Went to bed early (7:30 p.m.), so now I'm awake at 3:30 a.m. The miasma is still there, but either it's gotten better or else I've just gotten inured to it.
I'm on an antidepressant, but my experience with them is that they don't actually make me less depressed, they just make me care about it less so I can function. Right now, I'm on Wellbutrin, and it dulls the pain but also makes me jittery and unable to sleep. So when I'm too depressed to function, I up the dose; when I'm too short of sleep to function, I lower it.
I'm still in the process of figuring out what hurts so much. The latest insight I've had is that, though my physical needs were provided for, at least the ones people believed I should have, I was entirely on my own with everything else, especially emotionally. Most of my childhood I felt like I was drowning and if people (inside or outside the family) noticed at all, it was to scold me for not walking on the water. I learned at an early age that if you need someone, nobody will be there for you, and you're a contemptible wimp for even wanting it. To this day, anytime something unexpectedly goes wrong, I go into a complete panic, convinced that I have to get myself out of it without any help from anyone, only I won't be able to and I'll be lost forever.
I think that's why I have such a hard time even saying out loud that I'm hurting or in trouble. I imagine I will be rejected and dismissed as just being lazy or making a big deal out of nothing, or just trying to get attention, and I should just "man up." I remember going to a therapist in college, and again in grad school, and each time being told there was nothing wrong with me and I didn't need therapy. I can't imagine calling a hospital or going to the ER. It would be less traumatic to just go ahead and kill myself -- I've plotted different ways in my head often enough, all I lack is the guts to do it.
Yesterday, when the pain was at its worst, I imagined talking to God and saying something like, "why do you force me to go on suffering? You've even refused me the mental wherewithall to end it, so I go on, like an insect pinned to a display board." (For all of my supposed "feminist consciousness," in these moments I see God as male, perhaps because I see casual cruelty and indifference to people's sufferings as inherently masculine.)
Yet even as I write this, I keep feeling like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, I'm boring people with my whining. I should just "man up" and soldier on. I'm just embarrassing myself by revealing this stuff. Nobody wants to see what you look like under that facade of fake competence and "I'm okay." I should do what I trained my self from age 12 to 18 to do: ignore the feelings so they'll go away eventually, figure out what you'd be doing if it didn't hurt and force yourself to do that until it becomes second nature. Act as if until you feel like the "as if" is the real you. Oh, and of course pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
