01.12.10
Posted in Depression tagged The spoon theory at 10:15 pm by kyrias
Yes. It’s more whining navel-gazing.
Being depressed means not really knowing what it’s like to not be depressed. It means not knowing your own self because your entire perception is so colored by the depression that you cannot tell where it ends and where you start.
It means, to a certain extent, never knowing yourself. If you can’t comprehend just how fucking frightening that is, then I’m happy for you.
It means that when people assume I’m a slob because I don’t clean up enough, I can’t say anything to the contrary — because the proof is right there.
It means that when people assume that I am lazy and I’m overweight because I’m a bum who hates to exercise, I don’t have much of a retort.
It means that when family and friends drift away because I’m too much of a flake to be a reliable correspondent who remembers birthdays and get-togethers and proactively seeks chances to hang out — I just have to suck it up because it’s my own fault after all.
It means that no matter that the person who I think I am or should be isn’t the person that other people see, I just have to live with that discrepancy. It’s not the failing that does the most damage. It’s the trying and failing and being judged for the failing and knowing that this is not how you would have it if only you had more energy, more vim, more something or the other.
What also hurts is when the meds don’t work. Or the meds don’t work well enough. Or the meds work, but you can’t live with the side-effects.
Remember that little discussion my classmates and I had about what side-effects would be deal-breakers? Well, I’ve discovered that when your anti-depressants kills your appetite and makes you want to sleep 20 hours out of the day, then that’s a deal-breaker too.
Those spoons — I do not have perhaps even a fifth of the ones you own. This cannot be stressed enough because the normal, not-sick person just does not get it.
I’ve actually given up explaining, because there is no explaining, there is only the sickness and the fail, and the knowledge of fail. Just yesterday night my father brought up the topic of willpower and once again I had that bitter taste in my mouch.
I have a set number of spoons each day. This number goes up or down depending on how poorly I slept, how late I slept, if I’ve managed to eat properly lately, how stressed I am, how much is going on, and how much stress I get to look forward to… etc.
Dealing with people takes spoons. Just getting ready to walk out the door to go to work takes spoons. Having to interact with people without descending into a gibbering screaming mass of hysteria takes amazing number of spoons. This isn’t even the run of the mill random strangers. Sometimes often it takes spoons even to deal with friends and family. Being at work takes spoons. Getting back home from work takes spoons. Every single little detail of my life can potentially take away a spoon and sometimes it smacks me out of the blue how many spoons I just lost.
Details:
It takes spoons to get to and from work because every time I go out the door, it’s an endless stressfest about whether I have all my stuff. My keys, my wallet, my IDs, my bags, my props for work or whatnot. If I’m not careful, I forget and lose things. If I’m not careful, I fall asleep (because of my meds) and miss my stop — which is a fucking problem when you’re on the commuter rail.
It takes spoons to deal with people because sometimes the ADD really makes it hard for me to focus on what people are saying without really working at it. Sometimes it’s real work to not be negative and complain incessantly and talk all about myself and all my problems. Yes. Note this blog post. Often when I’m not feeling too chipper, which is far too often considering my comorbid depression, I find it very hard to interact with people. My almost non-existent patience just goes into the negatives. When you add in the effort of trying to connect and interact with someone in any meaningful manner and be entertaining whilst you’re at it without wanting to bite their head off, that’s a lot of spoons right there.
It takes spoons to get to therapy. It takes spoons to get through therapy. It takes spoons to go to my doctors appointment and explain just once again what exactly I think is wrong with me. Dealing with doctors who seem skeptical about my problems pretty much takes all my spoons for the day.
To be honest, although I’m looking forward to Arisia — I’m probably going to running on fumes and spoon-less the entire time. This is an alien concept to people. Yes. Even things I enjoy takes spoons. How’s that for mind-boggling?
This will sound like unbelievable amounts of whining. Probably even most people who know me well will consider this unbelievable amounts of whining.
