Rejection

For a child, rejection, whether explicitly expressed or implicity given by their parents, is still rejection. A child doesn't know the difference, they only know the feeling. They only know what it is in its most simple way, rejection.

They know once felt, the damage is done, the rejection by their parents. And the memory never goes away and the emotion scars never heal. The damage is permanent and life long. The rejection as a child stays in the adult for the rest of their life.

What

Years ago before I retired I would wake up early and sit on my deck in the predawn darkness and wonder what will happen and what I'll be and be doing. These years I sit there in the predawn darkness and wonder what happened. What happened these years and what happened to me.

And now, as then, I still have no answers which satisfies or comforts me. I only have the darkness.

Some Days

Some days the only thing I want to do is have a face to face conversation with a big pillow, and not wake up until tomorrow morning.

Nothing Left to Love

It's really very simple with me right now, there's nothing left to love about who I am, what I am and what I want to be. Nothing. The plan I had with the medication to transform my being and life is failing as I can't tolerate the medicine, my body and mind revolts.

The metabolism crashes me into a couch potato and the mind crashes into a mental fog and double depression, meaning depression on top of Dysthymia. Drop the meds and I return to being human.

The body is revolting itself from age. My TMJ is improving but it left my jaw skewed a little and my face a disaster on one side, and ugly all over from the common effects of age, as the old saying, gravity wins all bets against time.

The digestive system is getting better but only if I live on a very restrictive diet and wonder when, what and how much I eat, especially food experiments, which everyone else calls food, will react with my body and the bathroom.

The Siatic nerve isn't getting much better anymore. The lower back hurts as does the upper legs from exercise, carrying or lifting anything, or just sitting for periods of time. The front half of the right leg is still totally numb from above the knee to the ankle.

The Raynaud's Syndrome is alive and well in my fingers and toes. I also got three black toes on each foot last winter-spring from walking to and from town. They haven't gotten much better as the nails die and regrow.

And all of this means, while I'm walking farther now (4-5 miles), I'm not back to where I was over the winter (6+ miles). And my goal to return to running is just a wish as short runs causes my right leg to buckle and hurt.

Yeah, the body is revolting and fighting it takes more effort every day. But it's what I had planned that I know isn't a reality anymore, something I knew from when I was 6. It's never gone away and now may never happen, at least not yet.

I started in the fall of 2006 and expected to be done in 3-5 years. Most people start and finish in 2-3 years and most of the rest in 3-5 years. I know now what I am is what I will be unless I undergo major and expensive changes, none covered by health insurance despite being a medical condition.

So that's my reality most days and some nights when I ponder and wonder what hope is left as there is nothing left to love about me, especially by me.

Fits

Depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day—wham!—there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain … and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal … and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live … I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality … In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest … the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead … There is a classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.

— Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

This fits my life and repeated experiences in the moment you have the sudden realization of the slow accumulation of depression, the weight of life and living overwhelming the body and the mind, and all the effort you can muster won't fend it off, won't keep it away and won't save you.

Only time and the small amount of hope, while thinking of the alternatives, you won't act on them. I'm still here and alive, and I'm still fighting it. As some people do, I always will. It never leaves me alone, it only buries itself in my memory to come back, suddenly as it always does.

It's my, and my others', reality.

Enuf Said

Seeing Myself

If you don't like what you see of yourself in the mirror, why would you like what others see in real life?  If you hate your body, your looks and much of yourself, why would you expect people to like you too?

Yeah, old questions and old psychological issues of self-confidence and self-esteem. But if they're old questions and issues, why are they still present and why are they still alive in some of us? Why do some people always have these questions and issues, throughout their life?

Because they are always real, and nothing changes them to memories.

Wandering Away

There are periods where I mentally wander away from life, and sometimes reality, in that I just exist, just doing the basic things of life and just being a body with a mind which is mostly numb to much beyond existing.

These periods last from a few days to a few weeks. Yes, really, sometimes weeks. This makes for periods where all the best plans get set aside and little if anything of significance gets done. This is large measure a reflection of my genetic, lifelong Dysthymia which becomes a moderate depression.

These periods have become more often and sometimes longer for the last 6 years now since I started a treatment plan for another lifelong issue where both drugs, but one in particular, cause the problems. Without the drugs, nothing happens. With the drugs, my body crashes and my mind wanders away.

I didn't fully realize this until earlier this year when I read the one drugs also excerbates digestive problems such as a bleeding small intestine, which started two years ago. I've had digestive problems for 4-plus years now with no real diagnosis or treatment.

But two years ago the symptoms changed and despite the obviousness of them the Gastroenterologist didn't want to do more tests beyond the basic ones and dismissed the symptoms and me as "age and diet", in short, "Get used to it."

