How depression feels

When I’m depressed, I’m really depressed. There seems to be no half way house for me, I don’t feel slightly sad or slightly lethargic. I feel chew my own arm off and blow my brains out depressed. Except I have neither the appetite nor a shotgun at the moment.

When I am, as I have been, I am so earth-shatteringly low that I can’t even see ground zero. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep I can’t think and mainly I can’t talk which is explains my absence from blog land. I read something Plath wrote today about not making plans or bothering with life as after her teenage suicide attempt it was only ‘by accident that I am alive now’. That’s how I feel, I shouldn’t be alive, many would be dead having OD on my amounts and more importantly I don’t want to be. Sounds awful doesn’t it? I don’t want to be alive. Mainly, I don’t want to be ill, but to me the two are inevitably linked. To live, is to be ill, to be ill is to be this depressed and so the circle continues until I remove myself from that circle, the only way I know how.

I am alive though, despite all the odds this week I have had the pills I have counted the pills but I have not taken the pills. And I have to give some credit to my CC who visited twice for over an hour each time this week and talked me back from some bad places. But I won’t always have a CC and I don’t want to have to depend on someone to rationalise the crazy mess in my head. To tell me that I will get better and I DO want to live. I try to believe but each time, it gets a little harder.
I said goodbye to my GP who retires in ten days today. She has not been that competent but has been kind to me, and that’s counted for a lot. She said she’s sorry she didn’t get to see me recover. But, I’ve got a feeling that day wouldn’t come even if she was staying on. I am signed off until 4th December and if I don’t go back to work then I will be sacked. At the moment 4th December seems long way off, too long and I didn’t think I would be here this Thursday earlier this week, so who knows if I will be here in any form by this due date.

‘If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.’
Clifford Odets