Sunset

Regarding my last post, I didn’t make it out for Halloween in the end.  There was one less creature of evil prowling the local bars last Saturday.  I am a bit disappointed, but I know I wouldn’t have enjoyed it the way I was feeling.  I was just coming out of a depression that had lasted a few days and, although I felt better than the previous days I sort of knew that I wasn’t in a good enough mood to be out socialising in crowded bars.  Plus I would have got drunk if I’d gone out and I don’t have a good reaction to alcohol when I’m particularly low in mood.  The pumpkin, alas, succumbed to the passage of time, and currently resides, wet and smelly, in the carrier bag it arrived in over a week ago.  Let us observe a moment of silence for this pumpkin, a pumpkin that did not see its destiny fulfilled.

I took some pictures of a sunset a couple of weeks ago.  I like them because they all look kind of different despite being taken within fifteen minutes of each other.  I was shooting from different windows in my house.  Behold!!

Halloween – who knows…

 

Happy Halloween! to anyone who cares to receive that greeting.

I’ve no idea where today will take me.  Yesterday was a wash-out.  I cancelled going to the cinema with my friend because my mood just felt too low.  It’s always an inaccurate science, that of deciding whether it will do me more good to force myself to do something I don’t feel like doing, but it’s a choice I frequently have to make.  Today my mood is a little better.

So, I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do today.  Will I go out in town?  My friend’s house party?  Stay in?  I’m gonna try to keep as many options open as possible until the last minute because I really need to be a bit careful what I do given my dodgy frame of mind.

I have a pumpkin.  If I get round to carving it I’ll pop a picture up on here.

Diary/Complementary therapy/feeling sad

Feeling rather unmotivated today.  It’s Halloween tomorrow; I like Halloween.  Still feel sad.  If I were standing outside myself I might come upto myself, grab myself by the shoulders, shake profusely, and bellow ‘what the hell is the matter with you?’

I have a feeling my response would be a subdued ‘don’t really know…’

One thing I’ve just remembered is I had a dream about a job I applied for, just some temporary Christmas work, and I received an envelope from the store (in the dream; haven’t heard anything back in real life), which had penned on the back several reasons they couldn’t employ me.  One that stuck out was ‘too much of a risk with health condition’.  How bizarre.  Well, bizarre in that it’s so straightforward rather than a weird dream.  It highlights my fears obviously and succinctly.  I’m scared of applying for jobs because I’m scared of being rejected due to my health issues.  With dreams like that who needs nightmares, hey? 

There is something of a vicious circle here that I need to break into.  Not applying for things because I’m scared I’ll be rejected is a sure fire way to end up with nothing.  And depression loves to feed upon such fears.  I’m also scared I might make my health worse by working – not the depression, but the CFS side of things.  But I think that could be avoided by looking and applying for a very small number of hours per week.

Maybe my sad/dejected mood has nothing to do with the above, it’s just a theory. 

My sister says I need to go buy a Halloween costume to get in the spirit of things.  Perhaps. 

I’m supposed to be going to the cinema later tonight.  It might cheer me up.

Complementary Therapy

No, that’s not paying someone to assail me with rapid-fire nuggets, like: ”wow, have you lost a few pounds?”;  “LOVE! the shoes, by the way”; “I think you just might be the bestest most spiffing-est person I’ve ever darn well met”; “Your fab!  Can we hang out, like, all the time, please?”  Though that would undoubtedly be a very nice way to spend half an hour, I was referring to the complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, homeopathy, massage etc.

Yesterday I had a massage.  I used an out of date voucher for a local salon, which luckily they still accepted despite its out of date-ness.  Here’s a weird thing.  It was a full back massage, which I thought might infuse some positivity into me as the essential oils absorbed into my skin with the careful caresses of the masseuse.

I was wrong. 

I think massage is lovely, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you are feeling very low.  I found it too difficult to focus on the positivity of the massage because the nature of it, lying there quietly, allowed my negative thoughts to percolate round my head. 

When I went in to the salon I was shown to a room, advised to strip to knickers-only and then deposit myself between two towels.  This I did.  The lady then wafted two bottles of heady orange oils in front of my nose and asked which I preferred.  I chose the relaxing version rather than the invigorating mix.  Now I think maybe that was a mistake because my mood was low not anxious, so perhaps the other oil would have left me less knackered afterwards.

