There are times when I go days, sometimes weeks, where I feel normal inside, and then there are times when I feel positively messed up. This is one of those messed up weeks. I thought I was getting better about some things, but as the week has gone on it’s more and more glaringly obvious that I’m not.

Can I just take a day out of work and spend the entire day in a bubblebath?

I don’t know how we’re going to afford to keep ahead of things for the next 2-3 months. Rent takes up a solid paycheck. The next paycheck usually goes for bills, food, etc. At this point, we’ve got the following additional crap to pay for:

• Eddie’s INS paperwork.
• Car registration
• Car insurance
• getting the car out of the tow yard

Needless to say, we are simply shovelling shit against the tide here. I noticed this morning that the depression seems to be creeping back. Not like the full-blown, suicidal wreck I was 3 years ago, but I can feel it steadily creeping back in, sort of like the black shadows you think you see in your peripheral vision while watching a creepy movie. I attribute it to the stress of the past couple of weeks, being on such an amazingly shoestring budget, worrying about how we’re going to be able to make it to the next paycheck, since it seems that as soon as we get money we lose it.

I want to just lose myself in some webdesign for about 3 weeks; thoughtless work that will keep my mind off of the real world for a little while. I look at some people who claim to be web designers, and laugh at the way that their tables don’t match up, or the scripts don’t work, stuff that obviously should be alligned isn’t…. I’m harsh and critical….I’ve been restraining myself a lot lately. I stop myself from curling up under the covers and ignoring Eddie. I know he worries about me, and I don’t want to freak him out.

“It’s the most frustrating thing about living with depression. Most of the time, there’s no reason to be low, but for whatever reasons (be it chemical or just an inability to let go of a traumatic past), you can’t be happy. Even the medication is like that. Sure, you’re not as depressed as you were, but you’re not happy either. True happiness is something that no medication can give you.”

Someone in my chatroom brought up and interesting point tonight.

“chicky, are you in love with your bf?”

Damned good question. Sometimes I despise him. There are times when I am quite happy when he’s not home when I get out of work, and I think about what it would be like if he weren’t coming home. I’m not sure if I would be very happy in the house alone. I think I’d be lonely. In the long run, I might be happier though.I feel kind of bad keeping all this stuff private and away from my mom. She means well, but I don’t need to have her worrying about me constantly. She worries enough about me as it is; I hear all about it from Danielle when I talk to her. Usually the first thing Danielle asks is whether or not Chris and I are fighting. Sometimes I love him madly. Oddly enough, the last time I felt totally, utterly in love with him was the night that were smoking pot at Myke’s house, and he was drunk and high and puking everywhere, and he was so worried that I was mad at him and that I’d never speak to him again because he was making such a mess out of himself and Myke’s bed and the bathroom. And I remember thinking to myself, “yeah, I still love this guy, no matter what shit we’ve been through lately.” Sometimes he’s a prick, then again, every guy I’ve ever been with has been a prick at some point or another. I don’t like the mind games we play with each other. The other day we were laying in bed and talking about this fucked up little relationship, and he was saying something along the lines of “We’ve got… I don’t know what we have,” and the only response I had for him was a shrug and “We have sex.” Essentially, that’s all we have anymore, and like I said before, after 3 years, there’s too many emotional ties that go along with that intimacy. It’s not good for either of us.

How does one decide when the pain of staying is worse than that of leaving? I can’t predict what it would be like without him. I can honestly remember a time not so long ago when I would have rather died than live without him in my life. Now, I’m not so sure. Sometimes I feel like I’m already dead. Sometimes I feel like I’m just a shell of my former self, like someone pulled everything that was once good and happy in me and replaced it with cotton balls. which leads me to my other least-favorite topic, second only to love……… depression.

Back in March I was officially diagnosed with major depression. This was nothing new to me, I’d been suspecting that’s what was going on for a while at the time. At some point, I had been making an attempt to explain to Chris what it felt like to suffer from depression, and he couldn’t quite grasp the “cotton ball explanation” so I wrote up something for him to help him understand how I was feeling most of the time:

There’s no real way to describe these feelings. Imagine that everything you hold dear in life, everything that has ever had meaning to you, every memory that you once remembered with a smile or a laugh or recounted with family or friends, imagine that at some point, their vivid colors, the life in all of these important things, is gone. Imagine that suddenly the brightly colored images in your head are suddenly in black in white and shades of grey in between or have taken on the appearance of photo negatives. You can make out what’s going on in them, but the little things that you once remembered are missing or worse, still there, but you’re no unable to derive any pleasure from them. No smile, no laughter. That’s how it starts off, at least for me anyway.

Now imagine that something takes all of this away from you- takes everything that you once enjoyed in life, the happy memories, the friends, etc, and scrapes it out of your life, leaving you with a feeling that you are nothing but a shell of what you had been before. Whatever takes this from you stands before you with everything it has taken from you in its hands, a big glowing blob of happiness and hope, and taunts you with it. It waves it in front of your face and reminds you of how happy these things once made you, how vivid the colors are, how much the people love and miss you because they can see what you have become and either don’t like it or are powerless and don’t know how to help you.

So you work to get these things back again. You strive to find a way to make everyone happy with you again and hopefully get the happiness and hope back into your life, but nothing you seems to bring them back. You look at these things and mistake the looks of sadness on some people’s faces as disappointment in your efforts, when actually it might just be that they are sad and disappointed in themselves that they can’t fix things for you and make shit better again. You get discouraged, until something good seems to happen and the warm glow of everything that was good seems to be just within your reach, but when things take a turn for the worse once again, you slip further behind than you were originally, repeating this cycle until the once bright glow looks like nothing more than a candle flame on the horizon…

For the most part, even though I wrote that on March 10, ‘00, it still holds true for me now. I’ve had my ups and downs since then, but I’d consider myself to be on the same level now as I was when I originally wrote that almost a year ago.

Oh well. Enough of this for now. I’m sleepy, and I’m sure that I’ve gone on for long enough about this subject.

Not too much to say about much of anything right now. I updated the tutorial page to add links to my software reviews. I added a couple of lines to my awards page. I did pretty much nothing all goddamn day today. Why? Because right now, at this very moment, I’m wishing that I could crawl into a hole and disappear for about 3 days. Maybe a week. Maybe forever. Who knows? Maybe I will just pack up my shit and just get the fuck out of dodge one of these days. Take my money and just buy a 1-way bus ticket to some small midwest town where cheese is the hot commodity and I can live in some little old woman’s boarding house complete with white doileys and plastic on the furniture and teach intro to computers to 7th graders