That’s fine. I’ve decided that I can’t care because to care is to quietly give up spoons without being able to actually affect anything. The only way to deal is to try not to care as much as possible.
Dealing with people who don’t know the concept of generalized reciprocity is hard. Dealing with people who cannot or will not put themselves in other people’s shoes is fucking hard. Dealing with people who only know how to complain and take, take, take without actually being willing to do fucking something about the entire situation is just damned fucking hard. Dealing with people who refuse to believe or refuse to take into account that for the love of the gods there’s only so many damned spoons in my hand is just a fucking worthless waste of time.
I’m sorry you think I’m a flake. I’m sorry you think I don’t care. I’m sorry you think I’m a slob. I’m sorry that you’re all superior because you’re not broken. I’m sorry that you cannot see past your own problems to see that I’m drowning here. I’m sorry that because you think that because you’ve overcome what problems you have and because of all the problems you do have that everyone else just needs to suck it up and deal. I’m sorry that you somehow have this overblown idea of just how much you’re doing as compared to what I’m doing. I’m really sorry that you cannot see the real me that is struggling within what is not a chrysalis but a shroud.
It’s ok. I often can’t see me too. Just remember, there’s only so many spoons, and if it takes too many spoons to deal with you on a regular basis — I will drop you, because there’s no way I can survive otherwise. I might hate doing it, I might regret it, but honestly, I cannot live with that amount of toxicity in my life anymore.
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01.10.10
Posted in Depression tagged rants at 11:30 pm by kyrias
Thene, my favorite link guerilla sent me something today.
I looked through my archives to see if I’ve talked about something similar, but my tagging system is erratic, full of fail, and not comprehensive. Therefore, I’m probably going to be going over old ground.
I guess that’s ok. As I was just saying to Thene, somehow navel-gazing, like talking about sex, never fails to be vaguely entertaining even when it’s getting trite.
As I said before, depression, to me, is just mostly about boredom and tedium.
I realized a while ago that my depression stems from my frustration that I feel that I’m judged and found lacking because of my lack of ambition. I feel guilty about hoarding my intelligence and creativity and not using it for the “powers of good”, whatever that means. I feel pressured to conform, to be just another cog in the machine — which depresses me.
I realized at a very young age that I really didn’t mind being a girl. All the other crap didn’t manage to overshadow the fact that being a girl meant that I could potentially spend my life doing what I preferred to do. Much to my dismay, the feminazis those women, society, and practical members of my family have killed that for me.
I think I once admitted to a friend that my goal was to become a housewife. His immediate loss of respect was palpable and lest I be accused to paranoia, he said something to that effect.
The thing is, I don’t see the point in becoming just another easily replacable cog in the corporate machine when that’s really not where my talents or interests lie. I believe that I would enjoy myself more and be more useful being a homemaker. Feeding the people I love and making sure their life runs smoothly is more meaningful to me than just being another worker ant. I don’t see the point in having both members of a couple sit there on the couch in dazed weariness after work, too tired to even care that their quality of life has gone straight down the drain in the name of feminism, practicality and reality.
The fact is, when Caesura and I were both going to work, our life sucked. I would get home from work, too exhausted to even think about nuking something for dinner, much less making something delicious and healthy. Laundry would only get done when we were absolutely out of clothing. We would stay up until late at night, desperately trying to unwind enough to go to sleep. I would come straight home and log onto World of Warcraft because it was a easy, mindless, soothing thing to do — that I could see my riches accumulate in a more tangible manner was also good for my soul. Unlike real life, there was actually progress. Between my stress levels, my unhappiness with how I was spending my time, the amount of money we spent on eating out or convenience foods, and my work wardrobe — I don’t believe we were coming out on top at the end of the month in terms of anything.
Despite my telling my parents this, they are pressuring me to find a job. They worry because a woman who is merely a housewife is vulnerable. They worry more because I’m not even a wife, so I wouldn’t even get alimony if things go south. The many women that we know who are in a bad spot because they put themselves in a financially vulnerable spot in their marriage are legion.
