annafdd

I am not in a particularly good mood today. Yesterday my mock-counselling session at the course brought me very low, and since then I have been feeling like a comprehensive failure, somebody who hasn't been doing anything, is slacking off and so on.

I went to bed tired and woke up depressed and with an headache.

Despite the headache, I have managed to do a few things I was putting off, like making an appointment to see the counselling agency, applying for two jobs, sending off my candidate file to my agency.

In this situation, it is blindingly obvious to me that I should really not involve myself in the Wrede's book thing. But I am not good at this sort of stuff.

The thing is that I feel guilty. This is irrational, because I wasn't on rasfc when Pat talked about the book, and had no knowledge of what was going on.

But I feel the deep uneasy feeling that if I had been there I wouldn't have noticed anything amiss, and I would not have the guts to speak up.

On top of that, I feel guilty because Pat Wrede is a friend and I like her and respect her, and I feel unable to help her, because no matter how bad I feel about this I cannot say that I don't understand why people are upset. To defend her, I could say other things, but I would end up embroiled again in the kind of dispute that precipitated the crisis in January, and I just can't afford that.

So I am trying to shut up. It's hard and unpleasant - shutting up is NOT EASY for me as everybody who knows me knows - and very sad.

I am pretty down today. I am very tired, as usual, and I am tired of being tired. There are so many things I want to do and don't have the energy to.

I tried going for a walk enticed by the light and got drenched in freezing hail. I looked up, sighed, thought "Britain", and ran back home, after which I went under the duvet and fell asleep listening to psychology lessons from MIT with Zip curled up next to me - something that should have cured the down, but didn't.

Lots of bad things are happening all around me, and there are times when it just drags me down a lot. I am also somewhat not well - a bit of a temperature, headache, stuff like that. Maybe a passing virus that my white cells are smacking around, maybe just the blues, who knows?

I am actually being productive, doing things and learning things, so I shouldn't feel so negative, but I do.

Sometimes, like today, I have this feeling that my life is whizzing away without me actually living it. Another day, another long sleep on the sofa, another set of failed objectives, and the day is over and I haven't lived it.

Of course this is not totally true, and I can fight my way past the feeling it is. But the list of things that I was totally going to do today and didn't get around to is pretty depressing.

As is the reluctance to go out. I really should take the car and go to Tesco to shop for groceries, and go next door to Ikea to buy a few towels or pillowcases so that I can finally sew my tea cosy and get rid of the damn fluff that is cluttering up my living room. But I don't want to. I get up, wander around doing preparing-to-go-out stuff, and then I get distracted and when I look up again it's midnight and Tesco is closed.

My counsellor asked me what I hoped to achieve with the eight sessions we have. I told her that I am worried that depression is making me vulnerable, too vulnerable to undertake a career as a counsellor.

I realize now that so far I have tended to be angry with my depression for what it stopped me doing in the past: I dropped out of Medical School, I never wrote my dissertation, I never managed to be the successful writer than everybody at Clarion thought I'd be (yet).

Nowadays, I resent it because it stops me doing things I would like to do. For example, today watching the Breakfast programme when that man talked about the Admiral Nurses I thought, hmmm, I could train for that. Wouldn't that be nice? It's a good experience for a counsellor.

Then I asked myself if I can weather the emotional burden of caring for dementia patients. Just as I asked myself if I can weather the emotional burden of volunteering for the Samaritans. Just as I realized, too late, that I was nowhere near strong enough to take on the Civil War in LJ. (I am pretty sure by now that my sudden plunge into depression was due to that most of anything else).

I hate this thought. I was never one to shrink from emotional pain. I always entered into relationships with people with an open heart, even when I knew the chances for pain were horribly high. I watch depressing things, read depressing book, and listen to depressing stories. The other day I went through the last earthly possessions of a relative of Alex's, to spare him doing that but also because I was fascinated and curious. I ended up crying in the night, unable to get away from the sadness and grief in his life. This man I have never seen, who is not even my relative, and I was crying for his growing old in loneliness and pain.

I don't want to give up that part of myself, the part that cares. I don't know how to build some containment that will keep it from bringing me down.

So I come home to this, and I decide that I really, really need to go out, not least to stock up on medication, because this is not the time to be without.

