Spirals

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

It has been so long since I posted here.

It has been too hard to post here.  I have been in the throes of such a debilitating depression that it has been hard to write.  That in itself has shown me how deep this goes, as I usually write more when I’m in a funk.  This, however, is no longer a funk.

It is an abyss.  A dark abyss, filled with water, in which I am desperately treading water. Every now and then a piece of flotsam floats by and I grab onto it, hoping against hope that this time, this one time, the tenuous hold I have on my sanity will be made firmer, that this one time, this driftwood will prove solid enough, strong enough, to carry me to shore.  And each time, whether it is a few minutes later, a few hours later, a day later, the flotsam proves itself to be nothing more than a flimsy piece of paper, perhaps one on which a bad joke is written.  It sinks, I let go, and tread water again.

But I am getting tired.  I was never much good at treading water literally and I find, after months and months of doing it metaphorically, that I am wearying of it on land as well.  I do it now because I don’t know what else to do, because the survival instinct kicks in not only physically, I’ve come to realize, but mentally – you do what you must to survive.  Because not to do it is to drown.  But I am getting to the point where I feel as though I am going to drown anyhow.  It’s just a matter of how long it takes, how much fight I put up and whether that fight is at all worth it.

This depression scares me because I have been depressed before but have always known where the door was to get out of it.  Now, in the abyss, I turn and turn and turn and I see no doors.  All I see is blackness.  I don’t know which way to go anymore.

I keep trying because I have children and the last thing I want to do is leave them a legacy of the ultimate failure, of defeat.  I get angry because I see so much of my mother’s struggle being replayed here and I had vowed to myself that I that my life would be better than what hers was.  Now I understand so much more of her pain and her actions, and even her inactions.  I see how she felt when she was job-hunting several years ago and getting nothing because she’d taken time off to take care of her ailing and dying brother.  I understand because I too can find nothing – there is seemingly nothing out there for an almost 40-year old woman who has taken time off to be with her kids.  That time off, apparently, has made me irrelevant.  The economy makes it even worse, as there are loads of younger, more connected people who have been in the game all along, out there vying for the jobs I might want.  Starting my own thing takes money, which I don’t have, and dedicated time, which I don’t have, and now even the effort is becoming impossible to make as I sink further into the abyss, primarily because so much effort has met with nothing and it seems pointless to continue making it. How ironic.

And, this is probably the BEST thing of all, after much reflection and being honest, I’ve realized that I need outside help.  So I called my doctor 2 weeks ago for a referral, leaving a message that could not have failed to sound desperate given that I was in the midst of a crying jag when I called.  No response.  Then 2 days ago I followed up with an email.  Still, nothing.  How do you hear someone asking for help for depression and not respond?

Methinks it’s time to find a new doctor…

Gotta go.

Tags: depression
Posted in The Mind, The Spirit | 2 Comments »