Did I mention...

...that I;m sick to death of this stinky diet? I think I did. It's ten-thirty pm right now and more than anything I want a big greasy cheeseburger and fries with all the fattening trimmings. Special sauce even. Or a big plate of fettucini alfredo full of butter and cheese. No, the cheesbiurger sounds way better.

I think I'm going through this because I'm so depressed and the depression makes everything taste so bland and all the food I can eat so unenjoyable. And because our big turkey dinner made me all the more aware of what I'm missing on a daily basis. But knowing that isn;t stopping the cravings.

I'm glad the diet is working, of course. I've lost almost 40 lbs and I intend to keep going until I've lost the 30 more I have to go. But I think I may break soon and get that cheeseburger. Maybe it will make me happy for a little while.

Marginal

Feeling marginally better today. Actually did my pilates workout. Cats are not driving me quite so crazy. But now it's one and I don't have anything to do for the rest of the day. I know some people would think that's bliss, but I don't. The problem isn't that I can't think of things to do or things that need doing. It's that I can;t get motivated because none of them hold any...I want to say meaning, but that's not quite it. I want to say there's nothing I WANT to do but that just sounds like complaining about my lot; I mean, in adult life there's lots of things you have to do that you don;t want to do and I get that. I don't really want to do the dishes every day but that's part of my job and I do it.

No, what I mean is that nothing has a hook in me. Nothing really affects me. I don;t feel anything. I know I've said this before. But somehow it's easier to do something you really don't want to do--like doing the dishes or even my Pilates sometimes--than to do something that has no value (and I mean value as in colour, not as in worth) because at least you;re having a reaction to it. And you know if you do it and get it over with then you won;t feel such revulsion anymore.

But this flat grey place just seems to go on and on forever.

I've been thinking about drawing again sometimes. I have a pad of paper and oil pastels sitting on the coffee table staring at me every time I sit on the couch. But I feel fear of it. I don;t feel at all inspired to draw; I think about it in my head, not in my heart.

I think that's what bothers me most about where I;m at: everything is in my head and nothing is in my heart.

But anyway, some kind soul gave me advice for getting drawing, about just experimenting with colour. And that's part of the problem, really. I feel no colour. I feel grey and dead inside. If I were to pick up the pastels and the pad, I would just colour a whole page as grey as I could make it, I think. I wonder if I should do that.

I know there's something more than this. I stay in this grey place because it's safer in a way, than the place I was in last night. I don't want to hurt myself here.

But it's also...I feel it as being underneath the black place of self-harm, like a sinkhole in a mine. I feel that in order to get to a good place I haveto come up through the black place and that frightens me. What if it hurts? What if I don;t make it through?

I don;t trust in drugs to make my condition any better, really. I hear and read so many stories about people getting on antidepressants and their whole world changing and it's just not been like that for me. I go up and down and all around, but never really happpy, never satisfied, never in a place where I feel I can accomplish anything. Maybe my pdoc just hasn;t foudn the right combination of stuff, but I'm So tired of trying different things...it's been over a year now, almost 18 months I think, and I still don;t feel well. Well, every time he raises the level on one drug I feel great for about a month, but then I sink back as my brain chemistry adjusts.

And I don;t think it's my fault. I work so hard at this. I go to therapy. i cooperate. I do what I'm told and it doesn;t work.

I'm beginning to think nothing will work and I'll just be stuck here in this grey place forever.

So maybe I'm not better, maybe I'm worse. I don't know. I really don't know.

Night

M. is asleep. The kittens are tearing around in their nightly spazz. I am not asleep, obviously. I lay there for about 45 minutes feeling miserable and depressed and then took a sleeping pill and came to write here. I didn;t want to take a sleeping pill because I took one last night and I hate taking them two days in a row. Actually, I hate taking them at all, but I need them more and more the more depressed I get. I used to be able to take one a week and that would set me up fine, but now. But now it;s not like that.

I also don;t like taking them because it seems to make me more depressed the next day, which is also different. It used to be, I;d take a pill and feel really happy the next day after a good night's rest. Now it's not like that, either.

It's very cold out and cold inside and cold inside me.

I'm getting really tired of this diet thing. I have 30 lbs yet to lose, too. And lately I can;t get excited about it. I just feel deprived and think of all the foods I would like to be eating--fettucini alfredo is much on my mind. I hate writing down what I eat every day. I try to force myself to exercise and I can;t do it and hate myself, both for not doing it and for the fact that I have to force it. Force feels like hurting myself and it makes me want to hurt myself more. This is crazy, I know, but there it is. I feel that I should be punished.

