yduras

So, the question of the hour is why haven't I moved yet. The room at aiskon's place is ready, and kind of has been. It's that I need to get my apartment into a condition where anything can be removed from it.

If you know me, you know I have clinical depression and dysthymia. If you're a casual lj-reader and don't know me, well, um, enjoy the voyeurism.

A big part of the reason why I want to move is that I've been on my own for about ten years now, and it has not, on the whole, been good for me. In that time I've had a number of major episodes, and one of the lessons I've learned from crawling out of that pit over and over is that I do better if I have people at the edges dropping me ropes. Partially it's a mental trick where I can make myself function to avoid disappointing anyone else until I like myself enough again to start being my own reason for functioning. Partially the fact that I have this incredible deep shame about being depressed. I can't bear to have it witnessed, and I'll present as though I were fine rather than allow anyone to see me broken. Pretending to be ok is not the same as being ok, but it keeps me from doing some of the damage that causes stumbling blocks to recovery.

So the thing is, I present pretty well most of the time. As far as most people see. When I left the job at the pharma company after three years, I mentioned at the farewell party that I have clinical depression (I'd been careful to never mention it at work - a boss finding out cost me the job before that one.) My co-worker, with whom I'd worked closely the whole three years, exclaimed "But you're so cheerful!" Because I can bury it, most of the time, and only lose things into the pit that hurt me to lose. As long as nobody's hurt but me, it doesn't matter anyway.

And now we get into why I am still in the little apartment. You see, one of the things I stop doing when I have an episode is I stop tidying. When I recover, I'm generally well enough to carry on from that point, but not really to go back and backfill what didn't get done when I was under. So I have archaeological layers representing various depressive episodes I've had over the last several years. And they need to be excavated. And I cannot ask for help because that would involve allowing other people to see how broken I am. [This is not, by the way, a cry for help. If I want help I will goddamned well ask for it directly.]

I've put eight large bags of trash out, and that's probably not half of what I'll have to do. I never really realized it, but I succumb to some of the mainstream thought after all - the one that says that depression is not a real mental illness. Not like MPD or Autism or schizophrenia. And I've had to face, this week, that I may not belong in a hospital, but this is not a minor thing. This is the sort of thing that people see on the news and pity the sad old lady. This is the sort of thing that gets calls made to social services or the health department. Sane people do not live like this. I don't mean this as an insult to myself. It's just a strange sort of epiphany to realize that successfully hiding the magnitude a mental illness doesn't actually mean it doesn't exist. And just because it hurts nobody but me doesn't actually make it less serious.

The good news, of course, is that I am making headway. I don't know when I'll be ready, but I've made more progress in the last four days than in the last four weeks on getting ready to go. And yeah, grandbuddha, I took my pills today.