Coming back from Tesco, my radio tunes in despite my protestation on a nice program about one of Woolworth's floor managers, now jobless, with three kids, a grandkid, a mortgage, and no way to make ends meet. Oh happiness oh joy. At one point the woman following him around asks: "Have you signed on then?" And he says: "No. No I am not going to sign on. Never. I have never done it, I'm not doing it now. It's a question of pride."

Oh happy joy. I drive home glumly, listening to more resolutely cheerful going around to find a job and your kid telling you that he's not going to ask for a present for his birthday this time because he knows how things are, and so on, and I get home and start unloading the three bags plus purse and a few Ikea frames, and it's pissing down. Pissing down, I tell you.

I look up at the sky in disgust and say: "You've never even heard of the pathetic fallacy, have you?"

Well, five now.
I can't sleep because I got to think about my mother, and how she nurtured and maintained my depression.

My mother's toxicity was that she wanted to empower me. She believed - still believes - that we are the masters of our fate.

I have a memory of deep happiness from my childhood. It stuck, for some reason, when little else did. I was leaning on the little wall supporting the chainlink fence around my primary school's playground. There was a tall shrub beside me. It must had been very early spring, the sky was completely blue, and there were tiny tiny white flowers on the shrub.

I looked up into the blue sky and the little flower and felt completely happy. Then I went back in and wrote a composition in which I said that I felt happy because I felt like that moment, that flower and that sky, existed just for me.

That was the problem. My mother had taught me that everything that happens to you, good or bad, is your doing. I didn't think that I had it in my to appreciate a flower that existed for its own sake. I thought the flower was put there specifically for me.

I have grown up never looking for excuses, and that's good. But I have also grown up convinced, deep down, that everything bad that happens to me is my own fault.

When it happens now I can see it and smile sort of ruefully and make a note: if I lose the car keys, it's because "you are always losing things, you really should be more careful". If I get sick, it's because I don't go to the doctor to find a way to prevent it (true). If I have migraine, it's because I gave up trying to get them "cured". If I am the shape and weight I am, it's because I don't make enough of an effort in losing weight.

If I am alone, it's because I am "too choosy", or, alternative explanation that still focuses on what I do, I am too good for most men ("men don't like somebody to be smarter than them). If I am depressed, it's because I am not strong enough. And so on and so forth.

In cognitive behavioural therapy, this is a very well known mechanism. I forget what it's called, I think something like universal responsibility. It happens when you lose the sense of boundary between things that are actually within your ability to influence and things that are unavoidable or not directly influenced by you.

Learning that slathering my hands with alcohol gel and spraying my desk with Dettol may reduce the number of colds I catch is learning how to influence your environment. Hoping that if you go to the doctor he'll find the magic reason why you are getting always sick and issue a cure is madness.

Learning how to manage migraine is reasonable. Hoping for a cure for migraine is not. Currently there just isn't one.

My therapist tried to tell this to me for twenty years. For some reason, I was never able to hear her. That is, I heard her, knew she was right, and still could not make the realization mine.

Maybe it was because I lived too close to my mom. I don't know.

Another favourite depression-inducing trick that my mom taught me is catastrophising. What happens if I don't pass this exam? The reasonable answer is: you'll take it again, and again if necessary, and if worse comes to worse, you'll drop out and do something else.

My mother's stance was: you know how competitive Medicine is, and if you don't get good grades you'll never get into a specialization school, and if you don't get your degree quickly you'll age out of the market. You know that most employers will never hire anybody past 29 years nowadays.

My mother thinks that extreme anxiety is motivating. Especially when not self-inflicted but inflicted by others.

This is why I never graduated.

Another trick that I haven't found in the books but that my mother excels at is the focus on the trivial. For example, when I went into my second major depressive episode following my breakup, and was feeling suicidal and increasingly desperate because it was the second such episode in two years, my mother was endlessly fretting about my buying the house. Note that there was no hurry: I had given no notice to my landlady, and if the sale of the house fell through, though titty, I'd start looking somewhere else. For my mother the fact that the sale didn't progress was a major source of anxiety. And I do mean major. While I was sobbing in fjm's bedroom last Christmas, I called my aunt on Skype and chatted and she told me that my mother was very worried about the house - but hadn't mentioned my breaking up with my boyfriend. This is my mother's closest friend and confidant.

She says that this is displacement. Yeah, no kidding. It is also a handy way of withdrawing any support, and even the acknowledgement that something is the matter. She did this during my university career as well.

