Whatever it Takes

Dear Diary:

Today was tough.

Family afternoon/night with my siblings, anxiety triggered with all the cooking I'm doing on this new diet, worries triggering one after the other... in anxiety mindset, hard to shake. I know it's my body that's triggered with the anxiety. I can feel my mind shift. Breathing techniques don't seem to work sometimes. I wonder if it's supplements, etc I need to be taking. I don't know. It's like this "panic state" gets triggered. It's not an anxiety attack, today, but rather a state of mind. I don't know how to turn it off and turn back on the other. As far as I thought I'd come....

Dear Diary,

I am starting to feel like I am going crazy again from stress (I think). I contacted an online therapist today to see if she could help me. I don't feel like I am in control of my own mind -- I feel I've slipped beyond that control. I guess it's understandable -- I've been under a whole lot of stress lately. I hope I'm okay.

Love,

Me.

Dear Diary,

I truly believe there is nothing in the future for me.

I truly believe hope is mostly lost.

I truly believe life does not give a shit about me.

I started a new antidepressant nine days ago and I felt great (plus some anxiety) for the first week, and now this....

There is no way forward, Diary. I have tried all of the drugs. I have tried all of the diets. I have tried all of the therapies. And I still keep fucking up or doing something wrong.

I will never find my way out of this job. Who else would want to hire me? It would take a miracle. Nobody in this shit head little town gives a shit about me other than wanting to use up all of my exotic energy.

I do not care about my life. I do not care about my job. I do not care about my chores. I do not care about my friends.

Why does God keep forgetting about me?

Exhausted.

No energy.

Feel hopeless.

Pressure.

Dear Diary,

Yesterday, I attended my long-awaited appointment with a functional medicine doctor and nutritionist.

I drove 3.5 hours and stayed the night with a family friend. It was lovely to catch up with the friend, and wonderful to have hours and hours of deep conversation with another woman, an older woman, a wise woman (wisdom from having lived life).

The doctor in many ways confirmed many things I had already known for many years, but never had anyone to cohesively help me with.

I am in a position now... on a path now... in a situation now... (searching for words) -- I need faith now.

[Sidetrack: My boss just came over... I feel like I want to vomit when he speaks to me. These last eight days at this job cannot go by fast enough.]

Trying to put my boss out of my mind. So... I need faith now. I see a path ahead of me, and I don't know how I'll get there. Well, I see where the path begins, I suppose is what's more accurate. And I have imaginings of how the path might go, although they are only imaginings, and life rarely if ever turns out the way we imagine.

The woman I stayed with two nights ago called it "life confidence." She believes that one ought to have confidence in life, rather than confidence in self. I rather agree. I liked her thought. I need life confidence. Well... it's a time to practice life confidence. Confidence in life to support me, to sustain me.

[Sidetrack: Anxiety... anxiety from interacting "within a hierarchy" at this job, from referencing the hierarchy. Breathing....]

I can do this. Breathing through anxiety. There are people who are supporting me, helping me on my journey. "God" is watching out for me, and I am starting to understand what that means. It's a frame of mind, a mindset, an awareness of certain types of things and events and people and feelings to pay attention to in life.

I hope. I do not know whether I will make it. The journey will be difficult. I understand now, too, what people mean when they say "It is in God's hands." I feel slightly happy, to understand now what they mean.

I am starting to see how faith is a beautiful and delicate thing, something I hadn't known before. Delicate not in a fragile sense, but in the sense that it is a fine thread... delicate in the sense that it is beautiful and intricate. Not delicate in the sense that it isn't strong. And, almost simultaneously, the thought crossed my mind that I am the same way, myself... I am starting to understand how there can be strength in delicacy. Like a spider's thread.

I need to be face-to-face with people, to interact. To discern whether I can build trust. I hope that in the next job I have (and my current job ends on March 23rd), I will be able to build trust with people, in face-to-face interactions. I hope.

I think I might be almost ready to start to pray. I think I almost understand what it means to.

Anyway back to the doctor.... (Sigh). I am tempted to say that I am very sick, but... that doesn't describe all of my situation accurately.

I am.... Finally safe to rest.

