After careful planning, I set up a new social media account. I made sure it was all set private, and wrote I wanted to keep a low profile. I said I would not post much on other people’s pages, but I was there.
I invited 12 people to be friends. And 10 had accepted before things went horribly wrong. I deleted the account. I am very sorry to those friends. I hope they see this message. It was not your fault.
Yesterday I had my first Super Bowl party ever! I grew up in Seattle, and have always watched the Seahawks. This whole season was great… leading up to the Super Bowl.
My first Super Bowl party… and I missed it. I was unable to attend. I tried to sleep thru the whole thing. I was crashed out. Nice.
I always have been. There have always been people who know better than I, and have more confidence than I, and who run over me without even noticing. I have got much worse over the last few years. This is what I was like before I was a teacher.
Teaching made me feel confident, and I was able to exert my desire, and influence more. But since retiring, I have lost all that ground. I have gradually become a doormat. You don’t even have to try to run over me. No matter how hard I try, or how long I prepare, I can not stand up.
It takes confidence to stand up for yourself… even on seemingly small things. I back away at the first hint of failure. Then I feel lightly around the edges for some sign of something to be self-confident about. It usually works for a while. But over a period of time, it wears me down, and I fold like a cheep suit.
This is ALL my fault. There is no-one to blame but myself. If I fall apart, it is up to me to figure out what to do – though usually I just give up.
Over time, it gets easier, and easier to give up. And it gets easier and easier for others to give up on me. I get is. That is human nature.
So I retreat again… and farther. And the next time it will be even harder for me. I will fail even more spectacularly the next time. Or I will finally learn to stop trying. I gave up on making new friends… I gave out on being more social… what’s next?
There must be other things I can give up on.
I hear a very quiet… “I told you so!” inL
I am far too easily distracted. I can not walk thru the house without having a dozen or more things grab at my attention. And I have a difficult time ignoring them.
My brain is running at full speed most of the time. Several things can raise my anxiety at the same time, and I struggle to keep my mind on track. When I think about something that has to be done, I must create a plan. When there are too many things at once, my mind overloads, and I have to fight to regain my previous thoughts. It might take a few seconds, or hours.
I am much better in the morning. But as the day goes on, I get tired. It starts to wear on me. By mid-afternoon, I usually can’t block out the noise so easily, and I start to feel low. It happens almost everyday. Sometimes I make it thru, and some times I do not.
My brain becomes so busy with too many thoughts, that all I can do is try to sooth the anxiety, and relax all my thinking. So I do nothing. I loose the ability to partition my mind, and concentrate on just one thing.
All the little distractions of the day add up… they slowing eat away my energies, and my confidence, until I am useless.
Some days I get better again in the evening. It becomes too late to do most things I have thought about, so the list hanging over me gets pared back. And things can clear up in my mind. But most days, I have to just cruse thru the evening, and wait to go to bed.
I can not control the flow of thoughts into my mind.
I put on a good show… even in therapy. I am always in a “better” mood when I talk, or share about myself. Yup… When I am feeling worse – more normal – I do not communicate much at all. I learned a long time ago that people do not want to see the truth if they think there is nothing they can do.
So this is Me Lite.
I make plans as if I am actually going to follow thru. Every evening I think about what I could do tomorrow. It almost never happens. I can not go places, or accomplish things at home. Everyday I struggle to get up, and get going. I probably would not if it weren’t for the kitties – they need feeding, and one needs meds.
It is all I can do to get thru most days. Anxiety and depression take a constant toll.
But it’s not like I have a lot of options. There is more I need to do – it just takes more planning and energy than I have. I want to be able to relax more, but having actual fun seems out of reach. It does not happen very often. Most days I just get thru…
Maybe I am better, but I am not seeing it.
I have struggled thru my life on my own. Every day is the same – take care of the house, the cats, the bills, and maybe myself. There are not any days off. Even on the weekends, the expectation is that I will work on the same things. There is no break in it.
I can’t even go out my front door without planning, and dealing with anxiety. My every move to governed by errors in my brain chemistry. And I have been learning about dealing with it. It takes constant effort. I have to fight back the anxiety… and constantly remind myself to avoid depression – if I can. I have got better at it.
