Overslept this afternoon, and so I will be writing today’s diary entry with slightly more haste than usual.

Don’t worry, I am sure I will be able to maintain my usual level of pinpoint accuracy and extraordinary refinement of prose.

Today was a therapy day, and that went quite well. It seems that my idea of writing out my feeling of frustration and whatnot last night worked, as I felt fine this morning, better than usual even, and hence did not end up in some petty and unproductive altercation with my therapist.

I am quite proud of that. I feel like I saw a problem coming on the horizon and dealt with it in a mature and proactive manner. These are the sorts of coping skills I am going to need if I am going to become better at managing my mental illness and getting more out of life.

So, big points to me on that one.

The subject of what happened last Sunday came up, and so I figured I would talk about it here. That will probably help me deal with it as well.

I had planned to go to this month’s BCSFA meeting with my friends. For those of you who are not local nerds, BCSFA is the British Columbia Science Fiction Association. It is a group of us nerdy types who meets once a month to hang out, munch the lovely food one of the members provides, and engage in the long, wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, and occasionally quite silly discussion upon which all of nerd kind (or at least, all that I like) thrives.

And I had been eagerly anticipating it for the whole week. What happened did not occur, as in the past, because I had completely forgotten it was coming up and thus did not have sufficient time to prepare myself psychologically for this challenge to my social phobia. I had been looking forward to the evening all week. Usually, that works.

But not this time.

What happened instead was this : at around 6 pm, right as I was about to get my pre-event shower, I suddenly felt as though a thick blanket of ice had wrapped itself around my heart and my mind, and suddenly I literally could not imagine going. I had to tell my roomies I did not feel like going. I had absolutely no choice.

This, to me, is the absolutely worst kind of moment in mental illness : the times, thankfully rare for me, when you know with certainty you are not in control of yourself. When you know what you want to do and what is right and logical and good, and yet you are completely incapable of doing it. The demon of your mental illness simply will not allow it.

And yet, it was not a panic attack, or at least, not one of the usual sort. I didn’t feel anxious or panicky or trapped like I normally do if I am panicking. If anything, it was the exact opposite. It was like I was stunned or stupefied. Part of my mind was paralyzed. I tried to exert my will over it, but something vital at the very center of my consciousness was frozen.

The sane part of me was there, screaming in the dark. It just was not in control.

And of course, the moment my roomies were gone and my opportunity to go to the meeting was irrevocably gone, the ice melted, sanity flooded back into my mind and my soul, and I was once more myself… and kicking myself for not going, because now I once more wanted to go.

Looking back, it is quite obvious that this was the beginning of the negative mood I wrote about yesterday. No wonder I felt angry and frustrated and out of sorts. I had come face to face with my own madness, experiencing it, as it were, in realtime, and in a way which was quite frightening to me.

That is enough to put anyone off their game.

I think I know where I went wrong, however, and that is a good and hopeful thing. I think the problem was that, despite all the time I had in which to do this, I had not performed the vital step of imagining myself going to the meeting and then dealing with the inevitable surge of anxiety that I always feel at some point before a social event.

There is always a moment before every outing where I am seized by a moment of panic, when my social anxiety digs in its claws and says “Nooooo, I don’t wanna go!”, and usually I get over that well before the time of departure and from then on it is smooth sailing.

But this time, because I had so much warning, I just sort of accepted that I was going and that with all that lead time, there would be no problems at all, and so I never went through the “preemptive panic” stage. And then, it hit me all at once at the last minute, and I could not do a thing about it.

I won’t make that mistake again. I know what I did wrong, and from now on, I will make sure I really think (and more importantly, feel) these things through thoroughly before departure time, as unfun as that can be, and thus be more emotionally centered and prepared when the time comes.

Still, it was a chilling event. It is a terrible thing to know you are not completely in control of your own mind. Most of the time, my depression and social anxiety is not so starkly insane. I can fool myself into thinking I am more or less sort of in control of things, despite the ample evidence that I make poor life choices and that I must do that for a reason.

But Sunday night, the insanity was laid bare and I looked into the eyes of my own madness.

I am not a well man.