The feminists believe that I must needs only find the right job for me and I would feel fulfilled. My wanting to stay at home is a slap in their collective face and they can’t believe how someone would just so easily throw herself away like that.
Reality tells me that I’m in a terrible place unless I can find someone else to latch onto if Caesura breaks up with me. Not having money, having a sparse resume with a large blank in years worked, falling out of step with the rest of society… I know all that and more.
I can function with depression. I even flatter myself that I’m fairly high-functioning for the level and duration of depression I have.
It’s just this endless thought of how easy it would be to end it all and why not end it all? Life is filled with soul-killing tedium, and endless grind that doesn’t even reward you with anything worth speaking of. There’s no hope of it getting better because unlike someone who would be happy with getting a raise or promotion or even more money, all I can think about is how I would rather be home puttering in the kitchen or getting the chores done. It’s not even as simple as working as a chef or something like that, because I’m still just another kind of cog in another machine. There’s nothing to look forward except a lifetime in a job that barely pays you enough to do anything past existing and then perhaps retirement or perhaps just an early death from depression. Nothing but counting the hours until the end of work, and mourning how the minutes away from work speed by like a meteor shower. Life drags on, slower and slower, until the only thing that stops your hand from reaching for that knife is the thought that it would be cruel to have your family or friends walk in the bathroom and find you floating in a tub of bloody water and the only fear left is of the last, ultimate failure.
My reason to say all this is because it’s necessary for what I’m going to say next:
ACW, your comment was not only not helpful, but offensive. I’m sure you meant well, but congratulations, you fail.
To quote:
“As I leave this comment, a character from a book I once read pops into my head, saying, “If you’re going to wax poetic, don’t be trite.”
I’ve never been diagnosed, though certainly we all have a bit of that Seasonal Affective Disorder going on this time of year. I recognize that Depression (with a capital D) is different from just being low every now and then. Regardless, I thought I’d share a favorite quote that helps when I’m low or thinking self-defeating thoughts. I hope it’s not trite. I also hope that, whatever your thoughts on religion or spirituality, you can pick out the good parts. I know I do.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
–Marianne Williamson”
First off, that quote is trite.
Seasonal affective disorder is not depression. For that matter, no two people with depression have the same story. It’s just aggravating for useless comparisons to be made.
Then, thank you for assuming that my depression stems from self-esteem problems. In fact, thank you for telling me what’s my problem.
On top of that, it’s irritating for you to bring God into this. The assumption that I either know or care about God and his supposed plans for and about me is, frankly, bloody presumptuous. Leave him out of it and stay out of my religious views or lack thereof.
Lastly, I love how you’re managing to throw in a guilt-trip about how I’m not serving the world because I’m not brilliantly shining whilst liberating myself and others. Thanks. That’s exactly what I needed to hear.
To be fair, there might have been or will be a time when I would have been able to draw something out of that quote. That’s not saying much, though. At best, it’s just another one of those generic motivation things that doesn’t really manage to sound like anything other than a platitude because it was trite the first time it was said. It doesn’t resonate with truth and nor does it tell me anything that I haven’t heard a million times before in other incarnations.
Meh.
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12.29.09
Posted in Bupropion/methylphenidate, Depression, Health tagged health problems at 4:21 am by kyrias
My rosebush wasn’t doing so well at the end of summer. It had strange spots all over its leaves and if you so much as brushed against it, it would shed leaves like crazy. As for the roses? Forget about it. It maybe gave me a handful of blossoms for the entire summer after I bought it.
It had been sitting outside on the stoop for more sun, but I decided that I should probably bring it inside so it didn’t freeze to death. When I brought it indoors, Azora said that I should prune it back for the winter. I figured I might as well, since the poor thing seemed to be all but dead anyways. So the two of us set to with scissors and whacked off most of the green stuff — to the point where it pretty much looked like a Y-shaped branch stuck into a pot of soil.