The day to day things… the mundane… the normal parts of life, become nightmares sometimes. It is all I can do to make it thru the day. And often I do not. Several times a week I can not fight it anymore, and have to go to bed and hide my mind.
That makes it difficult to keep going the same way on the weekends as well. There is never a break – except now I can get away, and go to Newport. Once a month or so, I get a couple of days to recover. It is very welcome, though not enough.
I know people have struggles at work… in school… and with other aspects of their lives. And everyone needs a break. My struggles are always around me. I do not get to go home from work for the night, or the weekend. I do not get to finish my homework, and rest. There are no final exams. There is never any true rest… there is only better control.
Some of you will understand. We live every moment within our nightmare. It is all around us. We take it with us. There is no TGIF.
This week has tested my limits – and the limits are still there. Depression is always lurking around the edges of my life. Some weeks make it almost inevitable. This was one of them.
Monday and Tuesday were horrible difficult. And issues all week never gave me a break. I was alone to deal… or at least to try. And this week it got to be way too much. But I still had to go on. Even this morning, I had to get up and do what I do every morning. There are things to take care of.
Once I am done, I will go back to bed, and hope the world will go away. Nice.
Sometimes I plan a nice dinner for myself. And sometimes I actually make that dinner. But usually, by the time evening rolls around, I am too tired – mentally tired. Then I either don’t eat anything, or I eat whatever I can heat up. This happened most days.
It is part of my life. It is just something I have to live with.
Wednesday evening I was going to make a nice salmon dinner… with pot-stickers, and veggies. It was going to be very good. I had left-overs. The night before, I did the same thing. I miss out on a lot of nice dinners – I am a good cook.
How many of you know this feeling?
Sometimes by the end of the day, I am too worn out to read… or even watch TV. I always look back on the day, and realize what I could have done. There are so many missed opportunities. That is the saddest part – my entire life amounts to a series of missed opportunities.
Sometimes things happen that cause my mind to become unglued. This usually results in a quick trip to bed to hide under the covers – literally. There it can take hours to relax enough just to be able to think again. More hours are needed to recover.
And then there are times… when everything I know seems to be flying away from me. Suddenly my entire live is fading, and there is nothing I can do to save myself. All is lost. I may just sit on the floor, and cry. My mind goes into a very dark place.
At such times, I had an occasional habit of reaching out… groping for help. On Facebook I would cry out, pleading for someone to bring me back down to the ground. Ranting… Repeated posts would go unanswered…
Sometimes someone would jump in to try to help. And it did help when I was able to follow thru with contacting them. But mostly I was met with silence. The most aggravating thing for me was when people would contact Lori to find out if she was okay… if she was okay.
That was like the little twist of the dagger in my chest.
She has friends… I do not. Though!!! A special thank you to the 3 people who have reached out to me over the last few years. One I was never able to get back to. I lost his name in deleted Facebook posts. Now my Facebook account is deleted! Deleted… not just closed. I needed to make it go away.
It will help. Now there is no place for me to reach out… and Lori will not have to tell people that she is okay.
When you are depressed you loose the ability to intellectually… do anything. That is not an option. But we still feel the emotional side… and there is also our philosophical side – it may be our religion, or any philosophical concept of existence.
You become a captive held away from the World. Depression takes away our ability to defend ourselves. So we hide. We run away. We will do anything to avoid the ___ that comes at us. And each of us has our own Structure of Fear… the things we need to avoid. No-one can point to any example of how they feel, because there are no examples… everyone is different.
There is nowhere to point your finger. So to most people, what you say is little more than fantasy. You know the feeling… when something so deeply within you, is smiled upon as a passing fancy by those you share it with. What becomes important to us, is but trivia to them…
People have back-up plans for things that are important. But I am not writing here about normal kinds of back-ups… it is the people who know me.
When I say I will try to go out, people come up with other plans for when I crash out, and can’t go. I know they are just being “realistic”. I get that. But it shows me that no-one really expects me to be able to follow thru. I tend to think everyone just assumes the “back-up” plans are actually the “real” plans. I may be wrong… but that is how I feel!
It takes away my energy, and desire to even try. I am a failure before I start the day. And it hurts me to my core. This is the attitude that finally drove me away from Facebook. That is not what friends do. Friends stand behind you, and encourage you no matter what has happened.
