Fog

I’ve been wrapped in a thick cloak of exhaustion for three days now.  It’s paralyzing: I haven’t been able to do much of anything.  Yesterday I wasn’t able to go to the photo studio to do the exercises for my lighting class.  I considered dropping the class or waiting till fall to do it, without coming to a decision.  I wasn’t feeling well enough to make a decision.  When I’m in up periods, I can become much more active, but I must always bear in mind that I’m disabled, that if I take on too much, I’ll crash down into another depression.  The tricky thing is that how much is too much varies.  I slept in till 12:30 today, and could feel even before I’d had my coffee, that it wasn’t going to help lift the exhaustion.  Today was my day off, a badly need day to do the housekeeping.  So I’ll have to put it off until tomorrow, and cancel tomorrow’s activities.  My place still looks like Hurricane Katrina swept through yesterday; I really wanted to get started on the cleaning. God I hope I wake up feeling ok tomorrow.  I’m afraid I’ve slipped into what I hope will be a short lived and low level depression.  I was on a winning streak when I played online checkers today, but I couldn’t have cared less—I just plodded on from one game to the next because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.  Tonight is my home group meeting, and going will be an especially big deal because it’s my anniversary week, but I’m wondering if I’ll even have the energy to get out of my room.

I consider myself really lucky because when I’m in a deep depression, I don’t go into doom and gloom mode: the world is not all dark.  My brother Peter says that I’m the only depressive he knows who doesn’t drive him crazy when they’re depressed. That’s probably largely due to the fact that I avoid complaining about it and making negative comments.  I also have a stubborn optimistic streak that keeps me going when the going gets tough.  Even now, in the late afternoon, I’m trying to figure out what I can do to make this day feel better.  Write for starters, no matter what I’m writing about, writing makes me feel better.  And go to my meeting no matter how insurmountable a task it feels, going to my home group is the highlight of my week.

Last night I had a dream with my ex-husband in it.  It wasn’t a bad dream, but I got up anyway because I wanted to have a dream without him.  He’s been a featured actor in my dreams since I started working on this bog, which is interesting considering that he hadn’t been in my dreams at all since I left him.  For years I wanted to write about him in this journal but didn’t because I was afraid that if the journal became public, it would get back to him and hurt him.  I still don’t want that to happen, but this journal doesn’t really make sense if it’s incomplete.  A friend recently asked: “Why don’t you not write about your family, if it’s going to upset them?  I don’t want to upset them, and I certainly don’t feel like bringing out all of the family skeletons is necessary to this story, but bringing up some of what went on is.  This journal has taken on a life and direction of its own, it demands to be written and shared.


Well I got my shoes on and my feet got me to the Thursday night "home cooking" meeting, as one member calls it: the meeting you go to for a basic well balanced meal of sobriety.  When I set out I still had that disagreeable feeling that my brain was swaddled in soaking gauze.  The meeting was great, as it always is, and afterwards we went to the Champs Elysées and sat out in the warm evening at a laughter filled table.  On the way home I realized that the fog had lifted without my noticing it.

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