Monday, December 10, 2012

Coping, and lack thereof

When it started I don't know, but my any measure I've spent most of my life dealing depression.

Sometimes I coped with it well other times it was abject failure, but at least I had a lot of practice coping with it.

Now it looks like it's dealt with.  Am I better off?  No.  A lot of things are better, and I'd be lying if I said I had no more joy in my life than I did before.  In fact I'm making some progress I've been meaning to make for years.

But here's the problem.  Depression out of the way ADHD is able to rear its head where before it was smothered under the depression.  And the most of my life spent coping with depression, that doesn't give me any help with the ADHD with which I have little to no practice.

So last semester I was nearing the end and had almost nothing done because of depression.

This is the last week of this semester during which I have done almost no school work for the whole semester.  And some of that is for teachers who don't know me and might not give me the benefit of the doubt.

I'm in the same place, maybe worse, as I was when depression was bringing me down as much as it ever had.

Hopefully I'm on my way to better.  The doctors I'm seeing now were able to deal with the depression in under a year, something all previous doctors had been unable to even slightly help with in significantly more time.  But the first thing we tried for ADHD didn't work, and the other things that might help are out of my price range like Whoa! (Psychiatrist is trying to see if he can find a way around that.)

This does not lead to happy feelings.

When I've got the depression under control and trying to face my life still makes me want to curl up into a ball and hope the world goes away that's not a good place to be.

I know what needs to be done.  I need to do a lot of work and fast, but whether or not I can do it remains an open question.  Thus far I have been given focus and interest and the capability for good feelings, but I have no control over those things so my whole life seems to be, "I've got to get this work done.  Hey!  Shiny object."  And the work doesn't get done.

Which just adds to the ever mounting pile of stuff I have to do, which threatens to crush me beneath it.

I expected that getting the depression under control would let me do work.  Turns out that's not the case.

And somehow having a professional tell me that it's perfectly healthy to be feeling down in the ways that I am  given the reasons I can point to doesn't make it all that much better than when I was suffering from depression and thus it was unhealthy to be feeling the way that I was.

3 comments:

  1. A thing that works for some people is a to-do list, including a bunch of small stuff that you know you can get done - and nothing that'll take over an hour, in that case split it down into smaller tasks.

    Good effing luck. You have the multiple whammy of conditions that make it hard to get stuff done and a country where you can't get help for them without being seriously rich.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Best wishes is all I can offer you, and I know it's useless, I'm sorry.

    ---Redcrow

    ReplyDelete
  3. Gah, that sucks. Or, well, it mostly sucks. There's some significant Pro in there with the Con.

    I basically only have a fist-bump of solidarity. I don't have ADHD, but I do have some executive function issues, a present from my dad that I'm passing on to my son. I have no solutions, magic or otherwise, but I feel strongly that knowing is at least a meaningful part of the battle.

    ReplyDelete