… I was thinking a lot about friendship. Oh, and I posted some song lyrics (Moby) and a small poem I guess I wrote. Well, I know I wrote it, but it wasn’t intended to be anything beyond what I was feeling, not a poem necessarily. Anyway, stuff has happened and most days you talk to me lately, I probably don’t seem like myself. Something happened a couple weeks ago (some of you know what it was) and it devastated me. It took a long time to not cry every day. The day after it happened, I cried almost all day. I was supposed to be at a conference in SF and bailed, as I would not have been able to face anyone. That whole week, I just cried hysterically every night. I couldn’t help it. Thankfully, Dominic understands and has just tried to support me. Eventually, I got better for awhile, sufficiently distracted and feeling more like myself. But the last couple days, it’s been hard again. Intermitten misty eyes, nothing like before, but still hurting again. Writing this isn’t helping right this minute, but I feel like getting this out will help when all’s said and done. That aside… let’s not talk about the circumstances, but I’d like to talk about my feelings and this depression. I have been dutifully taking my medication, and it’s not doing anything to quell this hurt. Such is life though. Rationally speaking, I know it’ll get better, and I know it’ll take some time. Without going into details, I knew this thing would happen eventually. While no one died, it almost feels like something did. Some part of me, maybe. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the stages of grief, kind of as a way to help myself get through this and back to normal. As a refresher, the seven stages of grief are:
- Shock & Denial
- Pain & Guilt
- Anger & Bargaining
- Depression, Reflection, & Loneliness
- The Upward Turn
- Reconstruction & Working Through
- Acceptance & Hope
I feel like I’ve felt all of these things during these couple of weeks at different times. But in terms of what actual stage I’m in, I almost feel like I’m still in pain & guilt. It just hurts. I wish there was something I could do to move along into anger, though I know I’ve felt like bargaining already. There was almost a whole week where I was feeling good… Dominic encouraged me to go out and we went to Monterey and Santa Cruz and Felton the weekend before he started school again. It was a great way to take my mind off the pain and how much I hurt. I felt like myself again. But the last two days have been hard all over. Maybe I don’t realize it, and I am in the Depression, Reflection, & Loneliness stage. Maybe I skipped the anger part of stage 3 and just tried to bargain. Part of the problem, not that it’s his fault necessarily, is that Dominic went back to school (getting his MBA in Project Management this time) and he actually has to go to class on campus this term instead of online like his Bachelors. Which means on Monday nights he comes home around 4:45 or 5, relaxes for a little bit, changes, showers/cleans up, and leaves about 5:45 to get to class in Fremont at the Keller (DeVry) campus by 6:30. Class goes until 9:30, sometimes later, and he gets home around 10 or so after stopping to get us dinner on the way back. This leaves me all by myself all day, which it’s been easy enough to distract myself from my feelings during the day while I’m working, but in the evening when I have nothing else to do, my first thought is to do something that, because of what happened, I can’t do anymore. And that kills me. But it’s something I just have to deal with. I think perhaps this extra time to myself has just made me re-depressed (is that a word?) since my mind has nothing else to do but ruminate.
I made the move and used a bonus I got from work to buy a new camera. It’s a Nikon D5000, a DSLR camera, nice. It’s fancy, not just a point & shoot like I’ve always had before. It arrives tomorrow, and I’m hoping that it getting here will give me something to focus on and bring me closer to my usual self again. I’ll have plenty to learn to work it properly. I bought a DVD the site recommended, made by Nikon and featuring the D5000 in use to help get acquainted with using the camera. A crash course, I guess. I also bought 3 filters upon Steve’s recommendation, so I’ll have those to play with as well. Just now, I signed up for this ShutterCal.com site, where you take a photo a day and post it. I’d like to kind of document how I progress with using this camera. I kind of want to pick one thing and take a photo of the same subject every day, just using different filters or techniques, but I don’t know what might be interesting enough to do that, so I won’t start there. Ugh…I wish there was something I could do to force myself into that “Upward Turn” level to process through this shit. I also picked up a cross stitch project that I’d put down a couple years ago. I started it for Jennie when she first got pregnant, then stopped it when she lost the baby. Now that she’s pregnant again and far enough along that she’s pretty safe now (as safe as anyone could be, knock on wood), I pulled it out the other day to finish it. Hopefully this, too, will give me something to focus my brain on instead of thinking over and over about what happened and what I feel like I’ve lost. To boot, I’ve had kind of bad insomnia… I’ve taken to laying in bed playing solitaire on my phone to give my brain something to focus on instead of being depressed and keeping myself awake. It’s working, I guess, and I’m thinking it’s just something I have to deal with for awhile until I feel more normal.
So if you notice that my Facebook profile picture isn’t cheery, or my status updates sounds down in the dumps, it’s because yes, I’m depressed. No, I’m not alright. But I will be. I hope sooner rather than later.
Posted via email from The Midnight Showing of Trisha | Comment »
This is really an aggregation of some of my various online ventures.
