It's been two years

So that this won't all be doom and gloom, here's some good news:

I wrote something.  Its not good, it's 15 pages of people taking in circles with an abandonment / betrayal based breakdown and some comforting through hugs and such.  It was supposed to be a quick "I'm going back home, I need you to watch this magical object that keeps the connection between our words active" and that was it.  Didn't turn out that way.

What it did do, what gives me hope, is that if flowed.  That's something that hasn't happened in a long time.

If you want to read it, it's here.

⁂

Two years and two days ago, but in the evening so not a full two days, I broke my ankle.  I've talked about it a fair amount.  Slipped on the top step, ended up on the basement floor, broke it in three places, needed a plate and a screw installed.  And it used to be my good ankle.

At this point it's very, very clear that the ankle itself was the least of the resulting problems.

You see, two years an two days ago in the morning and afternoon, I was the best I can ever remember being.  That's not the same as "the best I've ever been" because there was a time, as a child, before I had depression at all.  I have only snippets of memories from that time, and none of them really give a good sense of my overall mental state.

Being forced to be sedentary is usually not the best thing for depression, but the larger problem was bloodclot risk associated with surgery and post-surgery.

I had to go off of my hormones and the effect was . . . very similar to going off my depression meds.  It wasn't the same, and I doubt very much that I'd ever confuse one for the other, but those two things are in a category on their own that nothing else really compares to.

Eventually I was allowed back on hormones and things improved.  I was so relieved at the improvement that I thought it was over.  It wasn't, but I probably spent a year telling myself that I was back to normal and never acknowledging that, while significantly better than being off hormones, the state I was in was pretty definitively crap.

(Also, I had a lot of genuinely crappy things I could point to as the reason I wasn't doing well at a given time, which let me avoid the realization that I wasn't doing well ever.)

In the middle of last year, I had a series of breakdowns that led to me finally realizing that my mood had never recovered from the stuff surrounding my ankle breaking.

At around the same time, things got worse.  The big thing was that the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust did their backstabbing.  (The house and greenhouse have been demolished, by the way.)

Things got worse and they didn't get better.  Every so often I think that might be breaking.  Look at the note I have to remember to attach to the top of the post pointing out that, while not particularly good, I did recently manage to write something.

Every time I've thought it was breaking, though, I turned out to be wrong.

So I don't know.  Maybe I'm finally moving back to bad and away from worse.  Or maybe it's another one of those times when you get your hopes up only to have them shattered in a way that hurts all the more than if you'd never had hope in the first place.

⁂

What I do know is that I've spent the last two years barely functional.

I've been on hold.  The world has not.

My father's father has died.

We lost the farm including the part that we were very definitely supposed to keep as promised at every stage of negotiations.

That loss meant my sister was driven from her home.  Since she didn't have much time to look for a place to go, she settled for a place that was in a pretty terrible state (with the intention of fixing it up.)  Turns out that it was even worse than it looked (to everyone, including the inspector.)  Very much so.  It's not a long drive for being in a different city, but it's enough that I never see her or my nephews or my niece.

There was no Christmas or Thanksgiving last year because of how spread out the family has become.  Don't know if I'd have been able to take any joy in them if they had happened.

Other people have had changes that I'm not sure it's my place to talk about.  (They're not in my immediate family.)

All around me everything seems to be falling apart and I'm completely helpless.  I only ever leave the house for appointments, sporadic food shopping, and when I need to catch a bus to visit Lonespark.

I've been failing at taking care of myself so very hard.

My appetite went away, and I tried to stay on top of getting enough food, but last week or the week before (everything runs together) I discovered that I'd been failing at that.

Undernourishment will augment depression pretty hard.  So will dehydration.  Or sleep deprivation.

It's been two years, and that's way too long.  I want this shit to be over.

During that time my psychiatrist moved to a different practice, which means that while we should have been trying to adjust meds and such I was instead trying and failing to actually connect with the replacement.

Now we finally are working on it, but the process is slow.  "Let's make a slight change and wait a month to six weeks" slow.  And if I can't stay on top of the "eat-sleep-drink" trifecta that'll mess everything up and we might not be able to tell what works from what doesn't even at that snail's pace.

I don't want to be like this.  It hurts.  But I am.

That's where things stand.