Well, it’s been three days since the incident last Monday that threatened to destroy what is left of my so called sanity, and I have therefore had time for a more thorough damage assessment.

It is not a pretty picture, I am afraid.

I am trying to be at least rational if not actually hopeful about it, but the truth is, I have not fully recovered from the incident yet, and I am beginning to worry that I was dealt a serious blow that did some long term damage to my state of mental health.

All my serious psychological issues have ceased their retreat and instead come roaring back into life to crush me and make me feel horrible. My depression, my fear, my confusion, my hopelessness, and above all, my incredible contempt for myself. I really hate myself and I don’t know what to do about that.

All I know how to do is to try to keep myself distracted and my mind busy with all my usual addictions and hope that I will recuperate slowly over time. To hope that Monday’s incident did not somehow fatally wound me and set me on the track to a more serious depression, and instead will turn out to have been a good thing in that it brought all my issues to a head and forced me to deal with them.

But nobody likes having their major disease go from chronic to acute. I am going through the motions of my life and I am not entirely without joy, but it feels like a heavy, cold, sticky weight is sitting right on my chest above my heart and just waiting till I let my guard down to really do me in.

It’s like the incident ripped a hole on my thin tissue of self-respect and togetherness and now I am just waiting for the bleeding to stop.

Perhaps it really is for the best in the long run, though, and I say that not out of the depressive desire for things to be “over” but because I have truly been doing more thinking about how sick I am and how bad my problems are in the last three days than in the last three years, and I am getting to the point where I am starting to seriously ponder whether I need a higher level of medical intervention of some sort or not.

That would, I suppose, involve time in an institution of some sort. If they’ll have me. The way things are going, I would expect that I would finally break down and ask to be admitted somewhere, only to be told all the bed are taken by people with more serious problems, and that basically because I have no history of suicide attempts or other anti-social behaviours, my problems are just not considered serious enough to warrant anything but a prescription for Paxil and a Will You Kindly Please Fuck Off. After all, the mental health system here in Richmond already gave up on me when I didn’t get better fast enough. Like usual, I am just too much trouble for anyone to bother helping. Too much dead weight for anyone to lift back on to his feet, let alone teach to walk on his own.

That might be the depression talking though.

That’s the problem with mental illness, you never know how rational you are being. On some level, you know the ways you feel and the way those feelings make you see the world are not rational or even sensible, but you just go on feeling that way and seeing things that way anyhow.

Not every problem can be solved by thinking.

I certainly have been given a harsh dense lesson in just how badly I need to find some way between myself and some kind of solid self-worth.

I am about as low status as you get in modern society. Even homeless people have memories of being functional at one time. Me, I have never even been a teenager, let alone a functional adult. I have absolutely no memories of better times when I was productive and healthy and functional.

It’s just been the Internet and video games and books and napping and life at the bottom.

You know that your life has not gone well when living in a crappy apartment on welfare was a step up. Hey, at least I was living on my own, had a tiny bit of disposable income, was managing to clothe and feed myself somewhat competently, and was making my own choices.

I have lost ground since then.

What do you do when you are not even competent to look after yourself any more?