Christmas was grueling. Digging the hole made me ill and sore for days. The heart procedure. The partial deafness scare and long hospital visit when I should have been resting and safe at home. The scooter went in the shop so I had to walk that huge mall without help a couple of times. The antenna went up which hurt as much as anything else. Then several days of heat that sucked the last energy out of my limbs. Last night I didn’t actually sleep although I was too tired and listless to do anything that didn’t include being slumped over in the computer chair. Most of the day yesterday in the heat my body shut down and made me sleep. I was too tired to shower and still am. Conversations on the radio drain my energy pretty quickly. Today I am depressed. To have a nightmare all I have to do is shut my eyes or is this a nightmare? Both I guess. Confused!
By 2pm things stabilized and although there is still a search to find energy to do anything the whole deal doesn’t come wrapped in emotional despair. This emotional whirlpool is crazy. Sick of it.
The doctor will give me whatever pills I need to fight the depression. There are several on the list of things I have tried and could try again. I went and spent time with a psychiatrist as well. In the first meeting he established that I had been very ill over the years and still suffered quite strong Post traumatic Stress Disorder and probably had brain damage and still suffer amnesia. Perhaps if he had been closer I might have tried to see him again but in the end I felt that my life was nasty enough so that the day I didn’t feel a sense of loss or depression I would be too stoned to function. He was also over a hundred kilometers away and cost two hundred a visit.
There is plenty of Valium in my medical kit. It is the one thing I will have on hand for nerves. I know about Valium. I have seen people addicted to it and that certainly quenches any desire to use it. I use it very rarely and then only as one-off hit to lower the depression to where I can fight it. I have a dependency on medium grade pain relief because I have pain all the time and that is more than enough dependencies. Well, apart from several heart pills and diabetes pills which gives me dependencies of about eight other medications I guess.
There are problems with emotional rescue drugs. One problem is that we live in a confused world of delusionary realities. That is to say we imagine our wellness and our sanity and our safety rather than actually being safe and well or we imagine we are unwell because we don’t live like the family on television. We imagine ourselves as beings of near angelic behavior and base our understanding of ourselves on constructs of culture and shared tribal delusions of success. Shedding those can be devastating and leave big empty spaces in the emotional world of a person (bloody hell, a neighbor has a factory of some sort running out the back and I am trying to think in a wall of power tool noise) When you are disabled and ill you often lose your ability to find satisfactory social achievement and people like Tony Abbott’s constant attack on the poor as though we are making choices to piss off the lucky will destroy our self image and thus self esteem. Pills will not really assist to place me back on my personal pedestal.
With the emotional constructs that support most people in shambles there is really no yard stick that allows me to decide what is unnecessary emotional disruption and what is illusion and what is a level of despair that needs medication and will be improved by medication. Add pain and diabetic illness and heart disease and a little immeasurable amnesia and life is a rolling freak show in my head. I try. I try as hard as a human can. This is where I am left.