Another depression trick is the all-or-nothing thinking. Things are never somewhat inconvenient or sad. They are catastrophic and tragic. My ex partner for example was not somewhat immature and sadly incompatible with me. He was an evil bastard who sucked my blood and lived off me. The fact that after moving house there were still several dozen boxes cluttering up the place was not inconvenient: it was a major tragedy worthy of sobbing and hysterics.

I can see all of these things clearly now, but I don't remember them from when I was growing up. They must have been there. Of course, I was an overachieving little girl and mom had few opportunities to worry, fret and chide me for not trying harder.

In other news: I really do think I have Shift Work Sleep Disorder. The symptoms are fatigue, headache, and excessive daytime sleepiness. And, oh, depression. There is not much I can do save try to change my job. One of the tasks for tomorrow is to track down Fiona and ask her if I can meet her out of the time slot we have on Wednesdays. Perhaps I can find somewhere else that pays more during daytime. If only the only place that does so didn't have my first supervisor...

And this is Flock. I am not sure I want to switch to a whole new browser just for LJ, especially since I like me Firefox.

Anyway - I am writing this in my new study, that is, the dining room. The desk that was in my bedroom has been moved, as per my new counsellor's stern advice, into the dining room. The two chest of drawers are now in the bedroom, but as they very annoyingly didn't fit into the niche the desk was previously in, the bed had to go on the opposite wall, with much pushing and pulling and lifting and panting.

I am now tired and the bedroom, which was all nice and orderly before, is a right mess. The dining room too, with the exception of the computer desk which is a marvel of starkness and minimalist order. Won't last for long I predict.

Also, I have to find a different order of things in the bedroom because at the moment the bed is sort of at an angle.

I am not sure I am so taken with this counsellor, but I am too cold and uncomfortable right now to go to great length about it.

Also, my new GP was very nice and called me to tell me he referred me to a new psychiatrist. It will probably take six weeks or more to get back to me.

Fuckit, they take mental health seriously in this country, eh? And London is good - up North a guy attempted suicide twice while he waited for therapy.

(Don't get me started on private health care - I am broke because, guess what, no insurer will cover my depression, as it's a pre-exixting condition. Pre-existing to my coming to this country, that is. It is, believe it or not, a whole lot easier to get psychiatric help in Italy.)

Just when I think I have reached an understanding with my body and with the constant social pressure to be thin, I am pushed off it.

Today I stepped on the scale, wondering idly if the fact that I had skipped a lot of meals in the last few days (due to depression, fatigue and general inability to handle myself) had had any effect.

It had. I have put on another kilo.

I stepped down the scale feeling completely creeped out. What upsets me is that I keep gaining weight. It may be a fact of my aging, but it still feels... wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

My weight has been going up constantly and rapidly since I started being depressed. I think the Zyprexa knocked my metabolism off kilter, but I have stopped taking Zyprexa for ages.

I weighted 49 kilos (7.7 stones) from when I was about 16 to when I was about 30. At thirty, I bumped up to 52 (8.1). That was when my mother started panicking and convinced me to go on a diet. After that, I gained weight slowly but constantly. When I came back from Clarion, I considered myself overweight and I was 53 or so. When I came to London I was 59 (9.2). I am now 64.1 (ten stones).

I don't know what to do, and I don't mean "what to do to lose weight". I don't think I can. I would very gladly settle for not gaining any more weight. Failing that, I would like to be able to live happily with my body shape without the constant pain of not being able to fit into my clothes and not being able to find clothes that fit me any longer.

I am in my room, with the shutters open and catching what I can of London's wan sunlight, which is way better than Padua's gloomy drizzly grey gloom.

I am thinking that I could probably use a holiday somewhere sunny, for purely medical reasons. Sharm el Sheik looks attractive, plus there is diving. No wi-fi in the hotels, and going on holiday all alone is bound to be somewhat sad, but hey, I'd be able to write to my heart's content, and the hours of sunlight a day are on average 10 to London's 2 in this season.

I called my mom, avoided any mention of depression or psychiatrists, and got the Worried Lecture About the Health Implications of my Weight Problem. Groan. ("I know that you say that you accept yourself as you are and are happy like this, but too much weight is not good for the spine or the legs." My weight currently is 63kg, or 10 stones).

