I was really depressed this afternoon, and I don’t know why.

Actually, it’s happened two days in a row now. Halfway through lunch, I suddenly get very tired, a little nauseous, and extremely depressed. This cloud of ice cold mist fills my heart and I am incredibly sad and sleepy with no obvious cause.

Yesterday, I just chalked it up to the variations caused by Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I knew I was somewhat clogged up (the back pain was a telltale clue) and so I figured it was just my body being out of whack until the clog cleared.

And three trips to the bathroom in three hours later, it did.

And there was much rejoicing. (yaaay)

So to have it happen again today, when I am fairly obstruction free, leaves me back at square one without even half a clue.

Well, as the old saying goes, if it’s not bowels, it’s probably diabetes.

I have reason to be concerned there. I ran out of insulin Wednesday night, which means I should have gone next door to Shopper’s Drug Mart to pick up more on Thursday, but I was too lazy, and so I went a night sans insulin.

I could have used some old insulin I have in the fridge (it stays good for a surprisingly long time if kept refrigerated), but the old stuff is Novolin, the insulin formulation I started out on, and I use Levemir now for a reason.

With Levemir, I get way fewer blood sugar highs and lows. It’s a time-release insulin analogue, and so it provides a smoother, more even blood sugar level, and I really appreciate that.

I have to really fuck up with the not eating often enough to get the catastrophic lows I got before where I felt like I was dying.

I can be such a spaz.

So that is why I elected to skip a night rather than use that Novolin crap. I have had to skip one night before and it was not a huge deal.

But this time, methinks I didst fuck things up proper, verily.

I am guessing that my body has grown quite used to its nightly dose of insulin at roughly 11:30 pm, and not getting it really threw it off. It might take a while for me to build up that kind of natural rhythm again, and until then, I am going to have to deal with a certain amount of unpleasant variability.

That’s what I get for being too lazy to put some proper clothes on and go next door, I suppose.

So that’s another theory. It might be a blood sugar thing. But it might also be something else. If it’s not bowels or diabetes, it could be depression.

The process known as recovery is an intricate and deep operation, and its inner workings are not always accessible to the conscious mind. One never knows what its products will be or what work it will assign, or when.

So maybe the workings of my inner drive towards betterment just plain dumped a big bundle of sadness into my emotional processing queue. In order to move on, I have a bunch of sadness to feel. One does not get out of decades of depression without having to pay the price, and with depression, the price is almost always paid by feeling things that have been long suppressed.

It certainly feels like something just welled up from down below. A sadness not unlike grief. I have spoken before about how recovery can be a lot like a grieving process, although exactly who you are grieving is never made clear.

If I had to guess, I would have to say I am grieving the version of me I am leaving behind. Much like moving to a better apartment (or, for me, when I graduated from high school), the fact that you are going somewhere better does not erase the emotion attachment you have to where you are.

Even if you don’t even like where you are and are glad to see it go, you will still be sorry about what you are leaving behind because, good or bad, it was home.

And home is a mighty powerful concept in the human mind, especially for a mildly agoraphobic homebody like me. In my mind, home means safety. When I was being bullied both in school and out of it, home was the only place I was safe. That’s when the agoraphobia started, naturally enough. There really was a time in my life when it was justified.

So I have warm, sentimental feelings about every place I have ever lived. Even the fairly crappy ones. There are so many memories attached to places we have lived that it’s hard to let go sometimes.

Historically, I have not realized this truth until I had already left the place. But it seems absurd and somehow wrong to me to only appreciate things when they are gone. So I try to appreciate things in the present.

But it’s not easy. Taking things for granted is easy. Appreciating them while you have them is hard. We get all too easily become so consumed by the problems in front of us that it seems absolutely insane, not to mention counterproductive, to think about the problems we don’t have.

But right up until they said they were kicking us out, this place has been good to us. That’s why we have lived hear for seven years or more. And you can’t just walk away from seven years of history and never look back, at least if you’re me.

So maybe we should have a house-leaving party to bid adieu to the place that kept us for seven years.

But in order to keep it from being too depressing and melancholy, the party would then move to the new place and become a housewarming party.

Out with the old, in with the new!

That’s always been easier for me in theory than in practice.

Hey, maybe that’s why I was sad yesterday and today. I am grieving the fact that we have to pack up and move!

See how I brought it back to the topic? Classy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.