And a little longer

After last night's blog, my attempts at sleep were disrupted by tears and general feelings of worthlessness.

Lovely and grand.

I think the overwhelming suck of it is KNOWING the name of what I am dealing with: depression. And I can't just snap the fuck out of it.

I added guided meditation to my attempts to self-soothe last night. It helped a little. Rory joined us in bed at 4 am and...actually slept! Unreal.

Not a lot of people, and by that I mean almost nobody, knows I deal with depression to the extent I do. People know I get into moods and funks, but I keep most of it locked up at my house. I grew up surrounded by depression in various forms. The first time it hit me in a big, memorable way was when I was 16. And it was bad.

I spent four months writing in a notebook - complaints about my life, I fully expressed a lot of anger at a lot of people in it. And it was very negative. And besides that and sleeping, I didn't do much else. It got so bad that my friends started buying me "Cheer up!" cards. And a few of those friends offered themselves up for some serious listening, because I was going to talk or they were going to tell the school counselor how worried they were. Teenagers don't go to counselors unless they are seriously scared. At least, my friends didn't.

And most of my friends and family are aware of the next big time it happened - after my miscarriage.  I consider that one a mulligan. Of course I was going to be depressed. But that took longer than all the other episodes to resurface from.

The last big one was 2008, and I don't think there was a trigger, just overwhelming feelings of being lost and wandering and insignificant and unimportant to 99% of the people in my life. Went on for a few months. I came out of it. And then came Rory.

This is the first time I find myself back here since her arrival. I was never so naive to think it would not come up again, but I have dreaded it. Because I turn into a shell of a person, and I hate, hate, hate the idea of exposing Rory to that. I hope it's just coming off as lazy to her, and maybe a little irritable. But not more. Not anything that makes her feel insecure or like she is responsible for cheering me up. Because she's not. None of you are.

My therapist was good enough to get me in tomorrow, I'm hoping we can get this under control. I can't bear the thought of it going on for weeks again.