Caged

(Thoughts like this post are partly why I stopped writing for a while...yeah I didn't have the internet at home, but I also couldn't find the energy to make the effort to get outside my home and make my way to the library only a few short blocks from my house, to rant about my depression, anger and inability to get well. I don't know if my continued diatribe about my depression is helpful to anyone, myself included.)

I'm cranky, irritable and at times am feeling a rage swelling inside me. The anger is mostly focused at myself and my inability to manage to help myself get better...either by somehow influencing a/any medicine to work, and by doing the things I keep being told to do in order to get well...for example:

• eat well,
• get some decent, cardio exercise...other than dragging my sorry slow ass for a painfully slow walk with the dog...(painful for me, because even slow seems completely exhausting...and painful for the dog because all he wants to do is run.)
• sit under my lightbox
• challenge my thoughts
• read
• get my sleep schedule/wake schedule the same everyday
• don't eat sugar, so many carbs, eat more veggies
• take my vitamins

...yadda, yadda, yadda.

I feel like screaming I am so angry with myself for not being able to, or willing to, or trying to, or whatever the hell it is...do something to save myself.

I feel enraged also, by all the "helpful" ideas in psychiatry/psychology that seem to presuppose some magic energy resource or will, or that the ability to motivate oneself exists in me, and people like me.

Maybe it's true...like I think sometimes...that I am the only one who fails to get better, 0ver and over and over again Otherwise, why do people always tell me to do things that I can't seem to do because I'm to exhausted/amotivated to do them....because I have an illness that exhausts, overwhelms, and robs me of all your desire, ability, and motivation to actually DO SOMETHING to help myself.

If others with this illness have these same difficulties why the hell do doctors and therapists and studies, and papers and books and friends and family keep telling me to do all the things I feel unable to do?

Am I crazy, 0r does this sound as crazy as a hockey coach screaming at a tiny kid; who knows how to walk and run pretty well, but who has never been on the ice, or in skates, to speed skate, intuitively know how to handle the puck and get a goal when they aren't even able to skate yet; or like a doctor telling a person with no legs to just walk around the block a few times a day and they will feel better; or like telling Cinderella to go find a prince to marry when she is so busy trying to clean up after, and appease her evil siblings' and stepmother's demands, and to even just protect herself, that she doesn't even know a world outside her abusive existence exists.

SURPRISE! I am really depressed right now. I feel overwhelmed with life, and once again underwhelmed by my depression treatment plan. I am pretty sure that even if something helps it will only help a bit, or for a while, or it, like everything else I've tried will simply stop working. I am pretty sure I have lost my old life; my old me.

It's not acceptance I am feeling...but an internal rage at losing what I valued so much...my joie de vive, my adventurousness, my wildness, my positive outlook (yes, I did say that...I used to have a pretty bubbly positive outlook about the awesomeness of life)...and my lust for life.

I do not want to live if it means living without those things. I don't want to continue taking medication, continue psychiatric treatment, continue existing, if it means I have to accept the dullness, ineptness, anxiousness, sadness, fatigue, blah, blah, blah my life has become.

My Mom used to tell me I would get better when I accepted I had an illness. I think I accept I have an illness. I just don't want it anymore and I feel completely helpless, and hopeless, that I will ever be able to stop my symptoms.

...it was intensely difficult to write the word "helpless" in that last paragraph. I feel like I have fought so hard to try to help myself, but nothing ever works, nothing I do ever changes how I feel for any length of time...Maybe it's time to give up trying. It is this intense feeling of helplessness that enrages me. I feel like a caged wild animal. Caging an animal just isn't right. Wildness tamed is just a captive. No thing, no being, wants to live as a captive.