Darkness

I suffer from severe bouts of depression. I am in the throat of one of the worst as I write this. The only reason I am writing at all is because I have been sent home from work today after committing a HUGE error. My boss needs time to think about what he wants to do with me. Which, I understand, is code for--- cut my last check and fire me.

This was not a part of my plan. I didn't want to be crazy, but the older I get, the more I see my grandmother in myself. First, let me fill you in on my family history. Insanity is heredity, so I am beginning to understand. My dad's mother, Jo, was a miserable person. She was sad, angry, helpless, and mean. I didn't really understand the depths of her irrationality until I was old enough to understand that she had tried to commit suicide, many, many times. In fact, we aren't sure that it wasn't suicide that finally ended her misery about ten years ago. She had suffered for years with mental illness, but nothing as fancy or as detectable as schizophrenia. Not that hearing voices is okay, but when you suffer from just a depression, that is how people treat it. Just a depression. That's what they did to her, when the shock treatments and lithium stopped working, if they ever did really work in the first place.

In childhood I watched Jo as she must have been with her sons, not her daughters. She loved males, she loved her boys, she loved Steve (my angelic, perfect brother). She loved to take care of her men, and it was when Red died, she fell apart for the first time. She was a wreck, she didn't have a purpose anymore. She felt worthless. And in trying to kill herself, she continued her failures. She found a level of happiness again when she was taking meds and was able make friends with an elderly man who lived in the trailer next to her. They were sweet together and for the most part, she was okay again. But, he died, as older people often do.

And she fell over the cliff again. She tried to kill herself many times, with razors and pills mostly. In the wake of this, she was going blind. This meant that she could no longer live on her own, and she moved into my aunt and uncle's house and then would spend the summers with us in Colorado. And her small world became smaller, and her unhappiness became more pronounced and she was shipped back to Vegas to live with my aunt and uncle. With the help of Jo's money, my aunt and uncle bought a huge new house with a "mother-in-law" quarters so Jo could have her own space and not need to walk up or down the stairs. A couple of weeks after she moves in with them, she goes missing. Was she kidnapped? She couldn't drive, she didn't know the new neighborhood. She was gone for two days and was eventually found sleeping on an abandoned couch in the middle of the Las Vegas desert. Now it was time to put her in a home. The assisted living place was great because she could have her own space, and the doctors would monitor her medicine, make sure she was eating, bathing, that sort of thing.

She lasted there for a few months. She was convinced that people were coming in the night and watching her sleep. She was sure that they were painting her apartment while she slept with paint that would make her crazy. She thought people were stealing from her. She thought they were drugging her and then moving the furniture in the middle of the night. We decided to bring her back home.

She died shortly there after. Was it suicide? She was found in the swimming pool, wearing tennis shoes belonging to Kyle (the 17 year old). She NEVER went out to the pool because she cannot swim. She never left her comfort zone because she couldn't see. So, however it came to be, her many cries for death, for an end to it all, were answered.

It's not something that happens to you overnight, at least not for me. I knew, given that brief glimpse of my family history above, that mental illness and depression was in my family. Both sides of my family. My mother, her sister take anti-depressants. I know I have mis-fires in my brain, but there is something more pronounced about what has been happening over the past few years. I want people to understand that though this is an illness that can't be named, per se, and manifests itself differently in every person. People look at me and see someone who is sad, some of the time. This is me, right now, as it stands. Raw and unadulterated.

I feel worthless. I feel like everything bad that happens as related to me is my fault. When Tom and Marianne died, I felt a guilt like nothing I had ever felt before. Tom wanted me to go with them. They would have taken a different plane, maybe a different course. They wouldn't have crashed. I was too selfish and wanted to spend time alone, with my boyfriend, hanging out in my new hometown. The guilt was oppressive, and I would have physical tightening in my chest when I thought too much about it. And then, Julie died. That was the world crashing in around me, and no one could understand. I didn't want people to pay attention to me and pat me on the back and try to soothe me- I wanted to be angry. I felt lost, and defeated, and I think that is really when the depression that I am struggling through started. I felt like at any time the rug would be pulled out from under my feet. I felt out of control, and I felt that I wasn't worth asking for help. How could I explain all of this to someone without feeling utterly, irreparably broken. There are a lot of people with a lot more serious problems than this who deserve help.

And that brings me to the past year. People say you have the right to happiness. You are entitled to be happy. You are worth being happy. I struggle with the concept that I deserve anything. I have never admitted this to anyone before, and can only admit to it now because I feel I am nearing a breaking point. The past year has been filled with a job that I likely just got fired from, working for an abusive boss in a toxic environment. I would come home at night, take my porozac, take my ambien or anti-anxiety, and have about 5 cocktails, and would fall asleep on the couch. I would go to work, and perform my duties, to the best of my ability. But my ability wasn't enough, or at least it wasn't enough in my mind. The depths of the hopelessness and grief for a life I don't deserve can make it difficult to function. I am able to get through the days, I can have laughs and be my normal "funny" self, but inside I am screaming for someone to understand me. I don't feel I deserve anything. I don't feel entitled to anything. I don't have a passion in my life, and I don't know what I want to be passionate about. The pills and the cocktails do a nice job of numbing that restless anxious feeling.

But when all of the cocktails and pills are stripped away, a shell of me is left. It gets progressively worse as the years go by. I have friends who are all going through some pretty intense things in their lives, so I feel like I don't have the right to feel any of these worthless feelings. I don't give myself permission to really feel those feelings, because the times I am overwhelmed by those feelings, I am slammed with guilt. I have my health, a roof over my head, no one is terminally ill in my life. I should be grateful. But I can't be. I feel guilt ridden for feeling sorry for myself, I feel worthless, useless, dispensable, ugly. I feel weak and incapacitated by some illusion of a brace that won't let me breath comfortably. I feel panicked, and jumpy, like the channel in my head is changing all the time. I feel overwhelmed. But I can't feel that way. I don't have a family, I don't even have a boyfriend. I don't have kids, so why can't I keep my life on track? Right now it feels like The Hindenberg......the very beginning of the Hindenberg.

I feel like there is nothing special about me. I am ordinary, and I am a failure in all aspects of adult life. I have managed to land a string of jobs, that always seem to end in some error that I have made. And y lately, I think the fact that I don't feel like I deserve anything good- I bring the bad into my life because that's how I associate with things. I sleep with a married man, not demanding anything from him. I ache for a compliment, from anyone, about anything that I was involved with. I have let my abusive ex into my life again, and of all things, he is the one who tells me what I want to hear. But I know it's not true, he is in it for himself, to use me to give him a life he can't get to without me. But he doesn't love me. the other man doesn't love me. And these negative thoughts have infiltrated my brain and tainted my way of thinking so I am unable to do some of the simplest things now. I put a frozen chicken in the microwave on Monday so it would thaw during the day and I could make dinner. I forgot about it, until today...Friday. Last month I paid my mortgage twice, but didn't pay my electric bill.

I feel like I am falling apart. Where do I go from here? What do I do? More pills, more booze, less pills.....but I can assure those work as band aids. I will still wake in the morning and have to struggle to take a shower, be exhausted after I change the litter box. I will find my serenity on a pill and booze induced nap. Because in my sleep I am rarely myself; I am beautiful, energetic, competent, loved. My tweaked brain generally doesn't mis-fire in my sleep, my sanctuary. It is where I find peace, cuddled with the loves of my life, Ilsa and Lula.