It’s been too long since I posted.
For a long time I was feeling pretty well. No major symptoms from any physical condition; I even stopped using my cane.
Just my depression, fluctuating in and out, kept me down.
I stepped down from my PhD to an EdS and graduated. I didn’t even have a breakdown over it. I met with my therapist every two weeks and it kept me even. Even to the point that I considered not needing to see her so often.
Then I moved. And I haven’t seen a therapist in two and a half months.
And I miss it.
My depression has been overpowering lately.
I end up crying every time I leave the house alone. I’ve had breakdowns in Target and Michael’s, and driving down the road.
The first time I was filling my Prozac prescription, waiting on the CVS in Target. I walked around the new store in my new town, with it’s different selection from my familiar University-town store, and everything went sideways. Intrusive, negative thoughts about not deserving new clothes because I don’t have a job yet started it. At least that’s the best I can pin-point it. Then they didn’t have pants I wanted to get for my husband in his size. Then… I don’t know. But it was overwhelming. Sadness, emptiness, self-depreciation. Tears welled up in my eyes and I struggled to hold myself together.
For four days after that I didn’t go out except to walk the dog. I didn’t shower or basically take care of myself at all; I ate because my husband made me dinner. I woke up when I physically couldn’t sleep anymore…and very often napped again shortly after. Things only turned around when my husband was home.
It’s been mild ups, and downs, since then. Sometimes I feel normal again. Mostly I feel empty and uninterested. Tired; Fatigued. Occasionally the nasty intrusive thoughts of not deserving, not being valuable, not competent, and never improving rear their ugly little heads; despite recognizing I don’t deserve these thoughts and distracting myself from them, I haven’t been able to silence them completely.
Then today I managed to convince myself to go out and run some errands. I forgot the post office was closed for President’s Day. And the the glue that held my cracks together began to become undone. Everything I needed from Michael’s, I got, and yet I still left holding back tears.
Depression is like that I guess. It eats at your edges. It sneaks in and crushes everything around it with wave after wave of apathy and negativity. It isolates you.
And to fight that I’m trying to blog again. To reach out and break the silence that depression tries so hard to impose.
the best liar you know 
Congratulations on starting to blog again. Even thinking about my blog that doesn’t want to start up again helps me talk to myself and makes me more patient with the me that is either numb from disconnection and low expectations or in an odd state of distraction where I dash everywhere and suddenly forget why and where I’m going–or remember I’ll forget and just sit still.
Thinking about this I remember taking a journalism course were we required to write an advice column. Struggling with the assignment it finally came to me that the advice need not be good. Maybe people like the mess they are in? Or more likely find the “acceptable” alternatives either not particularly rewarding, unsuited to their needs or inauthentic by being not of their own heart.
If the purpose is to change SOMETHING in ourselves, like being without interests that might push us along, perhaps we could be worse at something? Not being able to do things people naturally have the expectation you are spectacular at opens up a whole field of unexpected expressions of incompetence both unique and not subject assessment as goo or bad. Of course you need a lawyer to
Emptiness is awful but a curiosity at the same time. I isn’t a place of nothingness.