Emotional Umbrella

Finally clear of the Effexor, and starting to feel somewhat closer where I was when I started this whole thing.  Still feeling some side effects from starting the Prozac, but I’m mostly just very very sleepy at this point, which I can live with (especially compared to the other stuff I’ve just passed.  Bring on the sleepy.  Cake walk).  I’ve been napping for at least a few hours every day this week, but I’m trying not to feel so bad about it.

So I’m not really up for much lately (I walked down to my basement today and was winded.  My heart was pounding.  Not so much with restarting the workouts yet, then), but I’m thinking about being up for stuff.  That’s an improvement, right?  I want very badly to get myself back to that place where I was experimenting with my life, and trying various random things to help myself get better.  Deep down, I am a little bitter that process has been put on hold for three full months of what was really Not The Right Medication For Me, but I have hope that in the end some medication or another will be helpful, and acknowledge that the only way to get there is to try some.  Still,…sucks ass, right?

I am now firmly convinced on the “burnt out stress coping systems” theory on the cause of depression.  Body undergoes stress and reacts accordingly.  Due to situational factors, the stress reaction is triggered with extreme frequency.  When overtaxed enough, body cannot keep up and loses its ability to respond as it normally would.  Body systems related to the stress response (sleep, appetite, immune functioning, etc.) are out of whack, as is the body’s ability to handle additional stress of any kind.  This makes a lot of sense to me given what I’ve noticed in myself, and the situations in which people tend to become depressed (when they are under extended periods of stress, either as a result of life events or a distorted perception of them), and the things that could make depression more likely (the body would have more or less of a reaction and/or reactions to more things depending on genetics and thought patterns).  The stress reaction is an intense thing.  It was designed for running from lions, not for deciding which shoes to wear to meet in-laws.

At any rate, I’m trying not to feel so bad about feeling like I want to take a break from things for a while.  If I had a sprained ankle, walking on it right away would just delay the recovery.  Same thing here, I think.  Eventually I can work myself up with more responsibility, but trying to fling myself into things before I can really handle them is going to set me back, not speed things up.

So maybe if I need to watch a lot of TV on the days I don’t have other commitments while the new antidepressant is making me too tired to think about much else, that’s not such a bad thing.

Moral of the story, I need to back the f@#* off of myself.

Which has pretty much been my lifelong moral.

Except when I was six and did not yet know what the f-word meant.