Dear Diary,

Where is my joy? I am going through the motions. Life feels emotionless, and I am not deriving enjoyment from activities.

I am seeing a psychiatric nurse practitioner on Friday.

I saw a counselor today for the second time. He's my dad's age. Or older. He says stuff that other people have said. Nothing ground breaking, earth shattering, or inspiring, but good, common sense type stuff.

I think later tonight or tomorrow I am going to start a list of things I enjoy doing and just... start going through the motions of doing them. I don't know why as a person this keeps happening to me. This is the place I was in a year ago, a year and a half ago. A similar place. It was more desperate, then, in some ways. Maybe it's answers my new doctor (the functional medicine one) can help with.

For right now I feel sad. Not tears sad, or desperate sad -- which I would probably prefer -- but a tired sad. The kind of sad my dad is. The kind of sad that is just no.... life. The kind of sad I never wanted to be. And I'm afraid I've chosen it, forever.

Love,

Singer

Dear Diary,

I feel exhausted. I'm signed up for so much to do. I don't know how I'm going to have time/energy for it all.

Sigh. I feel exhausted.

Guess I'd better keep striking things off the to-do list.

- Singer

Dear Diary,

I no longer want to be here. In this life. I feel disconnected, so alone. My family says they love me, but I dont feel it. It feels like they dont care. I feel no joy, no meaning or purpose. I feel in screaming pain on the inside but unable and unwilling to express it on the outside. I also feel like people are far, far past caring about my pain. And I feel its hopeless to express it, like nothing will change. I also feel like this is just life — like this is just the way it is.

I am no longer hopeful about the results from my doctors. Even if they figure out the right nutrition and medicine for me, theres still an entire life in front of me that Im ungrateful for and shouldnt be here wasting. Ive started betraying my values for money, and its numbing me. I feel like its my only option and only way to try to survive. It seems like the best option anyway. I need a way to make money if Im going to survive, and making money in general betrays my values. I hate being in the marketplace. I hate competing. It goes against everything I believe in. Yet here I am.... so Im turning off my heart in order to survive.

I hate myself. I am sorry for taking up everyones time, and never getting better. I am sorry for who I am, and for still existing here.

Thank you guys for commenting yesterday.

I haven't had the wherewithall to write back.

I'm not sure why my depression is acting up. I had a long conversation about it on the phone with my dad tonight. It's bad. I don't know if I'm going to come out of it. Even though I have expensive doctors. I don't know if I have the willpower. I feel too exhausted. Too hopeless. Too despairing, as though all of my efforts would merely be pointless. (They have been, thus far -- I'm still depressed, financially I have nothing, career-wise I have nothing, relationship-wise I have nearly nothing.... what is the point of going on?)

I am so discouraged. I keep fighting so hard to live, only to end up right back here. Do I even belong in the trauma community? I don't even know. Sure, I had some trauma, but I have no idea whether my current depression is because of trauma, or whether I'm over the trauma now and am depressed for other reasons. I have no idea.

No hope. And no fighting energy with which to muster up hope (which is unlike me). It's been too long. With too many years. And too many failures and flops. I have nothing to fight for. Nothing to live for. My hopes have been dashed so many times, it seems foolish to hope again. It seems naive. I have failed so many times, it seems foolish to try again. Nothing about my strategy has changed. I don't know what to change.

I'm back in the same place I always am..... and the thought that is running through my head is, "THIS IS YOUR LIFE!"

This is my life.... These are my choices.... These are my failures.... I am letting myself destroy my body and mind with the food that I intake. But I don't know another way to eat. I don't know that I can keep on patiently waiting for the bloodwork results and the stool test results and for these doctors to tell me what I am dealing with sometime in mid-May....

I don't have a job. I don't have an income. But I can't stomach just finding something else dispassionate to scrape on by, continuing to let my life just waste away. "Most people don't live -- they exist, that's all." Oscar Wilde said that. And I know for a fact I am depressed because I gave up on living and settled for the time being on existing. But I felt stuck and trapped, like I was unable to live and incapable of living. And now I really am stuck.

I can't even find the way out.

