Obnoxious Bitch

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Death, Debt, Deployment… Depression

Emotionally, the past month has been an especially brutal one for me.  Within 3 days’ time, tragedy struck two families I know, leaving two barely-past-newlywed, pregnant widows; one of whom I felt compelled to defend from attacks in the public sphere due to her celebrity status.  Then I was forced to come to terms with our dwindling finances (blecch!). Last, but certainly not least, I learned that a dear friend of mine is going off to war for a year an a half.

Oh yeah, and I’ve been having a few health issues, too.  I fainted one night; I think it’s the second time in my life I have done so.  The first time probably shouldn’t even count, as it was most likely directly related to the substances I’d ingested that night.

I suppose it says something about my state of mind that it’s 10:30 PM and I’m still in the little dress that serves as a nightgown that I put on last night.  I’ve been sitting outside with my laptop, smoking cigarettes while reading and posting on Pharyngula since I woke up at 7 AM, even though it was 114° here today.

But it’s time to write things down, so I can get my feelings out, get myself together and carry on.  The anti-depressants seem to work fairly well to keep the “normal” stresses from hurtling me into the abyss, and to tell the truth, even these more severe stresses seem to affect me differently now than I’d have expected.

I don’t have that crushing despair type of feeling, or constant dread; but I’ve noticed that I’ll quite suddenly feel overwhelmed with emotion to the point of crying, or nearly so. And it’s not just feelings of sadness or even only negative feelings that wash over me in such a way that I can’t speak without a sob escaping or at least a catch in my voice.

These recent emotional stressors or events are important enough, to me at least, to warrant separate posts.  Especially since they’ll be more like stream-of-consciousness ramblings and attempts to put into words those things which have of late caused deep feelings to rise to the surface, and have driven me either to tears, or to sit behind this monitor and keyboard and read/write about something… anything that provides an escape from the realities I don’t want to deal with at the moment.

Gotta get a grip… and get back to something like “normal"…