vaxjedi | (no subject)

General Stream of consciousness...

I've been very quiet lately, in several ways. A lot of it has just been depression. The stress from all sides is wearing me away. Work is stressful - we are always behind and always trying to do more with less and just doing less with less. Finances are a struggle at best - if it weren't for the graces of the State, we'd be so far in debt we'd never get out. Home is stressful because we just never seem to have enough resources for everything - emotional, motivational or otherwise. And we keep getting little bits of help annd kindness from people but it never seems to be enough. There is no light at the end of the tunnel - the future seems just as bleak as the present.

Now, as a long time veteran of depression, I know that a lot of this is simply depression - you lose the ability to see hope when you are depressed. But it still wears away on me.

I apologize to people who I haven't talked to much lately. I'm finding it very difficult to talk to people. Not only do I have my Low Self-Esteem brand self-defeat going on ("I'm not interesting","My life is too much of a bother to people", "why would people want to talk to me",etc), but it's just out and out tiring to talk to people for any length of time. The social interaction is laden with so much baggage in my mind that it's become exhausting.

When did I get so much baggage? Or more appropriately, when did the baggage end up seeing so heavy? Is that just part of getting older?

So there is a Darklady party coming up. I'm torn. Yes, I'd like to go. As parties go, DL's parties are the type of parties I like. But I had such a bad reaction to the last one and ruined it for

eleri at the same time. So, do I attempt to go, trying to deal with my issues, or do I give it a pass, knowing that I am already working myself up about it? I want to go, but I don't want to crash anymore.

I'm tired of crashing, of my body and mind falling out from under me suddenly. It feels like my whole existence is betraying me, because when I get close to something I want, I crash.

Eleri pointed out to me that what I experience is really like bottom drop - the sort of depression a lot of subs feel after scening. The drop in sensation is interpretted by one's system as a a depression since it's much lower than where you were. Thus you begin to spiral into depression because of the relative lack of sensation.

Now, while my depression is stubbornly persistant, it isn't really bad. I mean, I haven't been to the depths of self-destruction that others have. Also, even in my depression, I manage to retain some sense of objectivity - if in relation to other people if not myself. I wonder if the issue isn't that I have deep depression, but wide depression. And that my highs tend to be very high, so the flats of normalcy seems so low in comparison. Maybe that's why the antidepressants affected me the way they did - they dulled my highs (by regulating my serotonin absorbtion) and thus my lows weren't such a painfully long drop. And I'll note that on my antidepressants, I was less productive and creative (the semester I didn't have any meds for the first month, I only missed one class that month - a week after I was on my pills, I was sleeping through classes again).

Now, I don't know if I can raise the salt flats of my psyche any higher. Bad days happen, shit happens. You can't change that. And I've tried just filling my life with more highs. But lately, my energy has been so low that I can't sustain them or catalyse them. So I think the best solution is to cushion the fall - to keep myself from plummetting down whenever a high wears off.

I have no idea how, though.