Anyway, the massage was lovely.  I can see how it would be really beneficial if I was feeling anxious or stressed.  Calming music in the background, tea-light candles lit around the room, softly warmed towels.  My particular treatment involved exfoliation first and in between each of the products she was applying she covered my back with a hot damp towel to remove the excess.  Afterwards I told her about my tension headaches and stiffness in my shoulders and she commented that I had loads of knots there.  I’m not surprised, mental and physical being entwined as they are.

To sum this up then, I think you need to be careful what treatments and therapies you try.  I wouldn’t have a massage whilst depressed again because I think I’d have had more benefit from a thought-distraction activity, like exercise or a film.  Massage has been suggested to me for my CFS and I know it’s good for stress levels so I would do it again in a less depressed frame of mind.

Today I’m still quite low.  I can’t quite get a grip on it at the moment.  The fact I’m able to write this here is an indicator I’m not majorly depressed, because in the major depressive episodes I’ve had I haven’t been able to get dressed, let alone function enough to write.

Let’s have some good luck and good moods soon, please, thank you very much..

non-stick

context: written a couple of days ago:

Drifts drifts drifts

softly as they intend

movement unthinking

soft falls

eventual

whirr fall drift

move

cold frothing snow

drifts lightly

tumble-moving

I had a friend talk me through their suicidal motives yesterday.  We’re neither in a good place.  I realise more than ever that the world is not mine to hold steadfast in one-view-gaze.  His reasons, his motives, are alien to me.  They make sense to Him.  His perspective.  I have to be content to let him have his outlook and know that I can’t share it.  In fact I don’t want to share it.  The hardest thing is to create a happy space where I can live. 

I was worried about Halloween.  I thought I’d have nowhere to go and nothing to do since my girlfriend cancelled her house party.  It turns out I have suddenly more options than I could have anticipated.  This won’t mean much to you unless I expand: I really like the festival of Halloween.  It’s my favourite holiday.  The dressing up; the colour; the fun; green jelly and black velvet.  I now have another girlfriend who is throwing a house party, a male friend who has offered to bring me along to his friend’s house party and, failing that, I can go out locally with my sister and co.  I feel like I want to live until next weekend just for Halloween.  That’s a little crazy, huh?  I’ve got a bunch of things that I feel negative about, a bunch of things I am going to struggle with short-term and long-term.  Sometimes I have to hold onto these frivolous things to give me something, anything, to keep moving for.

I’m thinking…

 

I’ve been wondering about my history and wondering how much of a role it has played in developing me as I am today.  One can never know just how much of what has happened has contributed to what is.

I think I’m roughly what I would have been had circumstances been different.  And yet…  And yet, I also think minor occurrences, had they not occurred, might have had profoundly different results.

One obvious thing to me is school.  I was sent to a school at eleven where I had no friends.  I didn’t want to go there.  I didn’t want to be separated from my close primary school friends, none of whom went to the same school I did.  I remember feeling powerless.  I, a child, could not overrule my parents.  It was my first real taste of how my will was not strong enough to get what I wanted. 

Had I gone to the same school my childhood friends where at, the school I wanted to go to, would things have been different?  Maybe.  Maybe I wouldn’t have gone into myself so much to hide the deep distress I felt at feeling lost amongst the crowd.

‘Maybes’ are not a currency I can deal in for any length of time.  Things happened the way they did and whatever got this train rolling is not what keeps it chug-chug-chugging along.  Yet I have to, occasionally, look back and think ‘things could have been different’…

afros, flares and swirly stuff

 

As I’m not feeling too great at present, thought I’d post something written a while back.  I’ve got a habit of writing things and then leaving them rather than editing and posting.  Ah well.  This was written after my friend’s 1970’s-themed birthday night.  From 12.09.09:

I had The Dress.  I had The Shoes.  I had..The Wig.  Okay that last one is a little out of place, but 1970’s hairdo’s are not something I can recreate with confidence.

Nothing went wrong yesterday.  I feel very on edge today and a little out of sorts, but I blame this on having a slight hangover and feeling dead tired.

