wisdom tells us "nothing is wasted" especially if one is involved in some sort of creative activity - but it doesn't stop me from feeling like screaming and shouting and curling into a ball and crying and completely freaking out.

What he says is unfair - we are together a great deal - in the kitchen, at meal times, in the evenings, we went out for a drink today - we have been in the car driving places together.  We spend considerably more time together than most couples because we both work from home. I "push him away" because I'm trying to work, I could just as rationally accuse him of trying to sabotage my work.  He doesn't notice because he doesn't notice, or he doesn't comment because he wants to avoid trouble.  So we return to the eternal (well, long-standing) question: is that it then?  Is this my quota of happiness for this life? Will things ever get better?  Would I be better off emotionally out of this relationship - either with someone else or alone... The trouble is he misjudges thing badly - he accused me of having been "influenced by" A's depression.  I was really cross - she's bi-polar, heavily medicated and almost supine.  I've got "exogenous" depression - and I'm getting up and getting on with things despite it - just crying when I begin to feel too horribly sorry for myself.  But I found it really hurtful that he felt I was somehow not authentically, individually depressed, but apparently following some weird girlie fashion for it.

I think this is the first time I've recognised how angry I feel when I'm depressed: maybe I'm making progress.

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