between the rock and the cold, cold sea

For the last three days, I have barely been able to make myself care enough to get out of bed, much less leave the house. Today was the worst: I got up after dark and set out walking. I needed to get away. I needed to move. To a certain extent I needed to test myself, to push my injured ankle to see if it was healing - and there was a degree of self-punishment involved as well.

Fortunately, my ankle is somewhat healed. Fortunately, when I pushed myself beyond what was sensible for it, three miles from home on a road by the sea in the dark with the moon and the stars and the headlights of passing cars, I had worked out enough of my self-despite to be able to call my mother and admit I could use a lift getting home.

It is always too easy to hate myself. It is always too easy to fall into the feeling of being trapped, a kind of mental compression that brings blankness and lethargy in its wake. It is far too easy to feel a visceral loathing for my body, my flesh, my mind, a desire to rip it into pieces and rend it and smash it and push it far beyond sensible limits, to punish it for its weaknesses. To succumb to the confusion of emotions that batters me down, the hollow places and absences and over-full idiocies, and weep with frustration.

One of the things that's most difficult to deal with is the knowledge that this will never stop. That I can hide it most of the time, and manage it nearly all the time, and still there will come these periods when food loses its taste and exercise its attraction, when thought grows numb and life stretches like a bleak and pointless wasteland, toxic, without beauty or redeeming value, when there is no future and my mind finds it hard to think even a day ahead, to see possibility rather than blankness, potential instead of the closing jaws of a trap. That each time I have to reach for the stubbornness to bull through, to reach down and find the ability to keep going, to start again.

Knowing I have done it before doesn't make it easier to do again. It just means I know the shape of the difficulty.

And I am lucky. I am lucky. My meds have worked, mostly. My side-effects are minimal. I know the steps to this dance, to exercise and reasonable diet and accomplishing small tasks and using the pressure of not letting the side down to hold me up until I can balance on my own again. I just have to follow the steps, and eventually the blankness will recede, and with it layers upon layers of fear.

It doesn't feel like luck. It feels like drowning.

Every time you go down, you don't know if you'll make the surface again.

And it's impossible to explain to someone who has not lived with it, who doesn't understand that daily life is a narrow path with unexpected pits gaping at either side, that the worst is how much it makes you distrust yourself. That there is no crisis, no grand cathartic gesture, only the grinding endless chores of not stopping in the middle of the bog, not letting katabasis be all there is.

It hollows you out, makes you dull and empty and oversensitive and angry - tired anger. Frustrated and afraid.

It is too easy to hate myself, and it makes me angry and afraid.

I'm scattered and all at sea, lately. And OPPRESSED by feelings of DOOM. I walked for three hours tonight to drive away suicidal ideations. I have blisters now. It helped, but not enough. This is the way of things when there are external reasons to have a SAD. (And a DOOM.)

(I'm broke, I'm worried about the future, and I'm operating right up to the red limit of my comfort zone both in terms of Interacting With Other Humans Professionally and in terms of intellectual capability with regard to my thesis and the other commitments which I have taken on. I also remain convinced that being up at that red limit is a sign of my manifest failures as a human being.)

I do not say this to solicit pity. Merely to make note for myself.

Stress causes me to eat too much sugary crap.

The amount of work I can't get done leads me to abandon my exercises in favour of doing more work.

The internet, as always, distracts.

I supplicate your solutions, from the midst of translating 120 lines of Greek about How Neaira Is (Still) A Bad Woman Who Sleeps With Men For Money.

As I remember, February is my especial month for falling off the wagon.

Sad, really. But now that I've self-pitied my way through an unofficial four-day weekend, I appear to be capable of recognising that once more.

Time to get back on the horse. So to speak. Tomorrow I have work to do, and a judo session to attend, and a book to return to the library, and a set of emails to write. And a bunch of stuff to figure out with regard to the paper I need to write.

You know something? I really, really wish I had the emotional energy to write fictions, still. But hey. One day at a time, right?

Shit.

I have to start packing.

My internet holiday is not yet over. Alas.

Unfortunately, I seem to have got back - again! - the tail end of the cold I caught in January, courtesy of a weekend beside the smoke from a turf fire and two long walks in near-freezing damp air. Even wearing three layers, it seems, windchill of -3 and -4 and -5 is hard on my internal piping. I've been thinking longing thoughts about Mediterranean summers, and dry warmth, and finally getting the damp out of my nose and throat and bone and sinew. I'm going to be a creaky thirty-year-old, if I live so long, I tell you that: I don't mind the damp so much, even though it leaves my knees aching, but damp and cold together make me ache in places I didn't even know I had places.

I've had a bellyful of rain and cold this year. And I suspect we won't see the sun much this summer, either, since we'll be lucky if we get a couple weeks' worth of heatwave. Curse it.

At least I'm not sick to my lungs again, like I was at the end of last September. I've been lucky, I guess, but I'm getting damned tired of getting snotty and and achey and dizzy every couple-some weeks. Despite loading up with vitamin and fish-oil pills. Could be worse, though: I could live in an age before central heating and have to do manual labour to earn my bread. If I did, I'd probably be dead by now and snot'd be the least of my problems, so there might actually be an upside to that...

Although I don't think I'd appreciate being dead, so on the other hand, maybe not.

Anyway. In case you were wondering. Work on the thesis is progressing very very very slowly, as my brain doesn't appear to be working right. Maybe it'll come right in the end. I hope so, anway. I only have four weeks left. Be optimistic for me, yes?

Still awake, dammit.

*insert whine here*

My autumnal suicidal ideations have arrived. You know, one year, I'd really like to get through a full six months without having to run doublechecks on my cognitive processes, kthnx.

I seem to have contracted a combination of fatigue and fail in the last week. Running has gone poorly, climbing has gone poorly (although I did scrape up to the last move of a slippy 6A yesterday), I have anxiety and find it hard to get a good rhythm of breathing going when exercising or attempting to self-hypnotise into calmness.

Oh, and I went to the physio with the pain in my shoulder, and, well. No easy answers. I'm just too tense. I need to do more stretches to improve my flexibility, take hotter showers, and try to relax.

I find that last pretty hard. You may not have noticed.

Right now, I'd like to relax with a caper show with explosions (Hustle is a good caper show, but it lacks explosions, and I'm all out of M:I), which I don't have, or a good book I haven't read before. I have several books I haven't read before, but they all portend disappointment, either in terms of not being pretty enough, or giving me the wrong kind of kick in the gut.

I'm just made of whinge and want tonight, aren't? Good thing it passes.

Not that I imagine the internets are terrible interested. Still, I'm still here.

On Friday morning, I went to a doctor. She was not Irish. She took me seriously. Now I have, for a month, the lowest possible dose of an SSRI known here as Lexapro, and everywhere else by another name entirely. Instead of spending the weekend in an anxious fret, I spent it feeling marvellously complacent.

I don't trust this feeling of complacency, exactly. But it's a hell of a lot better than the anxiety. One hell of a lot better.

Still not exactly on top of things, though, but I'm not going to work myself back into a guilty fret.

My plans for the next week includes spending a lot of time getting to know some curse tablets a whole lot better.

Bad day.

No matter how on top I am of any one thing, there are always some (several) other things that just slide away from me. Damnit.