I've talked about how my mental illness feels like a thing that is in my body but not me, like something imposed on me by an outside force that is nevertheless interior to my self. The word "seam" has been drifting into my mind the last few times I've been hit with a bad spell of minutes or hours or a day or two (and I am so grateful that my bad periods are so much lighter and so much briefer than they used to be). I don't mean a seam in a piece of clothing or on a baseball, I mean the fifth definition in the OED: "Geol. A thin layer or stratum separating two strata of greater magnitude." These unpleasant interludes in which my in-remission chronic illness feel like encountering something unexpected and weird in the landscape of myself.

And I have more coping skills than I used to have! This morning I was feeling rotten and useless and under-appreciated, so I went to youtube and watched some videos of babies giggling. I don't know that I would have thought to do that a year ago.

I'm learning distress tolerance and self-soothing and whatnot. I just wish I knew if "normal" people have this feeling of their unpleasant feelings being something they run into and have to get through.

You know that joke that everyone in fandom makes, the "cannot cope, off to Mordor" one? It's not funny right now.

( cut for mental illness triggers )

That's about as bad as I've ever gotten in terms of disordered thinking. I feel better now. But I still don't feel good.

Some of this is November and anhedonia and massive external stress. And if I weren't distressed by (a) moving to a new place in a (b) new city where I have a (c) new job, that would be abnormal. I know all this.

IT STILL SUCKS.

This is...not good.

I've been ducking my family for the past *mumblemumble*. Which, you know, standard, this is what I do, this barely even qualifies as crazy for me (it's not sane, but I can't even see sane in the rearview mirror any more. I left sane behind five years ago, I think). But tonight I was thinking about how to get out of being yelled at for it, and I maybe started making a speech to the walk-in closet in my room about how this is what my life is like now, I have a disease and it will never go away, I cannot outlast it and I cannot get rid of it, it lives inside my brain and there is nothing I can do to win, I will never ever be "better," and being told that everything I do to live with it instead of dying slowly is inadequate is — and then I started crying, mostly because right now I absolutely believe all of that.

I know that the words never and always are dangerous and almost always wrong. I know this.

But I also know that when I'm depressed, my behavior tends toward the tiny self-destruction mode. Which is to say, I withdraw, and then people get angry that I don't trust them, that they can't reach me, and then I get upset that people are (justifiably) angry at me, and withdraw more, and it just never ends well.

I think I'll text Mom tonight, and write another 300 words of this fucking essay, and go to bed and hope tomorrow will be better. Or at least bearable.

"It's hard," she said, quietly, wrapping her arms around her knees. "It's hard to feel so vulnerable to myself. To know that what I feel isn't me. That it's something I think of as an illness, as something outside myself. Usually that helps, makes it nameable. But sometimes that hurts just as much."

This is...not a good day. I had a few good days, and now — it's November. It's my November, the cold grey unending stretch of time that batters the soul.

Doubling the lexapro as of tomorrow, picking up a lightbox from my source, going back to weekly therapy sessions. Drinking tea. Trying to be calm.

Just because I know I'll survive this doesn't mean I feel like it.

I fucking hate depression. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

I hate that small things take on the weight and magnitude of huge things I hate that it takes my attention span away I hate that it poisons every moment of contentment I can seek out I hate that it fucks with my body as much as with my mind I hate that once it gets started it feels impossible to cut it off at the knees I hate that it is so palpable and yet so hard to explain I hate it.

I am skipping dance class tomorrow AM and going in to the counseling center and saying, "I know you have a psychiatrist on staff, let me talk to her. NOW." Clearly 10 mg of lexapro is NOT ENOUGH. I just want to be able to concentrate, you know? I can't think. And if I cannot think, I cannot function, since my life, you know, revolves around absorbing and synthesizing information. I did the unable-to-function thing already: IT SUCKED. This is not a matter of will — "sit down and focus, just work harder" — and me telling myself to try more is not helping. I'm letting myself off the hook, I just don't know what to do to make it better other than what I'm already doing, which is not enough. I have a fucking full-spectrum light box, I have a regular sleep routine, I eat well, I exercise, I take my meds absolutely faithfully, and my brain is still broken. This is: not okay. At all.

This is not as bad as last time, when I not only couldn't do work, I had the dangling ball of misery in my chest all the time. This time, I can't work, but when I'm not miserable with frustration over not being able to work, I'm okay. Ergo, this is a subset of my dysthymia, and not the whole fucking disorder slamming back down on my head. I'm not being crazy about the dysthymia, I guess — I can separate me from the disorder more now, I know that my inability to concentrate is a fuckup of my brain chemistry, and not a condemnation of me as a person. Which is, you know, good. Also, I am able to say that I'm having problems with X, where X is concentrating, because I'm aware of the difference between inability to concentrate and actual...thingy. It's not that I don't want to do the work, I guess — I know the knowledge is inside my brain, I know that I know how to construct an argument, I just can't get to it. Although that was one of that bad things about last time, too, when I was kept saying, I know I can do this, I just apparently *can't* do this anymore. There's less desperation about it this time around, maybe? This too shall pass. I just want it to pass faster.

Reposted from IJ, 16 March 2009