I happened on the Mind website (I am deliberately not linking to it). I had been there other times, when I was very depressed and desperately in need of help, and found nothing, not even a useful phone number.

Today I had a better look, thinking that as a lifelong depressive, I might at least find advocacy interesting.

Well, I had a look at their literature.

"Making sense of antidpressants" tells you that antidepressant medication is no more useful than placebo, that it is addictive, and that depression "goes away on its own".

"Understanding depression" has the same message, with such gems as:

What can I do to help myself?

Depression has one major characteristic that you need to be aware of when thinking about what you can do to defeat it. It can feed on itself. In other words, you get depressed and then you get more depressed about being depressed. Negative thoughts become automatic and are difficult for you to challenge. Being in a state of depression can then, itself, become a bigger problem than the difficulties that caused it in the first place. You need to break the hold that the depression has on you.

An important thing to remember is that there are no instant solutions to problems in life. Solving problems involves time, energy and work. When you are feeling depressed, you may well not be feeling energetic or motivated to work. But if you are able to take an active part in your treatment, it should help your situation.

Translation: get over it. Depression is a "life problem". And you should "take an ative part in your treatement".

I have no words for how angry this makes me feel. Depression is not a life problem, it's a sickness. It's not a moral fault, and "getting over yourself" is not a solution. People have life problems all the time and they don't get depressed. People with a genetic predisposition react to the same stressors by developing depression. It's not their fault, they are not stupid, weak, lazy or unable to cope with life.

It then goes on:

Fighting negative attitudes
Try to recognise the pattern of negative thinking when you are doing it, and replace it with a more constructive activity. Look for things to do that occupy your mind.

This is true but incredibly unhelpful. A whole therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, exists exactly to help people do this. A facile "try to fight negative attitudes" only succeeds in reinforcing self-criticising attitudes that are part and parcel with depression. CBT in part devoted precisely in fighting these attitudes. As for looking for things to do that occupy your mind - this guy has obviously never been in a major depressive episodes. I don't even know where to start. People are not only unable to work, they can't get off their beds, can't eat, can't even watch tv when they are depressed. It is one of the markers of depression that people lose interest in activities and tasks that they previously enjoyed.

Activity is good for the mind
Although you may not feel like it, it’s very therapeutic to take part in physical activities, for 20 minutes a day. Playing sports, running, dancing, cycling, and even brisk walking can stimulate chemicals in the brain called endorphins, which can help you to feel better. (See Mind guide to physical activity.)

This helps when you are able to do it. And even then, it's at best an ameliorating factor. Exercise does not cure depression. I wish it did. And I speak from the point of view of somebody who has a very good understanding of exactly how helpful it is - a lot.

Caring for yourself
You need to do things that will improve the way you feel about yourself. Allow yourself positive experiences and treats that reinforce the idea that you deserve good things. Pay attention to your personal appearance. Set yourself goals that you can achieve and that will give you a sense of satisfaction.

Look after yourself by eating healthily. Oily fish, in particular, may help alleviate depression. Don’t abuse your body with tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, which make it worse.


Pay attention to your personal appearence. Right, this guy has not even seen anybody in a depressive episode. And as for not beating up on yourself, how about not phrasing the good advice about acohol and drugs in a way that is not as fucking judgemental? "Abusing", right. The issue here is not abuse, it's that alcohol is a depressive, that it can compound impulsivity and poor judgement, and that people with depression are more easily prey of addictions. Same goes for drugs. Tobacco is bad for you, but it's hardly worse for depressives than for other people.

And then we get to the real therapies. Which one is the first?

Alternative and complementary therapies
Practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine concern themselves with the person as a whole, and don't merely treat their symptoms. They can take more time with you than a GP can.

Practitioners may offer treatments such as acupuncture, massage, homeopathy and herbal medicine that many people with depression have found helpful. St John's Wort is one of the herbal remedies that have become very popular, and may help to lift your mood. But if you are already taking other medication, it may not be safe to combine them. Consult your pharmacist or GP for more information.


I am speechless. Totally speechless.

Then we get to the treatements parts. I won't bore you with the whole lot, save to say that antidepressants are constantly put down. I will just insert another reason to hate NICE:


The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published guidelines on the treatment of depression, in December 2004. These suggest that, for mild depression, antidepressants are not appropriate because the hazards outweigh the benefits. Suggested treatments include watchful waiting – a recognition of the fact that depression often goes away without treatment – guided self-help, short-term talking treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), and exercise programmes.

