Emotionally and mentally the worst day I've had since about November last year when I was coming out of two months of daily instability during which time I had almost no threshold at all for any kind of stress. I'm talking feeling crushed, angry and defeated because there wasn't a clean teaspoon there when I went to make my instant coffee.
That's aside from the many more days than not over the past three months when I've been sick as a dog, excrutiating headaches, nausea and/or vomiting almost daily for a lot of the time, stacked on top of other symptoms of my chronic illnesses as they degenerate into my older years. Too sick physically some of that time to even register mental and emotional troubles. There's no up and down to semi-delirious physical illness.
Just starting to feel safer in my body again after 10 days mostly free of that particular kind of headache sickness, and glad too of nonetheless feeling mostly mentally and emotionally stable since last November, even though as usual depressed. Stable depression being better than volatile depression.
Then losing it today at the dentist, anger, crying, ranting. Affected me like an earthquake to find myself doing that. There are some good reasons for me to feel mistreated by what's been going on for three months with a governmental dental treatment gone wrong, but I humiliated myself and mistreated the dentist and assistant as well with my harsh words and agro energy. In 58 years of life, I have never been like that in a dentist's office ever before this.
I can't stand myself that way. I take pride in presenting myself to the world as functional, even though I'm not. At least at the times when I do get myself out of the flat I want to relate to people as someone other than a mentally ill person, to be respected for the valuable, kind, intelligent and talented person I am a lot of the time as well.
I've been so emotionally raw and unbalanced over the 12 hours since the appointment. Tried to go to sleep and for a little while enjoyed hearing heavy rain outside my window, lulling me. Only to rouse suddenly after about 30 minutes to an hour. What woke me before getting to the deep sleep was a loud, nasty, damning voice, my own voice, suddenly rising out of my dozing brain, saying something really devasting about my deep self, trashing me in one sentence. Can't even remember what the sentence was now, but it woke me up and I'm still feeling the disturbing mental/emotional fallout as I'm writing here an hour or so later.
Seeing my psychiatrist on Saturday, good timing, but I also know there are very limited med options on how to deal with my current state of being. One of my meds may be raised, but the reason it was reduced was because it has been causing me significant physical health problems, such as nerve pain in feet with mobility limitations, dizzy spells, lots more. It also gives me a horrible inner agitation that is sometimes so intense all I can do is go to bed to try to reset my system. I actually feel pain like the nerves all over my body are on fire when taking this med at the higher doses. And it totally wrecks my sleep which is already very very dodgy.
In terms of dealing with emotional and mental pain, I see this med and others like it I've taken over time, as mainly only effective at deadening the pain of what I am experiencing on those levels, so that I am pacified enough to live with that pain without crying my life away. That's a valuable function for a med but it's not any real kind of answer to depression. Nor do I think there really is any, just better times or worse times, sometimes helped by our own efforts and those of our support people, sometimes helped quite a bit, but also sometimes just up and down at random. It's been my life for all this time so far, and appears likely to continue in the same vein.
Spiritual acceptance of my suffering seems the only way to go really, though I'm not religious at all, it's a personal thing for me. Spiritual acceptance has been a long hard climb with mental and physical illness in my life so far, and of course I can never really get to that higher place, but I think it may at least help to look in that direction. My spirit is bigger than my suffering.