A couple months later with indifferent watering…
Here’s a closeup of the perfect rosebud that I never got during the warm months:
If you can tell, there’s three buds on the bush right now. Three. When I was lucky to have a half-browned, wilty little bud on the bush half the time during this summer. The other half of the time there was nothing, just lots of leaves.
So looking at my sad, sad basil plant and my dead rosemary plant — perhaps next time I should just start whacking them too? For that matter, if anyone can tell me how to keep rosemary plants alive, I’d be terribly grateful. They seem to just shrivel away even with constant watering. I now have a very nice, dry, rosemary plant sitting in a pot of moist soil.
On an entirely unrelated note, further news on things in general:
I have a therapist now. I don’t really know if he’s going to be useful or not. Our first session, he pretty much just asked me the usual questions and then gave me worksheets pertaining to my sleep and what activities I engage in.
For the X’mas weekend, I pretty much had one word to sum up what I did for that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: Slept.
I’m not even joking. I woke up at 7 AM on Saturday morning, realized no one else was awake and decided to lie back for an hour or so. At 9:40 or so, I finally drag myself out of bed after hitting the snooze button countless times. I eat something, then sit down on the couch in the living room, and proceeded to fall asleep whilst Caesura and my father have a conversation. I rouse myself briefly to move to the other couch to watch my brother and Caesura play Puyo, and fell asleep. I realize it’s some time after lunch time, get a bowl of soup, eat that, sit down with a book, and fall asleep. I then wake briefly, rallied to read a couple more pages, and fell asleep again. Dad asks me to go help him with dinner prep at some point, so I go, then we eat, then I sit back down on the couch and watch some TV. At about 9:00 PM, I feel dreadfully sleepy…
Sunday sort of proceeded in a similar fashion.
I believe my therapist would tell me that if I only had something to engage myself with, I wouldn’t be falling asleep that much. If so, I have to say I don’t believe him. After all, when I had classes earlier this year, I would get on the train and zonk out, then I would get to class and then zonk out halfway through taking notes. In fact, I have quite a few samples of notes that pretty much went from coherent to faintly comprehensible gibberish within five sentences or less. When I was falling asleep in class in college from lack of sleep, the descent into gibberish was a lot more gradual. Of course, that’s hardly scientific, I realize.
Dad wants me to get a job. He believes that it would bring structure and meaning to my life. I believe that I would probably fall dead asleep in whatever job I managed to get and then proceed to be ignominously fired. He also believes that I suffer from self-esteem problems and guilt because I don’t have a job and don’t contribute anything to anyone. Asides from the usual self-esteem stuff, he thinks that I should get a job because if I ever broke up with Caesura/ Caesura died / something similarly unfortunate, I would need to be financially solvent.
He wants me to tell him what my “goals” are this weekend.
I really want to tell him to leave me alone until I sort out this whole problem with narcolepsy. I can hardly go job-hunting in this condition.
I also realized something unfortunate yesterday: For some reason, I’ve been continously leaking blood this entire past month even though I’m on the Nuva Ring. I thought about it and wondered if the narcolepsy might have had something to do with the constant blood loss. But then the narcolepsy was a problem before this month — so perhaps not.
My mother and my grand-aunt want me to go back to Taiwan so they can run comprehensive medical tests on me.
I really don’t want to. Asides from not wanting to deal with my mother on a daily basis in the context of living with her, I really don’t want to be living under someone else’s roof for however long it’s going to take for my body to sort itself out. I don’t know how healthy I can get with that sort of constant stress.
On the other hand, if the doctors here can’t fix me, I might not have a choice. As of right now, I’m sitting on the endless period problem and not telling the family about it because I can see a total freak-out session from everyone in Taiwan, resulting in a one-way ticket back there with no idea of when I’d be leaving. Dad pretty much knows about the narcolepsy, which is really unfortunate because now I’ll bet he told mom, which will worry her, which will lead to Bad. Things. At least I don’t think he picked up on the appetite problem or the hand tremors bit.
