A number of months back I wrote about how excited I was to finally have some serious relief from my depression. It was the first time in my life I felt genuinely happy, and I credited the antidepressant I was (and still am) on for helping me. Given the nature of depression I also knew a day would come when it came back, but it happened too damn soon. I went into a depression after an increase in the same medicine that was helping me (I’ve since decreased it twice without the same beneficial effects it previously had) and I had my old Claudia euthanized around the same time.
Since that time I’ve become close to someone, as close as you can get when you have a long distance relationship and talk over a screen. It won’t stay long distance, and knowing that makes this wait a tiny bit more bearable.
My point is that good things are happening in spite of the shit. I’m still struggling a lot, especially lately. I started birth control about a month ago and blamed that since it previously put me in a depression, but only for the first month. I’ve been taking the placebo for about a week now and have had no relief.
I honestly don’t know what’s going on anymore but it honestly freaks me out. I want very much to talk to somebody about all of this and how shitty things are starting to get, but I don’t for a few reasons. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m so tired of this cycle and I’m afraid people will get sick of me, they’ll push me away, or whatever. Some of the people in my life, as much as I love them, play the role of positivity police. I know they mean well and this has helped them before, but that shit isn’t going to work for me right now.
So I’ve started to isolate again. I miss my friends and I want to talk to them more, but they’re getting along fine so why should I interfere with that? People have their lives, they have good things going on, they have life shit, and I don’t want to get in the way. I just do what I do and try to keep moving. I’m tired of sounding like a broken record. I hurt so much inside and I’m finding myself falling back into this old pattern of drinking to numb out again. I know this isn’t good. I think about the unit I work on at the hospital and how easily I could have been/could be a patient there. Sure, there are people that drink a fifth or more a day, and I don’t come close to that. Then there are people like me who have a few drinks (beer) a day, or maybe drink when they wake up to take off the edge. I did that yesterday. I can’t remember the last time I did that, or if I ever did it at all.
I’ve been through this before and I don’t want to do it again. I know the value of feeling my feelings and actually sorting through my shit instead of numbing it out with alcohol or painkillers. I know this shit isn’t popular to talk about and these are issues that aren’t smiled on, but I hope my openness can not only bring some release and healing for me, but healing for others, too. So here I am.
I’m incredibly frustrated with myself because, as I said, I have a lot of good happening right now. I think I also just have a lot of emotional shit I’m trying to sort through. And to be honest there are some other issues in life at the moment.
I don’t really know in what order to go, so I’ll just start with this. I’m obviously still grieving Claudia. Sometimes I’ll be going about my day and I’ll think of her, particularly her last moments. I’ll remember that moment in the backyard, reading her eulogy, the way she collapsed (with her head on me, seemingly in exhaustion) after I read the line, “I can tell you’ve been tired”. I think of how she just went to sleep with the anesthetic, how I held her close and kept telling her how much I loved her. And then they injected her with the phenobarbitol and I felt her go and I felt a part of me go. This plays in my head over and over again. The panic attacks after she died and how badly I wanted to bring her back. Wondering if I did the right thing. Beating myself up for waiting as long as I did and recalling how much of her the dementia took away.
For the first time since I’ve started there, things feel very uneasy at my full time job. There are budget issues and it’s definitely affecting staffing. My favorite people (who I also work with the most) are either quitting or transferring to another unit. Everything is changing. Even the staff culture…people are so negative now. And I’m watching all the younger people I work with move on in their lives and make something of themselves. What am I doing? Where is my life going? I’m going to be 32 in two months and feel just as lost as I did before. I don’t know what to do.
I find myself getting increasingly more blunt with patients. I think I’m pretty professional about it, but it honestly makes me nervous how much shorter my fuse is becoming. I don’t know if the hormonal shit is still throwing me off or what, but I really don’t feel like myself lately. It’s nice to feel like I’m becoming more assertive, but my decreased tolerance for certain shit worries me.
I think it’s to be expected that pursuing a relationship has me face to face with a lot of my not so old shit. And my old shit. I’m incredibly fortunate because he is so understanding on so many levels. I’m trying to be very careful, and I’m trying to learn what it’s like to actually feel safe again. He’s proving to me that I can, but it’s still hard. I let my guard down many times before and it didn’t end well. But I don’t want to live with a wall up and miss out on something beautiful. So here we are. It’s just little things that get me that I know shouldn’t because he’s clearly not like the others. These are the struggles when you have trust issues…trouble trusting your own perceptions, and trouble trusting others.
Thanks to more recent drama and also finally diving into a book on rebuilding yourself after parental emotional abuse, a lot of my past shit is on my mind. I’m processing a lot of past hurts all over again, and more recent ones. I’m seeing how the hurts I dealt with growing up led to me allowing myself to keep getting hurt by not only that person, but by others as well. I grew up dealing with a lot of gaslighting, projection, guilt trips, and invalidation. I see how I kept ending up in emotionally abusive (and almost physically abusive) situations and how I need to break that cycle.
There are many general anxieties, too, some I’ll share and some I won’t. I find shit triggering me in unexpected ways and it’s beyond frustrating. Life happens, and we can all be inconsistent to a degree in what we say and not have any ill intent at all. And sometimes things happen and plans change. It’s a part of life, and a pretty huge part of my life over the last couple of years. I’ve planned for a lot of things and had them fall through, so I tried to learn not to plan or look forward to anything (while still kinda trying to if that makes sense). For someone who plans pretty damn half-assedly (am I being too hard on myself?) I struggle when things don’t work out or plans change, or when I expected a certain stability (in an unstable environment no less) and things inevitably change. Depending on what the specific situation is it can really mess with me, as I’m realizing lately. It’s all just a bit much because I’m in a shitty place, and also because it brings back a lot of old shitty feelings. I have a lot of healing to do because there is no pause button…life keeps happening and both good and bad things happen. There’s no time to stop.
My roomie/ex came home while I was writing this and I inevitably started falling apart when writing about Claudia. They asked if I was okay and I got to talking about some of the shit on my mind (a lot of what I wrote about here) and it was good to talk. I spend a lot of time in my head these days, and today was particularly difficult. I took the call off at work today and left three hours early. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I wanted, though I did some reading, writing, and cross stitching. Then I finally weeded the garden. Not bad since a lot of shit feels pointless right now.
Last night I put together some shit in my bullet journal. I’d been using a hobby and habit tracker and also my own home made mood chart, but everything kinda came undone after Claudia died. I’m going to start using it again now and try to get a bit more discipline and focus again. I desperately need it.
As I was writing and also talking with my ex, I realized that maybe I’m too hard on myself. Sure, hormones may be fucking with me. But I also do have a lot of shit on my mind, and it’s all legit. I’m so used to having my feelings invalidated concerning certain aspects of my life that I stopped validating myself, too. It’s strange to actually stop and think that maybe my feelings right now are somewhat normal considering everything. That said, I still feel like something in me is very broken. I’ve felt this way for years and it’s hard to see an end in sight. But I’m trying.
Nicole's ramblings 