Recovery: An Account

Posted on August 30, 2006 in Depression

It is interesting to watch the effects of three crystal pink capsules of Effexor on my mood.

Listless

Posted on August 27, 2006 in Depression

I am rising out of what my friend Janet calls the “black hole” into a state of just not giving much a damn about anything except eyeing the hairs of dust floating over a surface of your choice. I am surrounded by books and yet I touch none of them: The Heart of Midlothian frightens me because it was the book I was reading when I disappeared for eight days last week. Disappeared to you, that is. I knew where I was at but the space was Queen-sized.

I have had many depressions but few like this one. Guess it is the effect of the Lamictal: it gives me happy manias and truly listless depressions.

I cried when I went to a support group meeting which is a good sign because it means I trust the people there. After I left, I do not doubt that I was a source of friendly gossip. “This is not the Joel we know” one woman said to me. Well, it was the same old Joel but he was tired, very tired though not fatigued.

Reparting Thoughts

Posted on August 25, 2006 in Depression

I don’t know if I can describe the hellishness that characterized this last depression. I’m not counting myself out of it, though I had a good day yesterday — I brushed my teeth! Should even mention stuff like that online? Right now it is just me and Bach, but click on Publish and the whole world knows my problems. The world world including a few family members who are pretending to be not looking.

I count nine days of nothing but turning on my bed, sleeping on the best of them, just clutching blankets on the worst. I run back and forth writing, thinking, and hiding under the covers for this one. That’s my activity and I need to make more. I’d be at the gym working out except I took two Ativan and do not wish to risk the drive. And it is too hot and unshaded for the walk around the condos that I have made my regimen.

Coming “back” implies seemingly ridiculous victories. Today you brush your teeth. You take one less Ativan. You go for that walk twice at dawn like you should. You write in your journal. You blog. All in between visits to the bed, your teacher and your protector.

Just yesterday, I heeded studies which suggest that spirituality helps those suffering from depression and mixed and remixed the books next to my bed until I found a pocket Buddhist companion. This (translated into the objects of depression) made sense to me:

I am not my depression. My depression is not me. The world is not my depression.

This doesn’t say that I lie under the covers for not discernable cause and it doesn’t say to stop taking the meds as appropriate. It simply separates my disease in the same manner as one might separate the eye or the ear. My eye is not me. I am not my eye. My eye is not the world.

We get into an ownership thing in Western thinking — if not throughout the whole world. We own our body parts and our diseases rather than seeing them as causes. They are neither separate of us nor part of us. They are facts.

This gives me personal relief from this nine day good-riddance if rid of it that I am. And I’d rather not talk more about this. It makes sense to me.

How missed you all so! And how I missed the days! I look at the calendar, my notebooks, and my charts and see the opposite of logorrhea.

He’s Alive!

Posted on August 23, 2006 in Depression

Been in one of the worst depressions of my life these past several days, but writing to let you know that I am alive.