My therapist tells me I need to stop beating myself up, but I can;t seem to. It's a way of life that was instilled in me from the time I can rememeber.

Sometimes I wish I would just contract some terminal disease. It almost seems it would be a relief. Not to have to struggle with this anymore.

I'm in a bad way. Lately I;ve been thinking again that I won;t be here long, that I won't make it through the winter. I don't know why or how. The not being doesn't scare me but the process of it does. Mostly because it's so lonely. Everyone is born alone and everyone dies alone, in the end. No one can do it for you or really be there for you. It's very personal and private.

Yet I don't feel suicidal. I don't feel that I want to actively MAKE myself not be. I just want to not be anymore. No--I don;t want to kill myself, just hurt myself. And the hurting can get out of control when you;re alone with it; I know that from past experience. But I want the hurting to stop. And the only way of it stopping that I know is not to be. I guess that's why I spend so much time in this grey state of sitting on the couch just staring at the walls. Not being while existing. And that is painful in and of itself.

I think it would bebetter if I could cry over it or have some reaction to it at all. But the tears are all dried up; I've cried too much. Sometimes in therapy they come out, but it's without volition or connection to anything. They just come and have no more meaning than anything else. They offer no release. No catharsis. I think that's because the pain is so old, maybe. I have nothing in my life to be sad over and it troubles me that I can feel this way without its having a direct cause. When I was younger and living in a dysfunctional and abusive environment, okay, I can see why I cried a lot. But now it's just as dull and boring as anything else in my life.

I feel very exposed writing this in my blog. But that doesn't keep me from doing it.

Well, my last cigarette is spent and I think the pill is kicking in so maybe it;s time to try this bed thing again...

continuing...

...in this depressed state. I had hoped that once I got off teh anti-depressant I was on I wouldn;t have to try another one but it looks like I may have to. Everything just seems too hard. Getting up is hard. Getting dressed is hard. here it is noon and I'm still in my jammies, not wanting to do anything at all but go back to bed.

Major Suckage.

I don;t know if I should write this here because I really don;t know if I want potentially the entire internet world to know about it, but I have no where else to put it and it keeps circling in my mind and I need to get it out. My therapist yesterday told me I was showing "increased suicidal ideation." I don;t know if I agree with her. Partly because the idea of my own death has been with me for so long that it seems...almost boring to me. That doesn't scare me. When I lie in bed thinking about what it would be like to bring it about, what upsets me is not that I;m thinking that, but the thought that no one would be there to stop it. I could just wait 'til my husband was asleep and I was awake, for example, and cut my veins in the bathtub and no one would notice until the next morning. And that's a grief to me--the loneliness of that thought. The loneliness of being with any of these thoughts and not having any way to get out from under them. It's a great pain to me: one of the only pains I feel, actually, because most other thing are just flat. And maybe I cling to the idea because of that: because it's something I can feel. I think about suicide, sure. (And in my mind I think, "doesn't everyone?") But it's a distant thought, like a sweater you keep in the back of the closet because it's too ugly to wear in public but you can;t get rid of it because it's really comforting to have it there somehow. Maybe it's fuzzy, or maybe someone you value gave it to you, I don;t know. Maybe you wear it around the house, but you wouldn;t take it out and display it.

I don;t even feel like my suicidal thoughts are really suicidal thoughts. Just sitting around, thinking of death, as Moaning Myrtle might say. But I don't think I would ever DO anything about it. I know it would upset people and I really don;t want to do that. And mostly, I don;t really want to die, I just want not to be. I don't know exactly how that would come about. Maybe I'm accomplishing that now, but not getting up and getting dressed; by not being excited about the day. Is that a choice or something I have no choice over? Some philosophies would have it one way, some the other. I think, if there is no meaning in my life pretending will not make things have meaning. "fake it 'til you make it" is a big lie. A big lie that puts still more pressure to accomplish on people who don't need that.

The kittens are being holy terrors today.

The Next Morning

I didn't get to sleep until about 2 a.m. because the kittens decided the bed was the place to stage late night big time wrestling. Then I woke up at 6 to pee and couldn't go back to sleep because Onyx decided that he liked playing with my hair with his claws out, especially the wispy hair around my face. Needless to say, I am not feeling at all charitable towards the kittens just now.

