I am not a happy camper lately.

For the last three or four days, I have been experiencing a period of almost constant anxiety. I feel crazed and haunted all the time. I can’t seem to calm down for long. I feel like I am being hunted and I can’t relax at all.

Oh, I can sleep. I can even sleep fairly peacefully… no more crazy scary dreams than usual, no waking up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep, no waking uyp dizzy and disoriented either.

But once I am awake, the anxiety sets in. I feel restless and agitated all the time. I feel like I am waiting for something big and bad to happen, and I wish it would just happen already so I could deal with it and get it over with.

It’s like being in the waiting room of your dentist’s office, waiting for a procedure you know will be painful and gross and very upsetting, and the dentist is running late. So despite how part of you might be glad the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, you are mostly just mad at the dentist for making you stew in your own trepidation like this.

Ironically, when I feel agitated and anxious like this, I end up spending more time in bed. The nature of my illness leads me to deal with anxiety by reducing stimulation, and retreating into sleep is the ultimate expression of that. When you sleep, you do not have to deal with stimulation at all. You get to skip out on life completely for a while. The ultimate escape.

Well, penultimate, perhaps.

So I have been spending far more time lying in bed than usual. I spend my time sleeping, or reading, or playing games on my tablet, or just laying there with my fan pointed at my forehead, my conscious mind blanked out so my inner mind can process and integrate whatever it is that is bothering me.

Even just sitting here typing, with no music on or anything else to distract or stimulate me, I feel far too anxious, and the desire to retreat to my bed and finish this entry later is very strong. It is only my usual bullheaded determination to finish what I start that is keeping me here, typing away to you nice people, when I could be “safe:.

Naturally, all this worry has me worried. I am pretty curious about just what it is that happened lately that has led me to this state of heightened agitation. I can’t think of any one thing in particular that is the trigger. I haven’t gotten any sort of news that has me upset, and there’s no life changes coming my way as far as I know.

Mostly it is just an accumulation of things, I suspect. At some point, I started taking on agitation faster than I could dissipate it, and since them it has been building and building.

And now I feel kind of freaked out all the time.

I can think of a few contributing stressors. I slept on my right shoulder wrong recently, and so it is kind of sore. Nothing enormous or life-changing, just a stiffness and soreness that makes doing anything with that arm (like, say, use the mouse) a little more painful and uncomfortable, and that certainly adds to one’s stress level like only pain can.

Plus, my sister Catherine and her hubby Joe will be visiting me in around a month, and the evil forces of social anxiety are already hard at work making me dread the coming visit instead of anticipating it with great joy, like I want to do.

After all, I haven’t seen Catherine in decades and I have never even met her hubby Joe, and I am so happy that they will be visiting and I will get to see them.

Or at least, the sane part of me feels that way,

But the crazy part is terrified of the whole thing. Why? No good reason. That’s what makes it crazy. I could not even begin to offer any sort of rational rationale as to why I am terrified of the whole thing. I just am.

I mean, what do I think is going to happen? Rejection? Disapproval? Exposure? This is my sister, not some stranger. She knows me well enough, even after all these years, to know what to expect from me. And yet, I feel deeply ashamed.

So that is weighing on my mind, and probably contributing to this state of stress. I have been having low level anxiety attacks by the dozens. I have tried getting some exercise, and thank goodness, that does help a little bit. Takes some of that excess energy out of the equation.

But deep down, I think I am going through some sort of emotional crisis. All this emotional chaos is merely the side effect of a serious emotional renovation project, and I will be far better off once it’s all done.

In the meantime, I am going to have to put up with feeling crazy all the time. I feel like doing something nuts like throwing my computer monitor out the window or smashing my tablet over my knee or running screaming into the night.

Thankfully, I have you people to talk to, and that gives me a slightly less deranged outlet for my insanity. Hopefully, this whole thing will end on its own soon and I can go back to my usual lower level of total insanity.

When I am done typing this missive to you all, I will lay down again, perchance to sleep, or possibly just to state at the ceiling without really seeing it while my mind races and races and I try to get it to slow down and tell me what it wants.

