Still awesome. Still feelin shitty.
And I can feel the temptation to just give up and slump back into self-loathing growing. Like I said yesterday, feeling like you are as bad as you feel is so much easier than maintaining the distinction and I am quite new to the latter.
Plus, I just realized, there is evil’s best friend, the unwillingness to face how unjust something is. If I full accept that I am an amazing person who feels awful, then I am left dealing with the truth of how monumentally unfair that is.
And that’s a hell of a lot to deal with.
Again, it is so much easier to either pretend that everything is fine or just ignore the entire issue outright.
This is the exact same phenomenon that kept things like spousal abuse and child rape a dark secret for so long and let horrible people get away with these crimes with almost total impunity for many decades.
You could believe your kid, and have to go to the police and swear out charges against someone the whole community loves and respects and thus violating the social pecking order in a way that will turn your entire community against you and destroy the lives of you and your family all for the sake of charges that stand no chance of actually hurting the perpetrator of the abuse, or….
…you could tell your kid to stop making up dirty stories.
Similarly, for me to truly face the injustice of my depression head on is to face the fact that I have been the victim of a terrible disease that has robbed me of my entire adult life for 25 plus years.
Not that I ever thought I deserved it, exactly. It would be more accurate to say that I never thought I deserved better.
It’s a fine distinction but an important one.
Things get pretty complicated when a chemical imbalance is forcing you to think things that don’t make any sense.
It’s the same thing with my tragic childhood. What kept me from realizing how bad it was for many years was that if I did, I would have to face how horribly wrong the whole thing had been and what was I going to do then?
Put a contract out on my parents?
And even after that wall came down, it didn’t come down completely. In fact, I don’t think it came down completely until quite recently and I am almost 50.
Mental note : make plans for 50th birthday party.
Top of the list of activities : not killing myself.
So dealing with the truth of my depression on an emotional level is not going to be easy.
But I refuse to give in. This time I am going to defend my feisty new outlook no matter what, and continue to insist on making it clear that just because I feel bad does not mean I am bad.
In fact, I think I might be coming down with something.
And how silly would it be to hate yourself for a failure of your immune system?
More after the break.
Smell my dairy air
It’s a joke. A pun. Say it out loud if you don’t get it.
Warning ; it’s extremely immature.
Well I am definitely coming down with something, or fighting off something, or something like that.
I definitely feel worse than usual. Weaker, somewhat dizzy, and way more tired than usual. And that classic “under the weather” feeling of malaise.
Tomorrow I have Wound Care at 9:15 am. If things don’t get worse before that, then I can still go. But if they do, well, I may have to stay home.
Which I do not want. I don’t want to have to wear these bandages for another damned week. Plus there’s an errand I need to take care of on the way home.
It’s that time in this disabled person’s month when I have used up all the cash on the card I bought at the beginning of the month so I need Julian to go buy me another so I can buy my groceries this Friday.
Then again, this mysterious malaise of mine might just vanish all of a sudden, just like it’s done many times before.
Thus my oft-repeated theory that I have an infection that my immune system can subdue but not eliminate so it keeps coming back once a month or so.
Like a cartoon supervillain. “Drat! Doctor Virus got away AGAIN!”
A virus would explain why I have been so tired and out of it lately. It just took a while for me to gather enough evidence to show that this was not just my usual state of depression having a peak in intensity.
Such is the life of the scientifically minded but chronically ill.
It also explains why I kept wondering if I had taken my antihistamines for the day because my nose was running all the time.
And boy, are its nostrils tired!
I happen to think the anklet looks quite stylish,.
Seriously though, I do feel quite crappy. I just need to fix in my mind that I did nothing to deserve this and that I am therefore currently a victim of injustice in the broadest possible sense of the word.
And that it’s okay to admit to myself and the world that I feel terrible. I don’t have to pretend that nothing bothers me or that I am tough and stoic,.
Because I am neither.
What it means is that I now get to explore something with which I am unfamiliar – self-pity, also known as feeling sorry for yourself.
I’ve never felt that way before. I guess I just figure whatever happens, happens, and whether or not I deserve it doesn’t really matter.
But that is the diseased thinking of an undefended ego. Whether or not you deserve what happens is vitally important to your sense of self.
It all comes down to justice. Even an infant knows to cry when it is in pain so that someone will come remedy the situation.
But I was the baby left to cry. So I guess I gave up on that.
I didn’t deserve that, either.
Jesus Christ my life has been a sad one.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.