I still feel scumbossa. Maybe worse that I did yesterday and I can;t decide if I think that's a good or bad thing, because maybe I'm feeling SOMETHING, but it's very, very bad things. Like not wanting to be here. Like just wishing I wouldn't wake up. Well, those are thoughts, not feelings. The feeling is a pain in my heart that radiates down into my stomach. I guess I associate this kind of pain with sorrow or grief but it just sits there and doesn't do anything, doesn;t move and go on. It's just been there in a lump forever. And I'm so tired of being here; so tired of being. And I feel guilty for writing that because I know some people will read it and get really upset that I feel that way, but sometimes I feel like I'm just staying on this planet for other people, that there's nothing for me here at all. Everything is hollow and empty and lifeless.

I finally heard from my brother; he sent me a birthday card with a note in it. He said he thought it was a very brave thing to do, telling the family about my Bipolar diagnosis. ("from a few months back," he said, yeah well, I guess a year and a half constitutes a few months...). And it puzzles me because I don't consider that particularly brave; it just seems responsible if you find out you have a genetic illness to inform the people who share your genes about it. Then it occured to me that maybe he thought or meant that by telling people about my illness I was taking the blame for things that happpened, the difficulties I had as a teenager. And that made me really mad. Because I'm not taking responsibility for those things; I';m trying my best NOT to take responsibility for the fact that our parents were at best neglectful and at worst abusive of me. The fact that I'm bipolar has very little to do with that and doesn;t excuse their actions.

I'm really very tired. I need more coffee.

Later that Night

I have a headache and can't sleep. I make myself a cup of sweet brown hot water (otherwise known as instant cocoa) and write this. The long hours of the night stretch before me like a dull knife blade, tarnished and rusty, inefficient and useless without grit of joy or sorfow to give it shine. Nothing is accomplished here. Simply still more random mutterings. everything seems the same as always: me writing and smoking leaves the realm of the ritual and becomes merely repetetive, meaningless tasks to fill up time.

I think I am mad at my psychiatrist. I think I cannot tell him these thigns as I would like to do, for fear he will urge me on to still more meaningless tasks to fill up time. "Do volunteer work," he says and doesn;t seem to recognise that doing volunteer work without meaning is useless. The meaning does not come from the work like a rabbit coming from a magician's hat. The meaning must come first or the work itself is de-meaned. I imagine telling this to my psychiatrist and him telling me I have to find my own meaning and my telling him that's bullshit; I've been searching for meaning these twenty years or more and not found it. Everything is flat and grey. This is not the black pit of depression and I wish it were because at least you can feel something there. This is something in between, or maybe even lower. The grey place. The paths of the dead maybe, where the dead have no names and no identity. I feel I have no name anymore; there is no me in me. All those things that once defined me are gone like ash on the wind.

I wonder if this is how the Elves feel when they forsake Middle Earth and go to Valinor, and wonder why in the world they would want to go somewhere that grants them eternal life.

I woke up this morning...

...and realised I'm really depressed again. Actually, "Realised" seems like too strong a word. It was just something I knew or recognised maybe, like you can have a cold for a long time and then one day it's gone and you don;t know how long it's been gone, you just suddenly recognise that you aren't hacking and coughing anymore. But the element of surprise wasn;t there. There was no element of anything. And maybe that's what made me realise--that word again--that I'm depressed. Because everything seems so flat and without character. Not just joyless, but without anything. I don;t feel bad, I don;t feel good. I don;t feel anything. But here it is after noon and I haven;t got dressed yet and I haven't done anything although there are things that need doing. Like I have to go Downtown and pay the water bill or or water is going to be shut off and I can;t give a shite. I can't give a shite that it's a beautiful day outside although I can see it; it means nothing to me. Nothing means anything to me. I have no grief, particularly. I have no wish to harm myself. I'd actually feel relief if I did because that would mean I felt something. I just don;t feel anything at all.

I see my pdoc next week and I probably should be glad about that but in fact I don;t really feel anything about that either, except the vague ... expectation that he'll say something dumb like, "well, you can;t be that way!" because often that's his response when I try to tell him what I';m feeling. And my inner response, though I never say so is, "Why not? why can't I be that way? Tell me that." And I don;t think he could come up with a good answer.

I feel like I probably should be crying but there is nothing left in me to cry. There's nothing in me at all.