Nothing went wrong.  I stressed a bit over what to take with me and what to leave at home (the zipper of my overnight case was also s-t-r-e-s-s-e-d);  I stressed a bit because I was aware, even if I pushed it to the back of my mind, that this was a step up for me.  Challenges vibrated down several strands: the challenge of staying overnight in a travel inn; the challenge of keeping my energy levels reasonably up; the challenge of mixing in with several people whom I wouldn’t know and who didn’t know me; the challenge of just keeping it all together, really, for the time I would be away – we’re talking yesterday dinner time to lunch time today. 

Perhaps I should have waited for the pinch of the hangover to recede before writing this, as I do tend to feel less positive post-alcohol.  I did have a good time.  I did.  Now I have some slightly anxious thoughts along the lines of ”should I have said that”, “did I inadvertently say/do the wrong thing”, “urggh, I wonder what sort of first impression I made on her” etc.  Standard social anxiety stuff. 

Looking at it logically I no doubt did say and/or do things that weren’t as I would have liked.  I’m not talking anything major, here, stuff like a sentence intoned in a way that could have (unintentionally) appeared off-hand, insensitive, or whatever.  I don’t need to be putting myself through this sort of mental rehash, it’d be better if I didn’t, but as I said, I’m definitely a little anxious today.

We got the train to Leeds.  I sat on my own and stretched out and felt reassuringly unconcerned about whether that was the polite thing to do.  I didn’t feel obliged to whitter away to my friend’s friend, who also got on the train with us and whom I had only just met.  That shows how being in a reasonable mood and not too tired creates a much more peaceful interior for me.  I don’t question things half as much and I look out for myself and what I want as much as what others might want.  It’s freeing.  I chatted to the other three girls a bit, obviously, but it was only when I felt the urge to chip in with a comment.

Anyway, train journey.  Then dumping bags in the room before heading out for a really nice meal, where more of my friend’s friends joined us.  Our numbers swelled as the evening wore on.  For the most part the people I met seemed lovely.

I felt more comfortable when a late arrival, a mutual friend from uni days, joined us, as I had someone to talk to who I had actual history with.

Several glasses of wine and a change of clothes later, we transformed from an average assemblage of 20-something girls, to six (not everyone at the meal came to the club) gaudily clad chicks, in 1970’s get up. 

It was a lot of fun, though I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit of a prat walking through the city centre to get to the venue.  I’d also be a very rich woman if I had a pound for every bloke who ambled up to us, alcohol-glazed, to ask “Hey, so are you lot on a hen ‘do?”  That never got old, really.

My nerves are balanced on a clean sharp knife edge today.  I can feel the fray, the scratch of edge against weave and the sensation won’t go away.

Okay, just to confuse you, this next part of the post I wrote up the next day – on the Sunday.  We cool?  Okay, here goes:

So I’m now hangover-free, although moody and PMT-ridden, so let’s split the difference and we’re still left with one helluva moody girl.  I left the club earlier than the others on Friday – about 1am I think – but due to unforseen events, namely, my room-mate getting separated from the rest of the bunch, due to her being wasted, I actually didn’t get to sleep ’til much later.  Room-mate had left her phone in our room, so was out of contact with the others.  Birthday girl rang my room-mate’s phone to locate her, at which point I hear buzzing from somewhere under the bed, ignore it, hear it two or three more times, before throwing my head over the side of the bed to locate and answer the phone.

I inform Birthday Girl that I am indeed not Missing Girl even though I have picked up Missing Girl’s phone.  I am Gone Home Early Girl.  The usual ensues – phonecalls, retracing of steps (not by me; I stay in the room with orders to inform the others should MG materialise at the hotel), messages at reception etc.  Missing Girl has gone missing many a time before and since she doesn’t have her phone, I don’t really see the point in the search party, but BG wants to know she’s okay etc.

Missing Girl finds a group of people who walk her back to the hotel and one guy rings the hotel for her on his phone.  BG happens to be in reception at the time, having told them she’s lost her mate.  So, fortuitously, Reception Guy is able to pass the phone over so that BG can talk direct to MG and go out and meet her to walk the rest of the way back with her.  MG is nearly home anyway, but BG walks her upto our room, now about 4am, to deposit her personally.  Found Girl, formerly Missing Girl, bounds into our room, drunk and cheerful.  I pretend to be asleep so she will just get into bed and we can all go to sleep.