I hope NICE revised their guidelines according to more recent research, but I suppose not. In fact, "mild" depression is still depression, and although it is true that a depressive episode goes away of its own, leaving depression untreated increases the likelihood of episodes recurring, becoming more serious, more protracted and the intervals between them shorter.

Depression is a physical sickeness, and leaves scars, it leaves physiological modifications in the brain that can be seen at the cellular level. They are progressive and irreversible. This is why treating depression early and completely is now seen as the more prudent course.

For more severe depression antidepressants are appropriate, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI)s are suggested because their side effects are usually better tolerated than those of the alternative types of antidepressants. However, combining a psychological treatment with medication maybe the most effective course for severe depression.

This is more or less the only factually correct information I can find in the whole page.

Now, what is the first book on the "Further reading" list?

Beyond Prozac: healing mental distress without drugs Dr T. Lynch (PCCS Books 2004)

What can I say? Drugs saved my life. I have had it all - psychotherapy, psychoanalisys, hospitalization, CBT. I have read extensively on depression and I have seen my own experience. The only thing that worked were CBT and drugs. I am not putting psychotherapy down, it's useful and helpful. But it does not cure depression - in fact, it may well be that depression cannot be cured. The fact that pharma companies make an obscene amount of money out of antidepressant is not a good reason to consider them inappropriate.

The fact is, a chillingly high proportion of people with depression, and major depression at that, are not treated at all. A lot of these kill themselves. A lot of those who are treated are non-compliant. (This is particularly true of bipolar and manic depressive sufferers, where suicide is a high risk and noncompliance common).

The last thing people who suffer from depression need, from the charity that is supposed to advocate for them no less, is the message that pills don't work, they are not necessary, they are bad for you, and that there is no effective treatment for depression.

I mean, I have felt discouraged reading this stuff, and I bloody know better.

This kind of "information" kills people.

Had to cancel work again. Should prepare suitcase but can't. Can't eat although I'm hungry.

Called the second psychiatrist. To my despair, the secretary told me that they can only fit me in at the end of July.

I don't have the energy to fight. I should call back and plead, look, half and hour, five minutes, as long as she prescribes the Zyprexa I'm happy. I need to get out of this, and soon.

Called my contact at the agency. She was lovely, and reassured me that this is not the first or the last time they have this kind of situations and no, I won't lose my job.

The thing is, my mood isn't that bad. I am not sad or suicidal. Just... shaking and frozen in place.

"America is hurt when you are hurt" heard sometime on BBC24 by somebody who clearly Did Not Have A Clue. The only one who got hurt was one of the bombers, dear. There's plenty of other directions to send you sympathy if you have a surfeit of it.

"The US is going to increase the number of US marshals on flights as a response to events in London." You got to laugh. I don't really need to unpick this one, do I?

Also, the book I am reading suggests that an excess of empathy is a mark of depression. Very likely. I have to say that no matter how evil this sad moron was, I feel sorry for anybody dying slowly and very, very painfully of extensive burns after having spectacularly failed to die heroically. May you find some redemption and comfort in your pain, brother.

(on the other hand, it seems to be pretty well established experimentally that compassion is good for your mood, so I am getting a trifle irritated with Kramer's "Against Depression")

BTW - Prayer for the day has a Buddhist monk named Alison Murdoch this week. We want more buddhists in our Obligatory Religion Programming! And have I said how annoyed I am that when I drive to work on Sunday the only thing I get to listen to is "something understood"?

This is really strange. I was fine until yesterday. Today I wake up and my muscles are knotted and my stomach is clenched and I have to do a ton of things and I can't.

Methinks this is the perfect time to take some anti-anxiety medicaiton

Still doing a puny 3.54 miles, but it's a puny 3.54 miles more than I used to do. Also, this is the first time I have run for at least 25 minutes without stopping, a milestone that my ipod regrettably doesn't record but that makes me feel very smug. I used to be able to run all my circuit along the levee, 5 km, in 40 minutes without stopping, but it's a condition I was in only for a short time and never got back. This time I seem to have reached it again, and I'm chuffed.

Weight is not budging, but oh well. I mean, not only it's not going DOWN, which I expected on the experience of other times when I have started exercising, but it is still going UP. And this is before adding other shit to my current medication.