What it wants, I suspect, is to start screaming and never stop, but that is not currently a primary option.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

If I wasn’t depressed… if somehow my entire mental illness evaporated overnight like morning fog burned away by the summer sun… then I would have to face the world without it.

And that prospect terrifies me on a level so deep and so primal that it makes me feel like I am going insane just to think about it, let alone do anything about it.

This is the real deep throbbing hard-edged truth of depression : you need it. It stays because you still want it around. You might think and say all kinds of things about how much being mentally ill sucks and how you would do all kinds of wonderful things if that darn depression wasn’t around, but the truth is, you couldn’t live without it.

I need mine. That deadly numbness acts as a filter for reality, one that mutes the intensity of sensation and throttles down the volume of life to something I can handle, and I can’t handle much.

For this service, depression demands a very heavy price. It has left me alone and isolated for a vast majority of my life. Even when I am not alone, the icy numbness to which I am addicted keeps me from feeling the love and respect of others, so I am still isolated where it counts.

And all so I can remain turned inward, away from reality, and hide my head in the sand. All so I can stay in my inner world and pretend the outer world does not exist to terrify and defeat me, and make me feel so small.

I might fool myself into thinking that because my mind is free, so am I. But if you have a chained and padlocked soul, like I do, the freedom of one’s mind is that of a bird on a chain who thinks it flies free because it can fly in circles.

And boy, do I know a think or two about going in the circles. It seems like that is all I do. I can never tell whether I am making any real progress because it seems like I just end up in the same places over and over again. Am I spiraling upward, or am I just wearing a groove into the circle of ground at the end of my leash?

Either way, I don’t feel like I have the power to stop. If I stopped, all the energy that I use in my mindless circling would start to build up and that would shatter my fragile strategy like a china cup under a giant’s heel.

So I wander and search, never stopping, always looking, always seeking, never finding that one thing that would make me happy. The one thing that would let me finally stop and rest. Because there is no such thing. I search because I have to, not because I actually think I will find a solution.

And so in my mind and in my dreams, I am always moving, looking, trying to get somewhere but the cross current always pulls me off course and I can never get back to where I began.

I guess that’s its job.

At least here, I can drag myself back to the beginning. So… if I wasn’t depressed….

I would be… exposed? I would have to take reality unfiltered. I would have to live in realtime and make my decisions on the fly without even the illusion of a delay. As an over-intellectual emotional refugee, I have grown extremely reliant on my rational mind for decision making, thus cutting the more gut-level, integrated, instinctual thinking out of the loop.

And cold rationality is simply not enough. We cannot live healthy lives if we are cut in half. Only with balance and integration do we have a hope of being stable and sane.

If I could truly decide to simply throw away my depression… to rip the cold cloak of clinical comfort that has kept me from growing up and being a real person for my entire adult life… would I do it? Would I have the strength to say “Fuck it. Kill that bullshit and let me deal with the consequences. ”

I don’t know. I feel like I have on just looked beyond the edge of my depression and seen what truly lies outside it, and what its true dimensions are. If it were possible (and it just might be) to just rip it all away, would I do it? Could I do it? Or would cowardice and weakness keep me forever trapped in maladaptation and depression, watching the days and years of my life pass me by as I roll, unresisting, towards an early grave?

I honestly don’t know. I have been experiencing so much emotional flux lately that it is hard for me to do much more than try to just let things sort themselves out somehow, with the occasional bit of light exercise to help bleed off some of the pressure and make some room for me to think.

I think I can let my depression go. Maybe not all at once, but in the biggest handfuls I can make. I have a deep dark rage against this cold and filthy monster that has kept me trapped for two decades and more, and it is that rage that has powered my recent recovery and led me to be willing to do whatever it takes to be free.

Even if it means cutting off my arm, metaphorically speaking.

And the more I understand what I am getting from my depression, the easier it will be to decide to give it up. I have to be willing to give up this cloak of intellect and detachment and swim naked in the pool of life for the first time, without my little submersible, before I can endure… and adapt.

If you don’t endure, you will never adapt. If you don’t stay, you won’t learn to play.

And there are worse things in life than being trapped.

That’s all for me today, folks. Tomorrow… I talk about my Dad.