I owe you a bit of an update don’t I? Over the past few months I’ve been dealing with one of those monster depressive episodes. The kind that start off like a ‘normal’ one, and then simply don’t seem to end. It’s nothing new; I’ve been suffering from depression since my teenage years, but dealing with anything that lasts more than a few weeks still seems impossible to this day.
The thing with longer lasting episodes is that they basically wreck you’re life’s rhythm. It becomes a snowball as it interrupts more and more areas of your life. Sleep, food, health, social interaction, work, finances. Then you look around you, ready to pick things back up and all you see is the mess that needs to be cleaned up first. And then you go back to bed thinking ‘maybe tomorrow’.
I wanted to do an update sooner but I’ve learned not to write blogs while being that unstable. It’s not because I don’t feel that people in the middle of a depression shouldn’t have a voice, I do. But for me personally, it doesn’t work and serves no purpose. It’s also difficult to explain how depression’s dark and nasty voice can co-exist next to the part that continues to care for a child and a home.
So I decided not to update which was the best I could do at the time. It does of course bring to light a different problem that I need to address at some point; my work and the people who care about my absence. I need to think about how to approach that in the future, in a realistic way. Not the hey-I’m-back-and-on-top-of-the-world-again way. I guess a way that is more accepting of the fact that these mood swings, these depressions, are part of the structure of my life and need their place in it.
So that is something I might write/journal/paint about while I dust off my stuff and take things one day at a time. As my mood changes and self-hatred and paranoia subsides, I realize how lucky I am to have people all over the world who care, send messages and kind words. I just wish I could thrive on that a little more often. But I’ll take the moments that I do feel that and thank you with all my heart.
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