Also, yesterday I saw the Second Opinion Doctor, which I liked more then the first one, not that I disliked the first one, it's just that I felt more comfortable with this one. So now I am in the awkward position of unhitching from the first one...

This second doctor told me that lithium still looks to her like an eminently sensible proposition, and still the best mood stabilizer she knows - but she would set about lifting me from the current slump first and since Zyprexa worked in the past she thinks a short burst of it might help.

One by one, all these moments come and pass. Wiscon was one: now the various Pride marches. Next year will probably be better. This year, they all force me to remember The Time When Anna Was Happy. It's all very well telling myself that I am better, than I am not so much in pain, but then I remember that there are other standards.

Talked to my mom today. I told her about the counsellor wanting me to be "more self protective", and my mother started agreeing enthusiastically. "Yes, yes, that's it exactly," she said. "You know, you make me always think about masochism".

That was so not the moment to tell her "Mom, I think we don't mean that word in quite the same way."

"Take this thing you said of failing the copy-editing test at work: that is obviously self-sabotage. It's absurd that you are not up to do a simple copy-edit job. How can they tell you that your grammar is perfect and your writing skills exceptional and then that you miss all the typos? You obviously wanted to fail."

I listened in disbelief. Really, I did not know where to start. Not in the sense that I didn't know which of the many things wrong with her I could explain, but in the sense that I literally was speechless.

Finally I managed to say, "No, look, I think she meant something quite completely different. She meant that I am not able to communicate efficently to people what I want from them and therefore I end up disappointed."

My counsellor has told me to reflect on how I could be more self-protective. I suppose in this case I could just have said, "No mom, what you are doing is blaming me for everything that does not go well in my life AGAIN. What you are doing is once again undermining my ability, intelligence, competence. What you are doing is telling me once again that if things go wrong it's my fault and only my fault."

And I should have said: "In fact, when she talks about being self-protective she is talking about avoiding this kind of bullshit from you. STOP IT. I didn't WANT to fail the copy-editing test. It so happens that I am not suited to copy-editing because among my skills is not an ability to spot typos. Live with it. Just like I did not chose to fail that long-ago test for the literary translation school, I actually failed it. Just as I DID NOT CHOSE TO BE HURT, BETRAYED, ABANDONED OR DITCHED by all the men I ever loved. It is not my fucking fault. So stop blaming me."

I am not capable of doing it. Long, long ago I promised myself that I would never do to other people what my mother did to me - open her mouth and let all her anger and bitterness come out unchecked, only to later tell me, I didn't mean it. I promised myself that I would never, ever tell people hurtful things without thinking about it.

This evolved into not being able to tell people hurtful things, period. I still manage to hurt people, but only because efforts at communications go awry, because the truth hurts ("I realized I was never really in love with you"), because people misunderstand me. Things do slip out, occasionally, but usually I'm very good at keeping them in check.

Which is why I won't tell all of this to my mom. Plus, a lifetime of experience thaught me that it doesn't work. What would have happened would be that my mother would be horrendously offended, would have cried, screamed or put down the phone and weeks of excruciating non-communication would follow. During which I would feel miserable, guilty, and think about my mom all the time.

So instead I quoted Aynathie's brilliant analysis of my counsellor throwaway line about "if the world was fair, you would not have to be alone, because you're lovely". I told her, see, she said that so that I would not think that my being alone is somehow my fault.

My mother seemed genuinely puzzled. I don't think she understood what I was talking about.

So, I am supposed to think about self-protection. My mind is rather blank. I am thinking about my last Wiscon, and I suspect my counsellor would have liked me not to go. But that is not self-protection, that would have been cutting myself off from people I loved and moments I cherished. In hindsight, I should have prepared myself better. Try to negotiate what kind of contact we could have.

But, well, hindsight.

I went to see Pirates III. All in all, I wished they had stopped at number I.

On the other hand, I went out running today, deliberately doing a reduced run, and switching to distance instead of time. I am very pleasantly tired, and torn between the wish to go running tomorrow as well and the realization that, really, tomorrow should be a rest day, because my legs are getting a little sore.

Yesterday I managed to go running, ran for 41 minutes, my record. I was light-hearted while I ran, but it didn't last.

