A good airing

I had intended to write the short story today that I have mentioned in a previous post (the excellent idea), however as on so many other days, time has slipped through my fingers and I have found myself completely preoccupied with other thoughts.

'Preoccupied with other thoughts' is, as you might guess reading my earlier entries, my euphemism for depression. Depression is a rotten, sneaky and thoroughly wicked disease. I hate it as a whole, I loathe every aspect of it, but one of the things that most angers and upsets me is the way depression makes me feel, the havoc it wreaks on my emotions.

Sometimes I can stand looking at a winter wonderland and feel snowflakes gently land on my skin and slowly melt and I, in turn, will melt at the sheer beauty of the world even in the depths of winter; at how the snowy landscape, in it's own way, is every bit as beautiful as a cornfield playfully kissed by summer breezes on a sun-drenched July afternoon. Then there are depression days and I look at the same scenery and there is nothing, nothing but a yawning chasm where joy should be and a lingering and inescapable feeling of sadness for myself that I cannot feel as I should feel.

The sadness that depression imparts is not like the feelings one gets at the end of a tear-jerker, or watching the news show the world finding another thousand ways to let itself down. Depression sadness is destructive and long-lasting (indeed in the depths of it, it feels perennial), it absorbs anything positive around it and turns it into emptiness. When I am like this, I yearn to feel something, anything, to break the hold sadness has over me, but everything that would normally work will not - it either has no effect, or depression turns it negative, I become even sadder that something I love has not made me better, hasn't seen off the demons.

Then there is the guilt, the awful self-loathing and guilt that I cannot respond appropriately to loved ones or friends. Guilt that I don't speak up or cry for help and guilt when I do, burdening a happy spirit with my decline. This is all depression's doing too, a further twist of the knife and a tightening of it's hold on me. An ever-decreasing circle of sadness and guilt, a maelstrom in the water of life dragging me down and down and down. I would find it hard, perhaps impossible, to describe the blackness of the furthest depths or the bleakness of being there.

Why am I writing about this today? Last night I went out for Christmas dinner with my friends. It was a fabulous night, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it is always wonderful to have reason to remember why you love the friends you love. At one point I talked, very briefly, about being ill this year and I caught my hand shaking. My hand has never been a shaker, not even when I was a heavy drinker in my youth. It scared me a little to be honest, especially as I had left my medication at home and knew I had missed taking it and would not take any until today. In and of itself neither I suppose are terribly dramatic, but the seed of doubt had been planted in my head, and that is all depression needs sometimes.

Today I have been fretting about it, thinking about it, obsessing over it. I have already gone through a cycle of terrible guilt. I had a great night last night with 5 wonderful people and I hate that I have spent today musing on my illness. I hate the amount of medication I take and I hate how long I have been on it and will remain on it. Of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too, and Professor Yaffle, my OCD, has taken the oppurtunity to seize on my weakened resolve and state and I have found myself stuck in some weird little routines today. All part of the spiral.

I know it, I name it, I can write about it and I can hold on to yesterday and tomorrow as places where it has no hold. Right now though, in this moment, here, its not where I wanted to be today. It never is.