And then the pinched Siactic nerve this last July changed everything again, even the digestive problem where one set of symptoms disappeared and another arose from the situation where it's hard to know what the problems are, except the the one drug which still effects things.

On top of that now the drug has gotten harder to tolerate the more or the longer I use it, to where starting late last year I started taking myself off it for weeks, even months, to get some sense of mental and physical normalcy, only to find restarting it only goes back to where it was and I go back to the mental fog and depression.

And then I have the adjustment period where the body adjusts back to something related to normal but only after other reactions or side effects, but always continuing the depression even after the mental fog clears, to where I want to get things done but just don't feel the interest or energy.

And that's where I'm at right now, waiting while my body comes back out of the withdrawl symptoms and my mind finds itself again, and until then not much is done. I restarted it in late August for a just over a week but quit when I was forgetting things and losing interest in doing anything.

Now, it's just wait and see what happens.

Mental Fog

I wrote about being and feeling emotionally numb recently and after some thought when things cleared this morning I realized it's about the drug I was taking. Well not taking, then taking and so on repeating the cycle of on and off, which I write about here and which I know I should take but don't.

And that's the conundrum, taking the pills which turns my brain and thinking into a fog and my mind and emotions into mush. The drug helps the body for the changes I want but the drug also dumps the body into the couch potato catagory, crashing the metabolism into barely doing, let alone wanting to do, anything.

I've been taking this drug on and off for 6 years now and it wasn't this bad, but slowly the side effects have been getting worse with lower and lower dosage where at the minimum it's the same anymore. My body just doesn't like it and it tells me in no uncertain ways.

I stop thinking, I stop feeling and I stop being. It's a drug of choice but it's also a mandatory drug for the course of treatment to help overcome the condition I have and want to change. I'm taking the second drug in the treatment and its side effects are manageable but only at the near lowest dosage.

So in the end, the effects the drugs are supposed to make and help me change but don't work because I'm not taking high enough dosage to get the change I want and physicians require for the next steps in the treatment.

So it's a stalemate and I'm stuck in between where I hate it worse than before. I can't go back without losing some good things with the drug(s) and then hate myself for not in treatment, and I can't go forward because it causes more problems drugs can't fix.

And I can't complete the treatment, which in turn makes me wonder what all these 6 years have been about and for if I don't do what I want and don't change what I hate about myself then and now. I started the treatment with the expectation to finish in 3-4 years and it's now been 6 years.

It's where I barely started with no end in sight unless I get some other changes in the treatment which requires physicians to change their treatment plan and course. I want it, but they are bound by the treatment protocols, meaning they're also stuck in between too, wanting me to finish but can't help unless something changes.

So it's all a big fog and no one sees let alone knows what to do next. At least for now.

Emotionally Numb

There are periods of days, occasionally week(s) I'm mentally and emotionally numb, and turning 63 this week was one of the periods. While making coffee this morning which I use a 6-cup Melitta coffee maker (left), I was filling the holder, which has the filter and coffee, for the last of the coffee for the pot.

Well, after filling the holder full of hot water I turned to put the kettle back on the stove and knocked the holder over so that all the water and coffee grounds spilled on to the kitchen counter, creating a lake of coffee and grounds.

In past times I would have reacted to stop the coffee from spilling over the sides between the counter and stove and over the front of the counter to the floor and kitchen rug. Sometimes I would yell at myself in my mind, "How stupid can you be?!" Sometimes I would just get to work to clean it up.

But this morning I just stood there looking at it. I wasn't without feeling because numb is a feeling. The absence of a response is a response. And that's what I did, nothing, for minutes except to clean up the spot on my clothes from the splash. I washed the spot then went to the bathroom and used the hair dryer to dry it.

And then went back to just stand there and look at the mess. After awhile I realized it was an easy mess to clean, just move everything, get a big sponge and some paper towels, and all was done and back. I put the kettle back on to heat more water and put the holder over the pot where I added a new filter and 3 scoops of coffee.

I finished making the pot of coffee, but it just struck me I reacted by not reacting. I didn't have any emotion about what happened, not even, "Well, it happened, so let's clean it up." Just nothing, mentally and emotionally numb, and no idea when it will go away. It started over the weekend and is still lingering by my door.

And I don't have a reaction to that either.

Why

If I can never be who and what I want to be, why should I like who and what I am?

Suicide

If suicide isn't the solution many people think and want us to believe, then why do so many people find suicide an answer and a solution when everything else in their life is worse?

Hating Your Body

Hating your body doesn't know age, only the hate gets older and lasts longer.