Last night I started crying for no reason at all. Just suddenly got depressed, not triggered by anything that I could think of, and everything in the world seemed terrible and pointless. I’m feeling considerably better today. I know how lucky I am lately. I used to feel much worse than that for months at a time, so intense, inexplicable emotional anguish for one night is practically nothing.

This is going to sound sick, but sometimes it’s comforting when something like that happens. I’ve been feeling really well for months, and when I’m stable for a long time I start to worry that much of the past decade — the hospitalizations, the essays I handed in late, the crying, the cutting, the not sleeping, a million other things and how bloody awful I felt most of the time — were my fault, that I always should have been strong enough to deal with everything and the fact that it’s not so hard for me to deal with stuff now proves I should have been stronger all along.

Getting depressed again out of the blue from time to time blows that theory out of the water, though. This may or may not be logical, but it’s good enough for me.

And I am stable now. I can tell you exactly where I was one year ago today, though, because that was the day I started attending a partial hospitalization programme. I was at the psychiatric hospital from about nine to three, four days a week, for seven weeks. Last year I probably wrote a journal entry about that first day, but right now all I can remember about it is that when we had break time, I locked myself into a bathroom stall and cried. One of the other patients came to talk to me and she told me that I should come into the lounge and talk to everyone else if I really wanted to get better instead of hiding and crying, and I was surprised that she gave a fuck. I didn’t go off on my own because I didn’t want to get better. I was hiding because I thought it would be terrible for anyone to see me cry, because they might think I wanted them to help me or pay attention to me, when really I hated the idea of bothering anyone.

If you want to know what I particularly remember about the second day of the program, it was spraining my wrist playing volleyball during exercise period. I’m not going to forget that anytime soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Treatment, Depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.