Recovery. I always (somewhat naively) thought recovery would be a process whereby my mind would slowly return to sensible thought patterns and a gradual reduction in the usual anxietal and emotional outbursts to, well, pretty much anything. I’ve read numerous books about depression where the author charts their rise from utter hellish blackness into a perfectly normal life once again. I am beginning to feel these accounts are either a) lies b) wishful thinking c) lies.
Recovery from depression (anxiety, or whatever the hell my problem is, I see a clinical psych this month so maybe some actual insight into a label will come) seems far more akin to recovery from alcoholism. It is always there, waiting, whispering in your ear. You don’t get rid of it, but learn techniques to ignore it, to pretend its not there, whispering in your ear, until like an alcoholic, you just learn to live with the siren song and accept that you will always be fighting it off. It becomes so much of a habit that it gets easier, but weak moments test you, they can set you straight back to square one.
I do wonder sometimes, if I’m just fooling myself, if I’ll ever be free of these reactions to things, these emotions that grip me in their clawed fingers and no matter how much I chant the logic mantras, hang onto me, and leave me miserable and exhausted with fear. I am learning techniques to avoid falling into their grasp, but once they have me, I seem to be helpless. I’m a lost cause. It’s a lot like trying to ride a wild horse. You don’t – you just learn how to hang on, how to not fall off and break your neck.
I was expecting more somehow.
July 7, 2008 at 10:48 am |
I’ve been much better on the new drug I’m taking – to the point where it’s probably not going too far to say that some kind of recovery is taking place. For me it’s kind of an “Oh Christ, what do I do now?” feeling. Depression, in some ways, is like a safety net. A really sucky, awful safety net. But it’s familiar and when you ask yourself “Why is my life like this?” you can always say, “Well, I’m depressed. What do you expect?” Recovery, like sobriety, comes with all these expectations. I might have killed myself when I was depressed, I might have felt like a failure, but I couldn’t fail, not really. And recovery takes that away.
July 7, 2008 at 5:11 pm |
Your not a lost cause, these things just take time. I hope that recovery is recovery you know the pretty picture they paint in the books because we all work so hard for it. We must be rewarded. I suppose recovery is the point where you can get on with your life even if you still get imput from a mental health team, its where your actions are not constrained by your illness. But then I am probably wishfully thinking this because this is what I hope my recovery to be like. Hannah X
July 7, 2008 at 10:56 pm |
EC – Ah the wonders of Lamictal. I hope it works as well for you as it has for Aik. I have struggled with the slow hill of recovery for a year now. It is hard, and there’s a lot less drama involved, just pure slow hard work. Less excuses. It does however bring with it moments of hope, clarity and tottering steps towards actually enjoying life.
Which is so shocking I can’t quite believe such a thing could ever happen. It might not, but I hope so.
Sadly my blog has gone right downhill since I stopped being permanently depressed and/or skating up from or down into a depression. What the hell does one write about if not about how miserable life is?
CM – Well, I didn’t quite say I was a lost cause, I meant that once the emotions grab onto me I am a lost cause, for that particular battle. I didn’t word it very well though. I write quickly, and with little thought for clarity. Oh look I used clarity twice in once comment.
Thank you for your comment. Whats this ‘we must be rewarded’ malarkey though? Better get that idea out of your head ASAP. Life sucks, until you bludgeon it to death with a large stick of ‘give a shit’. Then when you shuffle over to check on it, it shoots a nasty old arm up and throttles you.
Erm. I’ll just get my coat.
July 7, 2008 at 11:52 pm |
A nasty old arm throteling me that doesnt sound fun at all i think this we must be rewarded thing comes from too much listening to my cpn and her bloody mindfulness stuff. Really I should go back to my old ways of ripping every word she says into pieces with clever overthinking. Hannah X
July 8, 2008 at 1:29 am |
[...] am starting to understand of recovery. Really I would like to think that recovery would be more but this got me thinking. If anyone has the answers about how to stand up please let me know, I am starting [...]
July 10, 2008 at 12:16 am |
I know exactly what you mean. I keep telling the shrinks that I suppose they’re just waiting for me to “get accustomed to the new volume”… and as shrinks do, they blink… and agree….
Why do they always agree?!!!!
July 10, 2008 at 8:22 am |
It’s probably all they can manage to say other than the ‘You are crazier than batshit’ that they actually want to say.