A Different Well

I've often spoken or written about my episodes of depression, actually double depression with Dysthymia, of first falling and then being in a deep well surrounded by total darkness where the light at the top of the well has long disappeared into infinite distance, and about the time and method it takes to climb out where I can get out of the well in the world again.

This time, however, it's a different well. This time the fall has been slow and long, probaby over the last year, and maybe longer, and the onset and fall has been incremental, falling ever so slowly I haven't noticed beyond a slow change of being less excited about what I'm doing and how well I'm feeling. Until I arrived near the bottom to discover I've fallen.

And this time it's not a deep, dark well but a glass one. One I watched myself fall in the world. Normally falling is done in isolation, a mental darkness where you lose sight of the world around you. This one I life and work in the world. I existed and exist in it, seeing it as I fall.

And then sitting on the bottom watching the world around me I can live and work it, but not much is getting done beyond existing. Beside me sits the tools to free myself, to break the glass and be free, but I don't have the motitvation to pick them up let alone use them. I sit just looking out and then looking at the tools.

The only words that seem to make sense are, "I am tired." I know part of this is physical, and I'm angry specialists seem to be indifferent to what seems to me are obvious signs something is wrong. I can read about the symptoms on legitimate Websites. I can show the evidence to them. And they say, "Everything is normal. It's just your imagination."

It's worn me down and some days out living with it and hating not finding a professonal to listen and help. It's treatable and probably curable to have a normal life again, one I had 2-3 years ago. As I've written food is my enemy and eating something feared. Every meal, every day.

I also know two drugs I'm taking for a condition (nearly 5 years now) have devasted part of me. They're essential for what I want to do and be, but it's come at a price my body has paid and is paying. The old damned if you do and damned if you don't, something which will be lifelong.

Add to that with the economy and trying to get my small, personal business off the ground I've almost exhausted the funds I had saved for the business and for some future surgeries. No thanks to President Obama, but much of it by myself. I knew better and thought I could manage the money better, but I didn't.

So now I sit on the bottom of the well seeing and knowing the world I have and live in is, for the most part, of my own making. One I don't like anymore and myself I don't like and some days hate. But in truth not all of it but much of it. And while the future looks reasonably good, it's not what I had planned or expected.

It is what it is as I know it now. And all the answer I have don't work. And now I need to find new answers. The tools will wait until I'm ready to leave the glass well. I can hope, and most days that's all I have left within myself.