: Now with extra added early hours insomnia!
Archive for December, 2008
My sister and I both got our ears pierced for the first time in the summer. Not long after I went back to university in October, then, it was perhaps inevitable that she should challenge me to a wacky earring competition to be held two months later, at Christmas.
We interpreted ‘wacky earrings’ (or “rediculous (but cheap obv) earings”, as I read back from Facebook) slightly differently. I bought her some bright wooden beads
, which at least are on the tasteful side of wacky, I thought. I mean, I could have bought her some squashed plastic hearts that I saw in a truly vile shade of purple, but there’s only a certain level of plastic tat on which I am prepared to waste my hard-borrowed student loan. What’s more, she has no excuse not to wear them, unlike these….
, which tear at your earlobes somewhat with the sheer weight
, as well as feeling rather unbalanced left-right
, not to mention being completely and truly hideous!
In a loving, home-made gift way, of course. I might use them as room decorations!
…or Day One of double dosage, 40mg.
Please, please, please, please?
What represents Christmas for you?
For me, it would have to be Benjamin Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’. I listened to it earlier for the first time this year, and for the first time it felt vaguely like December 22nd. It’s beautiful, it really is.
“Once you write something, it’s not your own anymore and it bears different meanings to everyone who reads it”
I read this today on one of the blogs that I read. It felt terribly appropriate, somehow.
Day 27 was good, and it finally felt like the Fluoxetine was doing something positive. Day 28 was catastrophic. Day 29 was OK, but not great. Day 30 was, if anything, worse than Day 28.
Today is Day 31. Pills come in packs of thirty, so I opened up the new bag from the pharmacist this morning. Being a generic drug, I’ve been given capsules manufactured by a different company. The old ones were green and pale yellow. These new ones are pale blue and white, and have a different code number on. It shouldn’t matter, but it does…
x
Bopping about the internet, as one does, I seem to have come across an increasing number of blogs which relate to depression, and people’s struggles with thereof. Some people, like me, integrate it into their normal blogs, which itself chronicles how much it’s taking over their life at any one time. Some people have separate ‘depression blogs’ – it’s a place where they can talk about it without their friends seeing, maybe, or a way of letting it all out without it dominating what else they might want to write. These ones tend to explore the issues behind the immediate crazyness/ pill-taking, so I would imagine are relatively more therapeutic.
There are a few which I read regularly, and have been doing so for some months now. I won’t link to them, or not yet anyway. But while it’s not exactly a cheerful choice of reading matter, it’s quite comforting to know that other people are out there, and more comforting still to recognise the differences. Depressives have as many personality variations and as many ways of dealing with stuff as any other section of the population, and that is something that I think is very easy for other people to forget.
Today I’ve been OK. All on a relative scale, of course, still slightly crazy, and still constantly physically shaking with tension. But my mood has somehow felt lighter, especially as the day has gone on. Good things have happened, and I actively enjoyed my friend’s comedy show this evening (rather than it being something to get through, laughing on the outside but being inwardly detached).
It’s one day, and tomorrow I go back to the doctors’. But it’s one day at a time, and for this evening, at least, I am thankful.
I’m angry. I’m fucking angry, if you’ll excuse the fucking language. I have been this angry since about 7:35pm last night, when I got asked, loudly and insincerely in front of a large number of people that I don’t know whether I was all right, because somebody had [clearly flippantly] commented that I was having a mental breakdown.
On the plus side, however, I’m angry! I’m not sinking, I’m not suicidal, I’m just fucking angry!
As such, this post is tagged ‘Beginnings’.
My new hobby: seeing how honestly I can answer the question “How are you?”.
Level 1:
“Hey Lucy, how are you?”
“I’m… I’m awesome, how are you?”
“Yeah, I’m good thanks!”
“Awesome.”
Level 2:
“How are things going?”
“I think I might be a little crazy…”
“And me, I’ve got SO much work.”
“Y’know, fluoxetine’s good?”
“Oh? Cool… I’ll see you later.” (goes in for Trevs lunch)
Level 3:
“Hi, how are you?!” (in greengrocers)
“Erm, wrong question… sorry…”
“Sorry, I said ‘How are you?’”
“I’m… I’m having something of a mental breakdown. How are you? Lovely weather outside, isn’t it? Bit cold for the time of year.”
“I’m, erm, fine…”
“Mushrooms, I need mushrooms… *pause, fix Maths guy with stare and enunciate clearly*… Unfortunately I’m not joking.”
(makes excuse and scarpers)
There were people in purple t-shirts in town a few days back, advertising mentalhealth.org.uk. They were collaring passers-by (metaphorically, fear not) and I really wanted one of them to come up to me. “No, please do tell me about depression. I have no idea. What is it like to be on crazy pills?”. I was also very tempted to change my Facebook picture to Edward Monkton’s “We must TAKE our TABLETS or else we will GO MAD” but my housemates dissuaded me from the idea.
One of my friends has told me that he loves my new bitter sense of humour. I didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that the only thing new about it is that I’ve started saying it out loud.
I want to scream. I want to scream and punch things, and get rid of all this horrible shaky tension. I want to stop having to run out of lectures owing to panic attacks, and stop feeling sick, and stop the tiredness and the spaced-out-ness and the lack of ability to think clearly. I want to be interested in Maths again, and enjoy socialising, and have my bedroom door open more often than not like it used to be. I want to crawl into a little box surrounded with nice things, and not come out until it’s time for summer and the world is happy again.
I don’t want it to be December because that means it’s the holidays soon, and I can just feel time slipping through my fingers. Every day more I spend in this state is a day less of my precious university time, a day less in which to salvage the remnants of my degree, a day less to do new things and meet new people. I want to be in control, and I want to understand, and I want there to be a solution.
I want to be able to write a blog entry that doesn’t centre around this horrible, horrible mess. I want to stop being so horribly self-pitying.
I want the black hole to go away.
Please?
Recent Comments