Is it depression or is it just me? I don’t know anymore. I am not sure if I ever knew. For with depression you are never quite sure what is reality and what is not. I am not saying that people with depression are all hallucinating or living in a different dimension to everyone else (though of course it helps) I am trying to work out where the one ends and where normal life resumes.
It’s not like a cold which is pretty obvious when it ends; I mean suddenly you can breathe again and you no longer have a dripping nose or sore throat. With depression it arrives with a bang, or so it seems, even though actually it arrives by stealth in exactly the same way it leaves. A silent mental ghost, though of course you are never sure if it will come back again to haunt you.
I get tired. Very tired. I don’t seem to have the stamina I once did or even the stamina of my peers. And when I get tired, I get impatient, my fuse gets shorter and I have to get away from it all, or else put those I love from me until I am less tired and able to cope. Now is that a legacy of depression? Is it depression? Or am I teetering on the brink of a depressive episode though I don’t know it? Or is it in fact all psychosomatic and merely a reaction to something that normal people have – called tiredness and the way I handle it is in fact normal.
Problem is I don’t know so I blame it on my depression.
Because this I do know I can be pushed into a depressive episode when I am tired. It is something I realise I will live with for the entirety of my life. I try not to think of it as a life sentence but I fear that it is.
It pisses me off not knowing.
Maybe I am behaving normally. I mean loads of people who have traumatic illnesses push themselves harder than those who have not had the experience. Testing themselves, their stamina, and their very existence to prove that they still do have a life.
I don’t know if I do the same, I am not sure for you see I don’t know what “normal” is, I have been “abnormal” for more than half my life now.
