Fear

The really scary thing about feeling better is the knowledge that just around the corner lies another 'dark' time. You dare not let go and enjoy the moment because you remember how steep the fall is. That's me at the moment - feeling almost human again and absolutely terrified of what happens next.

This depression thing is a bugger - at its worst all I wanted to do was to stop existing, stop the pain and misery. At its best there is a black humour that really is only appreciated by others going through the same thing. Now in this period of calm I can't relax because I am afraid.

Imagine if you would, falling, tumbling out of control down a steep slope. You have no idea what is at the bottom, no way of stopping and then, unexpectedly, you stop falling. You are still on the slope, still poised over the precipice of uncertainty but for the moment you  are still. Then there is a decision: to try and climb back up the slope, dodgy because you might tumble again, or to just stay put and hope for rescue.

Here's the thing - you know, I know that rescue is really only found within oneself and there is only one sensible option - to try and climb up. And yet, as I sit here writing this I know that I haven't even begun the climb. I am still holding tight to where I am, relieved to be here but in no condition to try anything uncertain or new. The fall, at least, represents some kind of familiar territory - I understand the pain and despair - they are oddly, my closest companions and I am not sure I am ready to let go to find new certainties that may desert me. The darkness below looks almost reassuring - I know what that feels like. It may be easier all round to simply surrender and let go.

And so depression becomes an awful self fulfilling prophecy - it seems easier to fall than to climb and  I cling to the old and the miserable as security. They are old friends - I know where I stand with them. And you see, that is the nature of this illness - it fucks up your mind so that rational thoughts and logic are frightening and irrational, suicidal, harmful thoughts are oddly comforting in their familiarity.

I stand on the edge of reason with this: when I allow myself to surrender to the now for brief moments I rediscover Pollyanna and the glad game but they are brief moments and the mad game has dominated my thinking so for the last few years that I find it hard to let go.

There is of course another element to all this: the drugs. They alter the mind's capacity to hurt itself, they alter my ability to feel  - perhaps that explains the self harm - it produces a pain that happy pills can't touch. The pills make me forgetful, full of casual love for mankind but still not myself and I question, daily, their real value. Feeing better puts all these thoughts back into play. In a weird way I was better off dosed up the eyeballs with vallium and sleeping pills, in a cow like trance  of misery. Not thinking was easy like that. Nothing hurt - not even the sharpest of knives - and all I had to do was contemplate my own despair from a rather foggy viewpoint. Now with these new and different drugs I remember the pain and ...it just goes round and round in circles and I lose any sense of what I started to say.

I don't know at the moment whether or not I will post this - I am not even sure what, if anything, I am trying to say. Except that this is not as simple as feeling a bit better or more chipper - and I find it so unbearably sad that brief moments of happiness and contentment should be so terrifying that I would rather be unhappy and certain than happy and uncertain.