Saturday, April 30, 2005

Glimpses of the Abyss

Zoloft has made me a better man.

I don't know if I type those words in gratitude for the drug's effectiveness or in sarcasm for the simple fact that I need to take it in the first place. It feels a bit weird admitting it, but I have to take it (at least for now).

Why? I would wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, and would not be able to fall back asleep. My mind would be filled with thoughts...worries, mostly...about everything from finances, my future, my family (and the coming addition to that), and even my friends. If you've ever found yourself awake in the middle of the night and all you could do was stare at the ceiling instead of sleep, then you can empathize with me here. In those moments, I'd feel everything from fear of what's happening and what's to come to outright anger and rage about some things I see happening in my life and in the lives of those around me.

I literally made myself sick 2 months ago (read blog posts for details).

Rather than bore myself by listing my worries again, I'll only say that tonight I feel both relief and shame at having to take Zoloft at all. Relief - because it's helped a great deal. My temper's better...my overall moods are better. Great stuff.

Shame - you do the math. I let myself become consumed by the things around me. Consumed by worry. And when I realized that, I even let the guilt of doing so consume me even further.

I dunno. I'm fushu'd in the head, I guess...

Tonight, I'm finding myself concerned that I generally worry more about things going on around me that I cannot control than I worry about my own 'character,' which I am responsible for.

Depression has consumed me at times in my life when I feel trapped...like in my old job. Sure, the change of 'venue' was needed, but I'm bothered that I bitched and moaned about my circumstances back then more than I did about the fact that I was wallowing in my own self- pity. Though the situation sucked indeed, I stretched the blame for my depression and laid that blame squarely on the shoulders of the people I worked for and people I worked with who stood idly by and did nothing to help me.

No one should stay in a situation that tears them down. I know that. But...

But how could I let myself sink so low? Why have I almost done it again with the things I worry about so much now?

Maybe because it's so much easier to point out what's wrong with things around us than to face the darkness lurking beneath the surface of the personae we try so hard to display for the world to see... It's just easier to tell you what's wrong with you than to reveal what's wrong with me and deal with that... It's easier to just run... Maybe...

Or maybe I just need to take another Zoloft....

2 Comments:

Blogger THE J Mo said...

Whoa man... I had no idea. Hope you get feeling better about things soon.

11:03 PM  
Blogger Kevin said...

Not in any deep depression now. Just feeling a lot like I've skimmed the surface of it a lot lately (especially with the father-to-be pressure happening all over again) and not realizing it.

11:14 PM  

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