In a brief flash of pain-filled lucidity this afternoon, I realized that I really am clinically depressed. You see, I walk around, doing the same things I've always done, but I feel increasingly miserable about them. I keep thinking of some psychology study that surveyed factory workers and measured the strengths of their social networks. A couple years later, some of those workers lost their jobs, and some remained employed. None of the employed men with strong social networks showed signs of clinical depression, but of the unemployed men with weak social networks, something like three quarters of them were depressed.
This makes me incredibly wary of drug treatments, because in my opinion, having no job and no friends is a pitiful state to be in, a state that (quite normally) triggers intense sadness. And a chemical alteration that makes someone feel happier than circumstances would otherwise allow does not seem at all natural or desirable. I need to be able to distinguish between altered states (as from drink, food, or other earth-shaking experiences) and unaltered, original existence. It's important that the difference be obvious. I can't be happy without truth, and everything is too uncertain in those kinds of reality-bending circumstances.
I talked to my mother last night, for the first time in nearly a year. I am glad I did. I now doubt that she will ever come around -- she still sees nothing wrong with what she did to me. And that serious doubt is freeing, in a way. I can close the door more fully now; from this point forward I can work to disentangle my psyche from her without fear of making a future relationship impossible. The future relationship looks pretty unlikely at this point, so it's time I start protecting myself again without concern for what might happen later.
Last night before I called her, I stood in the drugstore aisle and stared at the value-sized box of sleeping pills for a while. They were on sale, which seemed a sign of some kind. But I'm far too rebellious to accept negative signs when I don't see any positive ones. I know it's all random anyway, so if I'm only picking up on the foreboding instead of promising, I suspect my brain is handicapping itself. I suppose the person I'm rebelling against is myself. No wonder I don't feel so great.
So I left the pills and went to my more familiar, unhealthy comfort: junk food. But summer is hot, and my seasonal laziness extends even to carrying my own weight around -- I don't want to.
I definitely needed some kind of coping mechanism...and then it hit me. While I'm not yet old enough to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels and swig away, there's one illegal, addictive, hurtful substance that I am old enough for! Cigarettes.
That thought was so immediately appealing, and so horrifying in its appeal, that I almost bought a pack on the spot. And I almost resigned myself to going to counseling ASAP. My brain entered into a tug-of-war between the certain comfort that smoking would provide and my inbred aversion to smoking. Both my parents were smokers at my age. Look at them now!
Typing this makes me feel better, though, and less helpless. I suppose now that I have finished school I can begin to write again, and undo all that structural damage that's been done to my modes of thinking. This is the hope, anyway. And at this point, any hope is a positive sign. No matter how far-fetched.
I would like to meet new people and make new friends, and get married someday. It is hard to enter into positive relationships, though, when I feel like shit and that I have nothing to offer. I will have to work to correct these defects.
If nothing else, I'll survive so I can live to spit on my bitch of a mother's grave.
Odd how the anger and desire for revenge that spawned from unimaginable hurt seem to have motivated me when nothing else would. I hope that I can separate this anger out for her, and keep it from spreading to other people that I love(d). It's very difficult, though. For me, love is unavoidably linked with pain. The vulnerability of feeling for someone comes with the memories of those former feelings having gone horribly, cruelly wrong. So whenever I care about someone very deeply, I become depressed.
No wonder my current relationship is doomed. The less I like him, the more likable I become to him. How in the world can this pattern be broken?