I don't have any friends anymore. It kind of happened slowly. But when I left LA, I lost touch with those people. And it's been hard to meet new people here. This city isn't for me. I should have gone to Oregon. I've messed up my life so badly. But, if I had gone to Oregon, I would have always regretted not trying coming here.

But my life is messed up, badly. As I sit here eating. Knowing, as I've known all my life, that it isn't good for me. But feeling powerless, having nothing to replace it with, no support.... gosh. Something about being here on the east coast. On the west coast, where I was on my own, at least I had the motivation, even if it was fear driven, to try and do something about things. Sigh. I don't know. I don't know whether I did something good, or bad, for me by coming back here.

I wish I believed this would all work out for the greater good.

Signed,

- Me

Dear Diary,

Today I have had the motivation and the energy so far to do the following:

1. Make coffee. 2. Get on 7cups Depression Support for one hour and ask for/listen to help. 3. Tell someone unhelpful they were unhelpful and mute them. 4. Make and eat breakfast. 5. Do one and a half loads of laundry (so far). 6. Practice mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation. 7. Look for jobs for ten minutes. 8. Message my dad, my brother, and my sister. 9. Message back one person I met several months ago. 10. Make and eat a snack. 11. Write down in colorful pens some helpful advice. 12. Put in my contacts. 13. Hug my roommate's dog. 14. Drink a little bit of water with lemon in it. 15. Take my vitamins and supplements. 16. Respond back to people on 7cups.

It's funny. Listed out like that it looks like a whole lot, but compared to all of the things I feel like I have to do and ought to be doing, it doesn't feel like much at all.

I still feel scared about income.

I am going to a doctor's appointment today that I wish I wasn't going to (I don't have the energy) because I don't think it will be a helpful appointment. But I guess I might as well go. I am babysitting my nephew afterward and will have to see my sister. Funny... I'm in town for six months, and I've seen myself shift from "I get to see my family!!!!!" to "I have to see my sister." What changed?

I never thought I would be in the boat of not having an income and not having energy or motivation or willpower or whatever to do something about it. I always judged people in that boat; I thought they were lazy. I mean, I am trying to do something about it... It's just that something very odd has been made clear to me in the past several days, and that's that as a society, our focus is entirely too much on work. Life is so much bigger. There is so much more of value. Yet (in America) we place 90% of the value on work. On what we do for work, on whether we do work, on how much we work. And for once in my life, I almost sort of feel okay that I am not frantically driving myself into oblivion to try to get work. It's probably because I just invested so much money into my health. I don't know where my next income is going to come from. I hope it comes from somewhere. One lesson I learned the other day is that it doesn't matter how hard you work -- your income is not proportionate to that. I know many people who don't work much and have a lot of income. And I know other people that work very, very hard and have very, very little. And of course I know people who work hard and also have a lot of income, as well as people who don't work hard and also don't have a lot of income. So where does income come from? Also... there is a difference between work, and income. Right now I need income. I don't necessarily need to be working, and I definitely don't need to be working hard. So.... what do I do?

I don't qualify for unemployment, I already tried to file. That isn't enough income, anyway. (It would have been at least something though). My dad doesn't have a job right now, so my parents can't give me much money (they already just paid for my next month's rent, which I was shocked they even had the money to do that -- and it made me cry that they offered to do so). I have a feeling that what they gifted to me bought me some time... but to be honest, the amount of money was equivalent to about one week's worth of work. So it bought me a month of having a place to live, and it bought me a week without a job. I have a feeling that that amount of time, which I know is as much as they could give, is going to be "enough" somehow, and an amount that is very important to me. However, I have other bills -- doctors, groceries, you know. And I can't really cut corners on groceries right now -- if I want to get well, and get a return on the monetary investment I just made, before knowing I was going to lose my job, I need to follow the doctors' orders on supplements and nutrition etc. I mean I can look for sales on food if it's out there, and I can try not to eat out, but I can't stop buying my vitamins, and I can't start buying frozen pizzas, you know? What am I going to do? I already spent my savings, mostly. I suppose I could run up credit cards. I have two new ones that are interest-free for the next 12 or 14 months. But..... well, clearly, that is not ideal.

Is this a test? I think the Universe must be giving me some kind of a test. But how do I pass it? What am I supposed to have learned?