The best I can describe it is that my head feels like it's constantly running around in circles. Circles within circles.
There's the self-loathing circle. I don't mean "low self-esteem." I mean LOATHING. This is where I hate, detest, despise myself and my horrible qualities-- my inability to function socially, my incompetence at jobs, my failure to hold myself together, my insufferable whining, my inexcusable laziness, my tendency to alternately snap at my husband and withdraw completely instead of communicating openly and calmly like we'd sworn to do with each other, etc. etc. etc. etc. This is where I hate the person I am, the person I've become, the person I will be. It alternates between cold bleak and utter despair, and this horrible tearing screeching bitter anger. I want to fall asleep and never wake up, scratch bloody holes in my skin, drive off the side of a cliff. It feels like a black roiling pulsating mass, a cracked open bleeding red angry crevasse, the thick gobbets of black blood that spatter the floor of a gory murder scene. It feels like something you watch out of morbid fascination, knowing it is horrible and malignant and poisonous but you can't look away.
There's the "Oh now, stop being silly" circle. I keep telling myself that I AM being silly, that nothing about me is anywhere near as bad as I think it is. I berate myself for succumbing to that deep, dark part of me that LIKES the pain, the weakness, the misery. I call myself "coward." This is the part of me that wants to be strong, that feels nothing but contempt for my own weakness. The "tough love" part that hates the whining, that rails against my helpless cries of "I don't know what to do anymore!" and "I need a shrink and pills!" because OF COURSE I know what to do, I just don't do it, and if I need a shrink, why aren't I making an appointment with one? Of course, ironically, this part of me hates myself too. I goad myself to exercise more, start a project that will engage and involve me, find a volunteer position, find a second job, take a class, eat better, any of the hoarde of coping mechanisms I have built up over the years, and then when I don't do them, out of laziness, lack of money, lack of drive, or whatever perverse imp depression uses to make you not want to do the things you enjoy doing (psst, it's called "anhedonia"), I berate myself for yet another failed attempt. Maybe I really am worthless. Maybe I really am a horrible person, if I can't even do that. Maybe I'm not even worth my own self-directed contempt.
There's the See-Saw circle. Oh Dina, be gentler on yourself-- depression really messes with your head. But is it depression? Or is it laziness? Am I using depression as a blind for simply being lazy? Am I using the label to make it okay to snap at my husband, not do the necessary housework, lie on the couch in my pajamas and bathrobe re-reading books I've read a thousand times over? What is really the issue here? Am I mentally ill? Or just an irreparably flawed person? Is it me, or everyone else? Am I failing to do anything to fix my problem because of the anhedonia, or because deep down I LIKE being depressed? Should I try to talk to someone about it? But who would I talk to? I ask so many questions of myself, trying to balance out the schooling I've had about depression with the instincts and very vivid feelings of what's inside my own mind. My logic wars endlessly with my emotions, and though I hate philosophy I can't help but indulge in it.
There's the "Mouse running in little circles" circle. Like the previous one, only incoherent. I think to myself, "If I talk to Husband, he will only tell me what I should be doing and is no doubt sick of hearing my whining and will discourage me from going on pills and will say we have to money for me to go to a shrink and they'll just tell me to go on pills anyway and he'll leave me if I keep acting this way and I'm so co-dependent and what the hell would I even do if he left me and I resent him for so much, for no baby and for saying we shouldn't have more than one cat and for not doing as much housework and for not being supportive and for keeping me here in the country which I love and all but there's no jobs and for always interrupting me when I'm reading or looking at something online and for being paranoid and for bitching about how everything I eat is so unhealthy and for being right a lot of times and why am I ? I should just not talk at all, since it's my problem and anyway I don't have many (or any) people to talk to and it's just whining or is it whining or actual valid pain and I will be perceived as snobby and strange for being so untalkative but if I talk I sound like an idiot or like I really want to run away and I'll be boring" and on and on it goes. I'm constantly adjusting what I think to appease the different sides of me, what other people might think, what other people DO think, and I never reconcile anything. It constantly moves, constantly changes, like a sped-up tape.
And there's...Miscellaneous.
--Anxiety about my job.
--Simply not enjoying my job anymore.
--Resentment about everything I can't/don't have.
--Desperate loneliness that never seems to be assuaged.
--Disliking my body and hair and skin.
--Anxiety about my health (and yes, there is an issue I'm a little concerned about).
And all these circles are constantly running together and flowing together and making one swiftly-moving current of jumbled misery and anger and bitterness and shame and fear.
I fear that as I withdraw, talk less, smile less, I am only retreating further and further into madness.
I fear that I'm doing exactly the opposite of what I need to do.
I fear that if I try to do anything about it I will get shot down, or fail, AGAIN.
I fear that someday I might do something bad to myself.
About that last. I don't want to. But I do. I do think about it. I think about how to do it. I don't think I could use many of the current "accepted" methods. And my mind quails from the idea of how...finding me, or having to hear about me from the police, or even just finding out I'd done it, would devastate and emotionally wreck my husband, my family, the friends I have left. It's the last that really keeps me from doing it.
And so I fear that out of fear I will keep driving people away, until one day I am so alone that I WILL do it.
Of course, I can't think of not being able to taste good food, or feel pleasure, or drink in the sun, or visit Japan if I want, or feel water on my skin, or read, or sing, or sew, or make pretty things, or pet my cat, or snuggle with my husband again. There are still things I enjoy, even if it's mostly in the abstract right now.
And so I won't do it. "Never say never," and all, but I take that a day at a time. That's all I can do. My current stance is, "No, I don't want to die...but when it comes on its own, a minute or a century from now, I'll be welcoming it with open arms."
I think I maybe can fix that someday. I hope.
I really need to start now.
