Relearning

Please pardon the introspection. These blog posts are therapeutic, and a couple of people have asked me for an update. It's a good opportunity to take stock.

I'm one week into my antidepressant. That's far from enough to have fixed me...but it is enough to have made a noticeable (but extremely hard to articulate) difference.

It was, you'll pardon me, a shitty week...the kind of week that would have sent me careening way downhill without these pills. Three sets of plans fell through in three days. That happened entirely too often over the past year, and it always set me to brooding...especially if I was the one who made the plans. I took it personally, as a rejection, and then blew it out of all proportion. Logically, I knew, and know, that it's pretty much never about me, but logic simply doesn't register when you're depressed. Either everything is about you, and it all sucks, or nothing is about you because you don't matter, never did and never will.

I'm still brooding--it's only been a week, after all--but some...no, quite a bit of the sting has gone out of it.

Can I tell you what was scaring me about going on antidepressants? Bearing in mind I was depressed at the time? That I'd still be just as worthless, only I wouldn't care. I'd be this vacuously happy drooling idiot.

Yep, that's the kind of channel my mind always seemed to fall into. For over a year.

It's...really odd. I can still feel my brain trying to fall into that kind of destructive pattern, but it doesn't...quite...get there. I'm still fixated, still initially registering innocuous things as rejections...but instead of digging the hole deeper with every pass, I'm...more like sanding rough edges. Which is a huge improvement.

My next goal is to de-cling. I'm trying to normalize my use of social media, particularly Facebook. I should be able to go some reasonable amount of time between hearing from people without thinking they don't really like you, they were just pretending all this time. Stupid depressive thoughts, where the hell do they come from? They make no sense. I lived some 35 years without Facebook, and for a majority of those years I sure as hell didn't consider myself friendless. Furthermore, I KNOW I have friends, quite a few of them, very good ones. That's a fact proven many times over. I'm not alone in the world, far from it. I shouldn't have to talk to you, let alone see you, to remember that: I carry a part of each of you with me, and it's well past time I recognized that and cherished it properly.

Another thing I was worried about...because apparently I worry about everything...is that some weeks into the course of treatment, I would have a really, really bad day, the kind of day everyone has from time to time, and...how would I deal? Would it still register as a bad day? Is it bad to have bad days? Am I supposed to be happy happy happy all the time?

I think I'm starting to suss out the answers to those questions. Yeah, I'm still going to have really bad days every now and again...and those days will hurt...but they won't kill me from the inside out. I'll be able to process the hurt and move on. Because that's already started to happen.

Thank God. Or Trintellix.