I have literally lost count the number of times where I have sat down to post and decided that anything I was going to write was going to come out as garbage. I then promptly gave up and stared at the dishes, attempting to summon the will power to go wash them. Depression lies to me and it tells me that I'm terrible at everything. Tying my shoes? According to depression I'm no good at it. Self care? Depression tells me that I haven't earned that and I need to WORK HARDER. At the same time, I am so exhausted that doing the bare minimum required of me as a mom and household manager/cook/etc. I struggle to see where I have time to write.
I've been forcing myself to write. It's been painful and nothing good has come of it. I suppose there is some strange catharsis to it that I can make myself string together sentences even when my brain chemistry is severely out of whack. I mean, if I can put together a sentence, I can still write something. Most of my writing has been therapy writing and it's been ugly going. Depression tells me that the therapy and all of that sort of stuff is a waste of time because I'm just lazy/stupid/broken/etc.
I kinda want to find depression and work 'em over with a baseball bat a few times until it learns to sit down and shut up. Unfortunately, violence is not the answer here. Persistent effort is the closest I get to breaking knees and handing depression's teeth back to 'em in a plastic baggie. I'm not giving up. I'm just struggling really hard on a bunch of different fronts. And we're in the last few weeks of summer with the kids finished with summer school and officially on vacation. It's going to be a long couple of weeks.
I'm working together with my care team and my family to manage this bipolar business. This depressive episode is lasting longer than usual and may be tied to other things. We're still sorting that out. If I seem a bit weird in my posting, I'm in the midst of a medication change and may pop up into mania. Or something. I'm never quite sure how my brain is going to respond to medication changes because my sense of reality goes a bit funny in a not so amusing way. I assure you, the horror in what I write is easier for me to handle than the horror in my head and my past.
Still, I'm not going to give up. As Horace said in antiquity: Nil desperandum - never despair. Also, my motto upon adversity: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito - Yield not to misfortunes but advance all the more boldly against them. That one's from Virgil.
No comments:
Post a Comment