Falling down, facing up

It’s becoming increasingly clear that  at the moment, I’m just not ‘quite right’. I’m feeling a lot more apathetic and tearful, and just can’t quite be bothered with a lot of things. I’m struggling to work productively and find myself crying a lot more than I have for some time. I find myself thinking about things I haven’t thought of since my last ‘fall’. I can’t sing at church either, which seems to be quite a good signpost for things not being right.

In short, I think I’ve officially lost the race against depression again.

This isn’t really that surprising – after all, I’ve had a good five months of recovery after the last and worst dip, but doing these things cold with no medication, is not the best way. And no matter how much I argue that it was ‘best for me’ and ‘the only way I could manage’, it probably wasn’t. I should have pushed to be put on something that didn’t make me so suicidal.  I should have had more courage. I should have realised that like everything on this earth, depression isn’t something you can beat using your own willpower alone. Apathy is my greatest enemy, at times.

The defining moment was realising that my thoughts are getting progressively more negative and dangerous, and although I suppose it’s a good thing that I recognise that they’re coming from an illness which has a solution, and not myself, I’m pretty devastated. I feel like I’ve failed. I feel like I’ve lost the war, at last.

The thing is, I’m afraid to try medication again. I’m going to Nepal for my elective in January, to work in hospitals there, for two months, so there’s not much time to play with drugs and doses. Last time, no one, let alone myself, quite made the connection between how ill I was, and fluoxetine. This was one time when being the eternal perseverer, did not have a good outcome for me. I can’t feel like that again. I’m terrified of feeling like that again – but I’m not sure I have any options left. I feel like a total hypocrite after spending so much time convincing my flatmate to try them, but it feels inevitable. I’m also not really looking forward to going back to the doctors after spectacularly failing to refer myself to the psychiatrist/renew prescriptions/do what patients are supposed to do. It feels like this is all my fault, and that if I’d been just a little less brick-headed, just a little less obstinate, or, dare I say, it, just a little less depressed and incapable, this fall back might not have happened.

I’ve not got much time to play with as I’ve got two essays that need writing in the next fortnight, and there’s a lot to learn in paediatrics too – so I know that I need to act quickly. I know I need to stand up to this and stop thinking I can do it on my own. I know I need to accede the point and then start again from the beginning. It’s like a dreadful homecoming, an unwanted baseline. It makes me wonder if this pattern is going to be all I know, now, of a few months rising and then, repeatedly, falling back and losing everything I managed to salvage. This is a house I don’t want to be in, a party I don’t want to crash, and yet, here I am. I’m stuck  inside the walls again. I’m looking for God in this, and not really finding him.

So – let’s see what happens. I hope all my readers are having a better week than I am.