I watch a lot of sad American police procedural. It's basically a genre. Sad Cops Show. We have Without a Trace, Cold Case, and CSI treads that ground often, too. For some reason I find solace in them, even when they make me cry. Both Without a Trace and Cold Case are about lonely people reaching out to lost souls. Both are about reconstructing a broken life, trying to mend the unmendable. Both are about compassion and reaching out.

On the other hand, the hardest part of any book is the Aknowledgements. There is no books apparently that does not owe it existence to a Significant Other and wouldn't have been written if the SO hadn't been around. I ask myself, hell, is anybody single in the book-writing business? Or gay? No wonder my novel never reaches the end.

This time there was a whole bunch of people as well a spouse, "and I thank them all for giving my heart a home".

Well, my heart doesn't have a home. It has a small cat house, currently residing between my feet under the blanket. It's warm and purry but hardly any shelter in the cold and rain.

My father sent me a pitiful email asking to call him. I keep meaning to but feeling too tired, or something. The truth is I don't want company right now, because I don't want to have to put up the usual show or to explain explain explain explain. I'm too tired. Maybe that is why going to work is so hard for me - it's not the loneliness so much as the necessity to appear normal, functioning, superficially cheerful.

Well, much better than yesterday, actually, which is why I felt strong enough to phone home.

My mother is freaking out. She talked with various people, all of which expressed horror and worry at my going on lithium. One psychiatrist in particular scared her well and good and truly and then pointed out that lithium is kinda like the last resort. Well, YES. He also told her there are many other roads to try before that. I sighed and asked, like what? She said that there are antiepilectic that work on depression. That lithium was only used in psychotic depressions and my mother didn't think I was having hallucinations or hearing voices or things like that.

I asked the name of this long-distance diagnostician genius. She said she didn't have it handy. I told her that if she wants I can come down and have a consultation with this doctor. She started going into hysterics and telling me that I can't lose more days at work, I work little enough as it is, I need the money, she's dead worried about me, and so on and so forth.

I think she doesn't get the picture. Very calmly, because when confronted with people in hysterics what else can you do, I begged her to talk to somebody about depression. She said that she was deathly offended and if I went on like this she was putting down the phone. I told her that I meant, "talking with a professional about what depression IS", not seeking treatment herself, and she told me that she had been depressed all her life and she bloody well know what it is.

I am really truly at a loss at this point. I'm not happy about going on lithium. I know what it means. But the idea of my mother treating this as my irrational and stupid whim, really...

I don't know what to do. I suppose I could just tell her that I changed my mind and that I'm not taking lithium after all.

I know I shouldn't listen to her, but the truth is, she's all I got. Her and my father are the only significant family I have. There is nothing else. I cling to her because, despite all her toxicity, her and my father are at this moment the only people who love me. The only people who have no other priorities, who have no other business, no other significant other to put before me.

There was a time when I was with Emiliano when I knew I loved him more than my mother. But we broke up and he abandoned me. My mother didn't. That's all there is to it.

If she was dead, I could kill myself. She's the main reason I haven't so far. Of course, she doesn't know me at all.

This is shaping up to be another "too tired to live" weekend. Maybe this is why the various zombie posts don't amuse me - people, I AM a zombie and it's no fun.

Came home yesterday at around 9, managed to get to sleep around 11, woke up at 3 because I needed to fetch my prescription, and then came home and went back to bed and slept more or less without interruption until now (3am). I'm still very tired and hope I'll go to sleep again, but I was supposed to To Things tomorrow. I skipped breakfast, lunch and had a can of gazpacho for dinner. No wonder I'm tired if I don't eat, but then when it comes to choice between eating or sleeping I have to sleep.

My mind is not clear. I'm exhausted. Scared and exhausted. I am scared that the lithium won't work because I don't know what else can be done then.

I have reached the paralyzed stage. I am in bed. awake, eyes wide, but I can't move. It took an enormous effort to pick up the computer. Everything is cold and flat and very far away, apart from the pain.

As in, cried all the night at work, came home, slept, now want to sleep more. Still tired.

I had a strange dream in which I went around buying gifts for artist friends accompanied by two large, very friendly black dogs. One of them in particular was huge and lovely, and gave me a lot of warmth and comfort.

Knowing what black dogs usually symbolize, that's a puzzling dream. I loved my huge black dog, she was sweet, good natured, loving. Strange.

Two work days to get through. i can do it. I can do it.