alert beyond response

I am severely sick, have been having attacks of panic throughout most of the days past recently. I am sick, I feel sick.

I want to just stay home and do household chores and chill out with the cats. My cats comfort me, just as cooking or cleaning lately calms me too. Home is solace, solitude is peace.

Feeling stressed, in a panic over nothing. An eruption of palpitations pulse from my chest, my breathing is laboured.

As antidotes I dole myself medication to tide over the arrest, I also create an assault on my senses through calming music, rose and lavender oils burning, a comfy sleeping gown, flowers, juices and teas. Prescribing pleasure is not fun when it is in alleviation of pain.

The thought of challenging scenarios sets me off: that's my trigger: anything from teaching to social situations. I prefer household work more to these, and I find myself occupationally more able to do them recently. Sewing calms me, even folding the laundry and doing the dishes, things which I have not been able to bring myself to do for a long time. But these activities don't bring me any income.

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Recently I have been rising early, not because of health reasons per se. It is more because a boredom I feel the nights before makes me medicate early to sleep, and I wake early because the cats are most awake at dawn, moving around the room, or knocking on the door, or purring on our chests.

This morning I woke up again early. After feeding the cats, taking my meds, having my coffee and smokes, I just felt despondent. The prospect of having work to do today scares me. Recently the prospect of going anywhere out of home to do anything social scares me more than usual. I can go to Parkway to shop with J, but that is the most comfortable ordeal I can take.

In fact I feel anhedonic in general. I have lost interest in reading. It takes extreme flavours to give me an appetite to eat. I drink lots of juice. I try to make my home into a spa haven with aromatherapy oils. I try to allow myself to just feel and sense, and not think. But all I sense is weariness and despondency, and very little pleasure.

If I try to free-flow what I feel, the bunds that keep my sadness at bay overflow, and I feel reminiscent sadness, sadness that I have been a slave to for most of my life, sadness that has crippled me and paralysed me beyond this before, sadness that makes me, well, sad. But it seems that I have to give in in order not to give up.

madnessmadnessmadness

I am forgetful. Enough to forget my medication sometimes. Maybe that's why I feel like shit right now.
But I have remembered them all these few days. I should be all right by now.
Yet, I am not all right. And I don't feel like talking about it. Talking is confrontational. I hate confrontation more than some people hate change.
My cats have lost all sensitivity to human emotion. Slinky no longer comforts me when I cry because she is used to my depressed moments.
I know I should try to let myself feel, or in my doctor's words, enjoy simple things like flowers and drinks and music. But nothing I can think of will cheer me up now. Not even ice-cream or chocolate or flowers. If I were to take out my paints and brushes and paint now, I will cry as I paint; it is too painful, painting is too lyrical, too emotive, even if it is just simple drawings.
Primary processing, primary processing. All I can spontaneously feel is pain and sadness. I am suppose to enjoy the sensory things. Smell, taste, all except touch, because I hate being touched.
I turned on music. I am not enjoying anything, music is so empty even if it is superbly performed.
I wish I still drank. Inebriation and pleasure. But I can no longer drink as much as I used to, neither should I be able to in fact.
I should let the trembling and muteness take over. Physical manifestations of sadness. Also sensory anyway.
I wonder if I hug one of my cats and rock myself in sadness how they will feel.

primary processing

Lucidness eludes me. I often feel detached from reality yet I don't have enough will to get back into it. I want to be clear-headed, but I cannot really do it: I end up distracted, having to do more than one thing at any one time otherwise I cannot concentrate. Packets of my memory seem to be beyond the grasp of my consciousness. I cannot remember what happened to my first dog Rocky whom I had when I was a kid.

I feel as detached from my feelings as I do when I was young. I don't remember much of my childhood, except times which were sad or lonely. I do not at all remember any time at all in my growing up that can be classified as happy. Any form of pleasure from playing felt more like a relief from having nothing to do. A relief that feels much like applied pressure on a wound to stop it from bleeding.

I have been trying to write about my memories, or talk about them. But they only make me realise that there are lapses in time I don't remember anything except poignant sadness or silent loneliness.

I try to allow myself to feel, spontaneously, instead of rationally - primary processing it is termed, by Freud. But I cannot get out of the clockwork of rationalising my sadness away. Because sadness scares me, and when I try to feel, that is all I seem to feel at all. I try to administer myself simple pleasures, but nothing tempts me, I enjoy nothing, I am still anhedonic. Any activity is only a distraction to keep me sane.

I have been watching TV drama series on the internet, medical ones included. When the story involves a person 'going to crash', I wish sometimes that they would defillibrate my heart and mind instead to shock it into life once again, before I 'crash'.

I cannot do socialising. I tried to return to my social circle via the phone and the internet but I don't feel up to it, like as if turning on MSN takes so much energy, even more than it does to make a cup of coffee.

If I try to relax, I started to crumble, even physiologically: I find myself rocking or shaking, I feel like I can no longer utter a word out of my mouth. If spontaneous feeling is the antidote to anhedonia, then it is as good as saying allowing my depression to take over is the key to treating my depression.

I am tired. Of this journey. Of not being able to work. Of not being much more well and functional than is ideal. This year I will be thirty. I don't know when I will recover. All I want to do now is cry. That is the outward sign of the only emotion I ever really knew.