In general, I like the articles I am writing lately. But under the new one-article-a-day regime, I have kind of forgotten that this is also my personal blog, and I have been keeping away from the personal stuff and trying to write something more closely approximating professional content.

Well sorry folks, that ends tonight… or at least for tonight. My demons have caught up with me and I feel like shit, and it’s time to stop trying to ride it out, and write it out instead.

I know how this bad period started… last Friday night, I was eating with my friends at Denny’s, as is our custom on Friday nights, and I took out my pill bottle and saw, oops, there was no Paxil in it. I’m on a very heavy dose, 80 mg a day, and so missing a dose is serious business. No problem, I thought. I will just take my dose when I get home. It will only be a few hours later. No big deal.

But I forgot.

And by the time I figured that out, it was the next day, and less than 12 hours till my next dose, and so it was too late to fix the problem. I had no choice but to just take the next dose on schedule and go back to the usual routine. That’s how it goes with this kind of medication.

So biochemically, this created a trough in my SSRI dose, a chink in my antidepressant armor through which the old depression could come back, and come back it did. I have felt like crap, on and off, since last Saturday afternoon, and I am getting damned tired of it, and damned sick of myself.

The problem is that SSRIs are tricyclic medications, which means they have three cycles of effect, and those build upon each other. Individually the cycles are weak but as they become established and feed into one another, they offer a depression sufferer like myself a solid defense against that all-devouring never-sated void deep down inside my soul.

I’ve said it before : Paxil does not cure me depression, but it does give me a saving through against it. And the longer you take it, the better than saving throw gets.

But if those cycles get disrupted… you get a fun reminder of how sick you used to be. And through that, a painful remind of how sick and broken and miserable you still are.

All the old demons are back, especially the worst of the lot, my massive and pervasive self-hatred. At times like this, all I can think about if what a fucking joke of a life I’ve led and what a profound and bathetic loser I am. The litany is familiar… here I am, 37 years old, 38 in May, and I have done absolutely nothing useful with my life. I’ve just hid from life, on the system, on the Internet, on my own. I can’t handle even the very basic things most people take for granted in their lives. I’ve never supported myself, never had a full time job, or honestly a grown up job of any sort. I’ve never been in a relationship, only been on a few dates, all tragic, and any clubs I have belonged to were in college, or self-generated.

I am timid and frightened and broken and bleeding and a despicable and contemptible excuse for a human being. I am no longer prone to suicidal thoughts, thank goodness. Partly that’s recovery, partly that’s drugs, partly that’s just the feeling that death wouldn’t solve anything either. I suppose that’s a particularly perverse level of depression, when you can no longer even have faith in death as a solution.

So I no longer consider myself suicidal, which is progress. I still have the thoughts, every once in a while, but they pass through me list ghosts through fog, with no connection to any thought of doing anything. They are no longer anything to fear or worry about. They are just the byproduct of internal pain and the tendency of a certain type of mindset like mine towards escapism.

But the self-hate… it’s very difficult to deal with even on my best of days, and this last week or so have clearly not been my best days. I feel depressed, I’m sleeping a lot because my sleep apnea has gotten a lot worse lately for some reason, and so my sleep is brief, dream-soaked, overheated, under-oxygenated, and leaves me feeling more drained than when I went to sleep.

And yet I have no choice, because I am too sleepy to function properly.

And I look at the CPAP machine that I haven’t touched in over a year, and think about the moedical testing I also never get around to doing, and how I should be beating the bushes to get a therapist instead of just letting even these simple things slide, and all can think about is how I am not even good at being sick.

What do you do when you are too sick even to do the things that would make you better? If your illness is mental, I guess the answer is “nothing”. If I had a physical ailment that kept me from getting around to the things I needed to get well, there would be programs, machines, assistants, or whatever to help. But my problems are all up in the software encoded in this cavernous mind of mine and when that is the case, there is simply no helping you. You are left to get well or not on your own. If you are too depressed to make it to your appointments or use the tools you are given, too bad. If you don’t get well fast enough, the system just plain gives up on you.

Story of my life, really. Everybody gives up on me as being just too much work. I have trouble trusting that anyone will actually stick with me longer enough to really help. I assume everyone will bail once the going gets tough. As a result, I come out of my shell very slowly, always afraid that increasing the burden on others even slightly will make them leave me…. as a result, I go so slow that people give up.

Ta da. Catch 22 is one hell of a catch.

Maybe the dip in Paxil dose wasn’t really the cause of all this. Maybe the little stresses and pains and strains of life just build up under that protective shell of medication and now and then, I guess have to spill my bloody entrails across the page to let it all out, or at least, let a lot of it out anyhow.

And that’s what I have done here, just taken my knife, crudely sawed out my blood and filth soaked guts, and thrown them up against the pure white sheet of the Internet for the world to see.

Welcome to the splatterhouse, folks. Try not to get any on ya.