Ugh. Just. Ugh.
Thank the gods for small mercies, I guess.
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12.10.09
Posted in Bupropion/methylphenidate, Depression, Health tagged Wellbutrin at 5:05 pm by kyrias
It’s been, what, about 3 weeks or so since I got on Wellbutrin? I honestly don’t quite remember. Let’s call it three weeks for the sake of simplicity.
What’s changed?
My hands shake so much that I think any chances of my knifework improving went straight out the window. I’m hoping that the shakes will go away after I stabilize on the meds, but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to bid my future career as a sous-chef adieu.
I’m down to about one meal per day. Wellbutrin is/was apparently used as a diet medication. I get hungry, but I either A. forget to eat B. get too lazy/caught up in what I’m doing to eat or C. get bored of the act of eating and quit before I’m full. A, B, and C kind of imply that it’s not just that I’m taking something that also functions as an appetite suppressant, leading into the next problem:
My ADD has gone through the roof. If I thought my brain was like Emmental cheese (hah! Thene!) before, I’m most apologetic towards my brain, because what I’m experiencing now is what it’s truly like to have the brain capacity of a goldfish. I have a 10 page paper due today, and fuck if I can focus on it. That same paper I wrote 383 words on after spending 8 hours working on it without any outside distractions. For the record, I now have a full page single spaced after at least 48 hours of working on it. My mind for details has entirely gone and forget about remembering anything important. I managed to entirely forget my second psychiatrist’s appointment because I thought it was later. So it’s entirely possible that my ADD may be what’s contributing to the one-meal-a-day phenomenon.
I’m having problems with what looks like narcolepsy. Alright, I’m exaggerating, but not by that much. Even after 10 hours or so of sleep, I get suddenly very sleepy after two hours of being awake, and manage to fall dead asleep in class. Or I totally conk out on the T — leading to missed stops. I can wake up at 2pm and feel desperately sleepy at 6pm. It’s getting to the point where I feel like I should just stay in bed because there’s no point in getting up when I just want to crawl back an hour or so later. Insomnia is a documented side effect of Wellbutrin — so as Thene said, I did a great job on that one.
I have a constant bitter taste in my mouth that I’m not really enjoying. I can’t help but feel that it means that the drug is doing wierd things to me that might not be entirely benign.
Despite all this — I feel less depressed. I am not sure it isn’t apathy yet, but I think that I’m still worried about my paper should be a good sign. I guess, so long as I’m resigned to being a cheerful goldfish with no ability to get intellectually challenging things done, I’m good? Happy as a clam and all that, y’know?
I had an appointment with my psychiatrist and there are some real gems of conversation we had (keeping in mind these are trancribed from memory — which is really faulty lately ):
After I mention my problem with going down to one meal a day:
Dr: “I don’t think you need to worry about it, there have been no accounts of people wasting away whilst on Wellbutrin.”
I sort of blinked at him and decided not to bring up the fact that if I started taking stimulant type ADHD medication — that’d also be an appetite suppressant, which might make things really interesting.
Me: “I’m feeling better and all, but I’d really prefer not to fail my courses.”
Dr: “Oh well.” <– Yes, he literally did say that. Exactly that.
After describing my sleeping problems:
Dr: “You don’t look very sleepy now.”
…I guess that was a fair statement? But it isn’t narcolepsy after all, and aren’t most people usually a bit stressed from seeing their psychiatrist that they wouldn’t readily just fall asleep? I don’t know. It just seemed a bit odd, almost as if he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me.
My psychiatrist is a good man, I’m not throwing that into question. Furthermore, I think he’s probably also a good doctor. However, I think it’s hysterical that he’s so utterly unsympathetic.