BG, rather unhelpfully states “oh, well Louise was awake about five minutes ago when I spoke to her on the phone”.  Rumbled.  I grunt “I’m not asleep; just dozing”.  BG hugs MG and leaves her with me.  MG is totally hammered and, with my firm ‘I’m going to sleep’ body language, she soon collapses onto the bed and passes out.

Very Quickly

 

I just wanted to do a very quick post, mainly so that the previous post was not ominously standing at the top of the pack.  I am still struggling and maybe the fact I am struggling and frightened is a sign that I’ve not been completely overrun.  I don’t know.  Logic at 2am is hard to come by.  It’s hard just writing these lines right now.  So I’ll stop there.  Thank you to anyone who left a comment, it was muchly-much appreciated.

Down we go

 

BEFORE YOU READ: POST CONTAINS TALK OF SUICIDE.

I’m the most depressed I’ve been for a while.  It has to have been a few months at least since I’ve been so low.  I am having a tirade of negative thoughts parade about my head.  “You are a burden to your family” “You are looking crap” and so on.  I hate the darkness of the day and the early onset of night and yet I sleep through the majority of the morning hours.

When I am awake I’m sluggish.  I feel that I have nothing to offer and nothing to look forward to.  I feel shit and depressed.  At my last G.P. appointment he mentioned the changeover into autumn/winter and asked how I was feeling about it.  He knows, you see, that I usually suffer some sort of depressive recurrence in these times.  I said I’d use my lightbox and wait and see, what more could I do…

I’m sometimes able to fight the negativity in my thinking and sometimes not.  Truth be told I have vaguely considered suicide.  It is a thought which creeps in, nestled in the breast of the other thoughts.  I have thought about my dead body and I’ve thought how horrible it would be for a member of my family to find me that way.  I’ve pictured them at my funeral, also, with pinched faces and white knuckles.  That picture isn’t one I want to visit upon my family.  It disturbs me that I’ve gone down far enough to even think these thoughts.

more about how crap I feel

 

edit: previously ‘private’ post, just because it was more of the same. Now am making it public – written 20.10.09.  The unfinished sentence at the end isn’t meant to represent anything; I just couldn’t think of or didn’t want to write any more and as it was privately posted, the unfinishedness didn’t matter.

well it’s just gone 1am and I’m alone here, tapping away.  I’m not alone in the house, or in the world, but I’m utterly, desperately alone at this time, on this night, now!

I’m more than a little freaked by this grey-bordering-black mood.  I mean, I know how evil it is possible for me to feel and I’m scared of that.  Petrified.  I’m feeling myself slip and it brings the horrors of the world to my head.  The things I haven’t got.  The things I have got that can be taken away from me. 

I can feel myself slip as though falling down; it’s always a falling sensation.  Hands reach out to grab the sides to stop the slide and they gain grip.  And I relax.  But the next slide takes me further, where my hands grab moss tufts and broken mortar.  Now I’m falling from the place I stopped myself last time.  Now hands panic.  They flail as I fall.  Knuckles graze brick.  Legs kick to find a foothold.  I panic because I fall and now I do not know when or how to stop the descent.

I am

Diary

 

I’m still feeling woefully less than adequate.  I’m just so low and have been for.. three days I think it is now.  I’m blaming it on the changing light levels but really I don’t know if that’s what it is.  I’m dragging myself around.  I don’t want to socialize.  I don’t want to go out.  I feel stupid and worthless.  My head is dull and cloudy but the thoughts I do have tend to be of the how useless I am variety.

The thing that makes me suspect a bit of seasonal input is the nature of this depression.  I have no motivation, no energy and want to be in bed a lot of the time.  Okay, that could be the regular sort of depression, but for one thing: I’m craving carbs BADLY.  I could easily live between fridge and bed at the minute, only taking time out to fill my head with negative thoughts.  ‘You look like crap’  ‘Oh my God you’re nearly 30, still not working, no boyfriend and living with your parents’  ‘What a waste of space/drain on your parents’ resources you are’ etc.

I missed my CFS group today due to not being able to get myself alert in time.  I did try, but I was super sluggish.  I had to sit on the toilet lid for about ten minutes just looking at my Everest – THE SHOWER – before I could muster the must to do the necessary. 

Please please let this fucking horrible downer end soon.  I have decided that if I am being attacked by the Winter Blues I need to stop staying indoors.  From what I’ve read on SAD it’s important to get the natural light.