Bella, you're right. I had the option of doing something else, and I told my doctor I would let it go for a few more weeks and see. I think it's just an adjustment of "feelling good" versus feeling overwhelmed. I know I used writing as an escape. There were days I would sit and crank out thirty pages in a day because I needed the distraction. It was almost like an addiction. I couldn't wait to get back to what I was doing because it was an escape. I think I've done a lot of that creating for creativity's sake. Some of what I put on the page wasn't so good.
Amber, you might be right. Maybe just having energy to do other things is eating up some of that creative energy. Or else I'm just so exhausted at the end of the day that I collapse.
Ami, one of things I started doing was really looking at why I felt "depressed." It's such a catch all term, so I had to sit down and really think about what I was feeling. I wasn't always feeling sad. Sometimes I was angry. Sometimes I was sad. Sometimes I felt guilty. Sometimes, I felt numb. I once told a counselor that I couldn't feel anything, and I think the truth is I felt things, but those feelings were all jumbled up and I didn't know what was what. One of the things that I noticed as I started breaking "depression" down into how I was really feeling was that the depression itself wasn't the major issue. It was the anxiety. The depressive episodes started out with mounting anxiety. As the anxiety built, the more depressed I felt. So in addition to feeling sad, guilty, angry or whatever, I was very afraid.
I was afraid my mother would call. Before NC I would go home at night and literally be on pins and needles until after the call. I'd start cooking supper because I couldn't just go home and relax. I had to do something. And if she was coming to visit, then the panic I felt was even worse. I felt that panic just as bad going to visit her. I could just feel the panic start in my stomach, like a nervous feeling, and it would just spread outward. My heart would race. My head would pound. And it would culminate with me in tears. I would break down over a math problem in homework. I would get panicked if it was 9pm and M didn't have homework done and we still fighting about it. I would start to feel overwhelmed if I was working on a project at work and got interrupted with something else. My chest would get tight, and I would start to shake. I'd go home at night and the house was a mess, the laundry not done, the grocery shopping wasn't done, M didn't want to eat what I fixed, homework had to get done, we had to go back to school for something, the dog had to go out, my mother called to yell at me for something, I couldn't get my work done at work. I was tired. I couldn't sleep. And then something would snap and I'd sit in my floor crying, feeling like a failure because I couldn't do everything and nothing was working out. I started to be afraid to answer my phone, even with caller ID. I was afraid of coming to work. I was afraid of the homework folder coming home. I just had all of this irrational fear, and it was getting worse.
That was why I sought out some sort of intervention because I was doing all of those other things, trying to eat healthier, exercising, working on a positive outlook, rewriting tapes, and I was still feeling like crap. I think that realizing that part of my depression was actually anxiety was a big help. Definitely keep looking at your feelings and what you really feel.