What’s also interesting is that I almost had to twist his arm to prescribe me an stimulant-type ADHD medication. He didn’t seem keen on it, but he did it, which makes me wonder what exactly was going through his brain at the time. He said he didn’t want to muddy up the waters by throwing another drug into the mix, and I would usually be whole-heartedly behind that as really, I don’t like one drug in the first place much less two. But honestly, I’m tired of just conking over like that. P’raps he only did it because stimulants don’t really have much of a long-term effect and it goes out of the system fast enough that if I reacted poorly to it, I would be able to go straight off it. I have no idea! I really want some insight into this man’s mind!
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11.18.09
Posted in Depression at 4:23 pm by kyrias
The doc put me on 150mg of Bupropion to be taken twice daily. It’s an antidepressant that supposedly also has the side effect of helping ADD.
Potential side effects: TL;DR
Joking aside, the list is damn long and I don’t feel like typing it all out. I also don’t want to think about the potential side effects.
I believe that many people can be improved by experience a nice, prolonged, severe bout of depression. Certain people who I will not name aside, you know the type, the “pull yourself by your own damn bootstraps” sort who wouldn’t know depression if it hit them between the eyes with a 2×4 — those aside, there’s those who can understand it in theory, but when faced with the reality, have no damn clue.
We were talking about antidepressants in class the other day. One girl asked: “So what would be a deal-breaker for you in terms of side effects when taking anti-depressants?” All of the other women in the class answered the same: “Weight gain.”
My response: “I think how we feel about it is irrevelant — because we’re not depressed. I certainly know that if I were faced with the constant thought of suicide, I would probably have very different thoughts about which side effects were deal breakers.”
No, I’m not bitter, not at all.
What they don’t tell you as a psychology student learning about depression is legion:
- People with depression may not feel like talking about it. This is because there are often no words for the screaming void that is life and when attempts are made to bind it down with words, you just end up sounding like the worst sort of Mary Sue Emo Purple Poetry writer.
- Depression is boring. It bores me to talk incessantly about how miserable I am, about how I want to kill myself every damn day, about how I feel like everything is hopeless and stupid. I know it either bores other people to hear about it when it’s occuring, which is all the time, or they get desensitized after a period of not being able to actually do anything about it and then they either get bored or they don’t want to hear about it anymore because it frustrates them.
- Unless they’re actually doing to carry through with it, no one actually really likes hearing about someone else’s suicide ideation. Many people wonder why people let themselves get to the point where they actually carry it through, and I suspect it’s because there’s no point in talking about it to other people when you’re not actually going to do it because they just get stressed and worried and often take it out on the person who’s feeling down and then when you actually get to that point, you wouldn’t want to talk about it anyways. People like to say if they’d only known. Well…
- Unless you have major chronic depression, you will likely be incapable of truly understanding depression. You may understand it on an intellectual level, but you will likely be incapable of really comprehending just what it means. Lost friendships, lost opportunities, a house that is less than clean, jobs that are less than well-done, and why, just how someone can feel so crappy that the mere idea of going out to socialize sounds like a special form of torment.
- Even if you have depression or have had depression or have SAD or have been suicidal — that doesn’t mean you understand another person’s depression. This seems to be a difficult concept to grasp for most. All I can say is don’t assume and don’t be an ass.
On other notes, I do have cysts on my ovaries. So PCOS is pretty much diagnosed and all that.
I’m thinking I need to write a nice long letter to my parents about why I don’t want to move back in and explain to them just how much they, with the best of intentions, screwed me up. I’m really, really not looking forward to that, but I feel it needs to be done. Currently they can’t understand why I have depression and why I have ADD and why I can’t just see how there’s still hope in my life.
Suffice it to say that nothing depresses me more than someone trying to convince me that I really have no reason to be depressed.
What’s going to be great is that it’s likely going to be in English because using Chinese would just be too close and I don’t know if I can. They’ll likely hate that. Fun times.
At this point in my life, I think there’s little more devastating than hurting people you love by telling them they’ve totally ruined parts of your life.
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