I understand that over the decades, I have earned a bad reputation for not following thru. I guess I have earned that. But how much of it has been self-fulfilling? There have been many times when in the face of doubters, I just give up – why put out all the effort when everyone thinks it’s hopeless anyway? Why do things with people who expect me to cancel??
Today (New Year’s Eve) I am fighting this very problem. Now I think I will not go out this evening. All the energy and desire to go have evaporated. Why bother trying?
Trying takes a lot of effort. And I have to plan it very carefully. The effort last all day, or even several days while I am getting ready. It takes a major commitment. And it is no longer important enough for me to even try.
People will end up having more fun if I just stay home. Then they can do what they want, and leave me to myself. That is what happens most of the time. Everyone seems to like it this way best.
I should write about my plans, and my progress. And the plans still look good, and there is still progress. Things will get better.
But my mind is not there.
I do not want to be here right now. I wish I could sleep for 3 days, and everyone else could do what they want. I am staying home for Christmas… no-one is coming over. I can not deal with the whole Christmas thing now. There is no joy in it for me… I just wish it was over!
So my thoughts are now about trying to get thru the next few days without ruining things even more than I already have. Everyone blames me for things falling apart – that is fair. It is my fault. I just want to more on to things I can actually improve.
So I will go on now… and try to survive it all.
Merry Christmas!
I have emotional issues – everyone can see that. Sometimes I over-react to things, and people run away. But I think my reactions are at least going in the correct direction – I am reacting correctly at least initially. Then I go too far…
I understand that people are taken-aback by it. But I never hear from them. Oh there are occasionally people who try to help. But the people I thought I could rely on most, are nowhere to be seen. And so I withdraw farther into my own world. It is a nice world… it could rain more though.
Maybe people think these are issues best dealt with within the family. For me, that means between me and Lori – there is no other family. Or maybe I should talk with my closest friends – those were the people on Facebook. So I am left with writing about things here, in my journals, and talking with my cats (not great conversationalists).
The process is very familiar to me. It has been a central story in my life. I reach out, and others pull back. Lori gets more responses to my over-reacting than I do. But it seems to me clear that I am the one most in need. It is a dynamic that sucks the energy and hope out of me. I have to deal by myself.
The first step for me is always to pull back, and go farther into hiding. If they do not need me, I can not let myself need them. It is not as easy as it sounds, so I am not sure how others do it! Maybe they just click their friend-counter down one notch, and move on.
Now… that is a bit harsh. I am not giving them a break. Clearly other things are affecting them in their choices. I just do not know what those things are. I am left to my imagination as to what is really happening, and why.
Whatever is happening, it is centered on me. It is my fault… and my responsibility. So I will go on, and reach out where I can.
I am totally inadequate.
Lori does everything better than I do… she works harder, and gets more done that I can on my best days. No matter how hard I try, I end up letting her down. And it shows. I can tell it bothers her. I can tell it bothers everyone I interact with.
I cancel things I have planned because I can not trust myself to follow thru. I am tired of feeling like a failure all the time. This has been my life story – I have always been encouraged to feel like a failure. Even though it is currently unintentional, it is very real.
It is relentless.
I am struggling to decide what to do now…
I am not sure I feel comfortable with the new psychologist I saw. I seemed wrong. Though that could be normal.
Should I try seeing someone else? Or would more choices just make things harder? Things just do not feel right.
The last few days I have gradually fallen into depression trying to think about all this – or is it not trying to think about it all? Whatever it is, it is clear I have a great internal conflict going on in my mind. I get many glimpses of this conflict, and am slowly putting together some kind of thought… about it all. Maybe.
That is about as much I can cobble together at this point.
I was only able to be up about 5 hours yesterday. And it is already noon now – I have only been up a little while. my mind shuts down, and I can not think about anything. Some of you know that feeling all too well.
Little pieces of thought creep in, and eventually it makes for something… and sometimes it even helps me figure out something. Usually I just try to go back to sleep. It is a slow process, and I am not sure if it is actually getting anywhere, or if I am reaching for straws!
Maybe my brain is just trying to make itself feel better, and ignore the truth. There could be a whole world lying in front of me, and I am unable to see it. That seems to be the case… but I can not know.
So I keep going. I do what I have to to keep going.
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