My November guest

[kaberett]

[content note: depression, gentle whinging]

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

--Robert Frost

The thing that irks me most is not, as it turns out, this shattered prison, after all. I have said this before and probably I will say it again: mobility aids? Fine, good, you might be able to walk but I can do wheelies, etc. Pain? Eh, I've learned to live with it.

What I cannot stand, however, is this wretched foggy blanket, this muffling, this dragging sadness that catches at me (unawares) and can be staved off for a moment, for a while, by surrounding myself with people - at the cost, later, of exhaustion and increased susceptibility and the bedrock certainty that everything I have said, everything I have done, every tiny movement, every breath, has served to alienate the people I am clinging to.

These days I know that it will pass, and that it will pass soon, but I also know that the only thing I can do about it is grit my teeth and hurry up and wait.

What I mean when I say 'depressed'

depressed means numbness pressing down
where every step is a choice
and every choice hard to make

when you delay delay
even going to sleep
because you do not want to face the morning

when you are needy and desperate
and draw away for shame
hide away, paralyzed, afraid beyond fear

drawing breath is a choice
keep drawing breath
surely somehow
some day something will change
but you cannot quite see it
you simply have to take it on faith
and just keep breathing

depression burns you raw
eats your reserves
takes an axe to the root of your sense of self
until you bleed dry
and just keep bleeding

that is what i mean when i say 'depressed'
and 'history of depression' means there's no defense
perfect enough to keep it from coming back

--jjhunter, originally posted in her journal

Comments

[jamfish]

You are doing all the right things, and powering forward, and making so much progress. You inspire me! It's going to be okay. I hope the fog lifts soon. ♥

[kaberett]

<3 It will do - and in fact people have been lovely to me this weekend - it's just so tedious to know that three days, four days, five days every month will for certain be like this, however much the antidepressants help the rest of the time; that I have to be careful not to overcommit in the timeframe it might happen in just in case I tip myself into something worse; and so on and so forth.

(My depression is very progesterone-sensitive. I... kinda feel like I am ~betraying womankind~ on the one hand for "actually yes PMS" and on the other, uh, no, this is some of why trans* kthxbye!)

[littlebutfierce]

the bedrock certainty that everything I have said, everything I have done, every tiny movement, every breath, has served to alienate the people I am clinging to.

Ohhhhhh I know this feeling. It's one of the Core Lessons in my head, that People Will Always Leave & It Will Be Because You Are Too Messed-Up to Deal w/. :/

I hope yours passes soon, anyway.

[kaberett]

Yeah. <3

And... I am lucky, it will pass soon - my depression's very progesterone-sensitive, and at the moment my happy pills are working well enough that I only get like this immediately before my period, but there's a limit to which that helps, y'know? Sure it'll only be a few days, but when you're in the middle of it, that tends to feel like forever...

[amethystfirefly]

Yeah, I think the depression is the worst part of our chronic illnesses. The pain, the fatigue, we can work through. But the depression doesn't leave us any energy to even attempt to work through it. All we can do is just curl into a ball and hope it fucks off soon. And it leaves us with so little energy that we have difficulty pushing through the things we can deal with when we're not depressed. So not only does the depression crush us, the mountain we're usually dealing with starts crushing us, too.