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.