I think it’s starting to get better.

I feel I’ve become that person now, the person who flaunts her problems to get people to read her blog. Well, if you read it and feel that way, then click away. You’ve only wasted a few seconds of your day. And if you don’t feel that way, then revel in the fact that I think it’s starting to get better.

I say this while still feeling kind of shitty, but there are days when I feel completely normal. Usually those days are paired with a slamming, hangover-from-happy day, in which it feels like the previous day could not have possibly existed; but at least those happy days pop up every once in a while, right?

There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to these days. I’ve tried to find a correlation, and a lot of the time, I’ve failed. But then, correlations tend to be evasive, especially for a solution that you’re still not entirely sure where the problem stemmed from initially. Some of you have mentioned that a lot has happened in the last several months, and sometimes it takes time for things to surface in our subconscious. This is true, and a consideration. Maybe all I had to do all along was to ride it out. It’d just be nice to know how long the ride is.

It’s also slightly frustrating to experience something and never really know for sure what it was. Is it grief? Emotional exhaustion? Which event triggered it? Why can’t my body just be like, “Hey, I’ve got a map that connects these dots for you”? I am admittedly a bit of a control freak, and like to know what the hell is going on with me.

Another frustrating thing is that I have worked really hard in the past several weeks to continue eating a decent amount of calories — I have not always been successful, because I was not blessed with the ability to binge eat when depressed, but I’ve been working hard, damn it — and I’m still losing more weight. The last time I went to my primary doctor, I asked for help gaining weight, because if I ever got sick I would be screwed, and she replied, just try to eat more, you’re fine. Fuck doctors, you know? So now that I’m sick (it’s a mental health issue, but that is still a health issue), and drinking two Ensure Plus’s a day in addition to trying to eat meals, I’m at a whopping 94.5 pounds. Which really helps with depression, seeing as how I think about that number and want to cry. And crying makes me not hungry, and not being hungry makes me eat less, and eating less means that DOCTORS ARE THE WORST. But I’ve always known that.

But it’s starting to get better. I’ve been working out a lot of things in my life, because it gives me something to think about. And I’ve been working on some new projects, one which is exciting and coming along quite nicely, and the other which will probably not work, and feels a little vain, but I’m working on it nonetheless.

And I’m taking things one day at a time — I’m still on this ride, whether it feels like the end or not. I feel like most of the time, depression feels like a thing to conquer, but at this point, it’s become more of a thing that I must learn to adapt to. Not because I’m expecting it to stick around forever… It could be here for another ten years, or it could be gone tomorrow. But if it is still here in the morning, it’s better for me to not treat it like the end of the world. It will become what you make it, and I have to accept the power that I have in that sense, and step up to the responsibility that I inherently have in not making it worse.

adapting Depression Prose