30 Apr 2018
My brain has fractured into a mess of pieces. My last therapy session resulted in me accessing and assessing my core pain, as my therapist puts it. It’s just this huge ache down my left side of my chest. It hurts to breathe sometimes. It hurts to just be.
It’s not a pain I understand. It’s pretty clear that the Inner Critic (IC) is reacting to fear of pain, pain that came from my past experiences of rejection and disillusionment that have led to fear. In summing up our session, she alluded to PTSD-type symptoms, and my work for this week is to allow myself to take in current feedback and assessments, not just past pain and accusation.
It’s proven to be really, really hard.
The more I live with depression, the more I wonder how much of this is self-inflicted. Why can’t I just “let go”, or “think less”, or “be stronger”? Why must my mind wander down these rabbit holes, and end up twisting itself into pretzel shapes and complicated balls of yarn? Why can’t I lead a simpler life, and just trust God, and not be held back by the past etc etc?
Maybe that answers my own question. It’s just the way my mind works.
I could continue to fight and struggle and try to change how my mind works so that I’m stronger. But that’s being untrue to my nature of wanting to find answers, no matter how hard it is to find them. Perhaps I could live with knowing less – but that would be untrue to my nature of being able to observe more than what I seem to, absorbing information and then finding out things that make life a little more complex.
My boys have had to live with me being able to catch their lies at really unexpected times, because of a little bit of inconsistency in what they’re saying.
So it remains. A struggle to live up to the expectations of others, to not disappoint them. (Let go! Think less! Be stronger! Be a man!) Versus a struggle to just be myself. (I let go of things I know aren’t important to me. I think a lot. I’m strong in ways unseen even to myself. I think. I’m a man. I think.)
A struggle to upkeep the values of others, versus my own values.
A struggle to find out who I really am, so that I won’t have to live the rest of my life stuck with this ache that prevents me from smiling naturally from my heart.
I don’t know where to start. I’ve forgotten, in such a short time, to take each day on its own. I’ve tried to plan ahead, to look ahead, and I’ve collapsed. I’ve tried hard to recover, but with each push, I fall back even worse.
It doesn’t help that I’ve come off my night meds entirely, and I’m struggling at some level. Sleep is harder to come by, though sleep itself is much cleaner and I seem to need less of it. 6 to 8 hours are now more normal, and I wake up more refreshed. But going to bed is a torture, and my mind just never seems to take a break from the moment I lie down to the moment I wake. And i seem to be even more aware of my thoughts and the ache because I don’t feel as sleepy or foggy.
My knee hurts, and I feel lethargic more easily though. Unrelated. Thus the title of this update.
I really really don’t know what to do from here. One step, one day, one moment. And then I forget and try to charge ahead, and trip and fall flat on my words. I lose my conversation with my wife halfway through it, and I struggle to bring my mind back to what I wanted to say without losing hope.
I don’t know what we’ll do during therapy this week, but I want the pain to go away. But not by hiding it. It’ll come back to haunt me. By handling it. Facing it.
I continue to blog to allow others to see into the mind of depression. But sometimes, reality seems to take a back seat while I struggle with the motions of just being around. I want to give up at times, but that is simply not possible. So I have to fight on – and that also seems impossible at times.
I know that God is the one lifting my feet even when I have no words to express the need for help. But it still feels painful. I still struggle, wondering why I can’t just not be myself.
See. The mind never ever gives me a break.
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