Too Old For This, Not Old Enough to Escape

There is a set of thoughts that has been weighing on my mind with increasing heaviness over the past few years, a tangle of thoughts regarding money, happiness, purpose, value, worth, sacrifice, fulfillment, responsibility.

What do I really need to make me happy?
What makes life worth living besides happiness?
Do I have a right to be happy? Does anyone have a right to happiness? Do I have a right to try to make myself happy?
Should I feel guilty for taking what I want if I'm not actively harming people to get it?
How much sacrifice is enough?
How much contentment is enough? How much responsibility do I have for creating my own sense of contentment, fulfillment, and acceptance no matter what the circumstances?
How much do I owe to other people? How much responsibility do I have to the rest of the world?
Am I a good person? Am I a good enough person? How much do I care about becoming a better person?
How much responsibility do I have to change? To fight against myself when what I want is at odds with what I should be?
Would I be happier or at least more at peace with myself if I forced myself to do and be what I'm told is right?
What are the consequences of rejecting moral standards adhered to by my friends and family? Is maintaining social cohesion its own moral imperative? Will I be content with accepting the consequences for failing to adhere?
Would I be happier if I stopped caring so much about what other people think?

These questions have weighed upon my mind even more so in the last 6 months as I've become increasingly frustrated with being unable to find a solution to the one overriding problem that has emerged: I don't want to work full time anymore, but I can't accept the consequences of not doing so.

Money and time. It's all about money and time.

It's probably also about aging, being at least a partial introvert, dealing with the circumstances of my own particular life experience, and how my personality and brain are responding to the world at large as it changes.

I believe I was born to be a housewife, but I was also born to have some sort of career. I want to have some work to do and to be able to put my brain to good use. And I want a paycheck. But I am sick of not having the time or energy to connect with the things that fulfill me and give life some meaning. I am sick of trying to cram everything that isn't work into the two days between work weeks. And I'm sick of these things being robbed of their restorative value when they end up being forced efforts.

I am literally sick from these things. Over the last 6 months I have made myself sick from the stress and anxiety of not having the time to do the things that I need to do beyond work. I was sick from being up at night with a sick cat and but still having to get up at 4 in the morning to start my 12-hour work day routine. I was sick from trying to figure out how to squeeze vet appointments around my work schedule. I was sick from taking days off to take care of my dying cat and grieving her loss, and knowing that those "vacation" days were being traded off for actual relaxing days off later. I was even sick from trying to squeeze otherwise-relaxing social events into an already-too-tight schedule.

In the last couple of months, the stress of all work and no play has brought me as close to either some sort of clinical depression or some sort of anxiety disorder as I've been in years. It's brought me as close to being suicidal as I ever want to be again. (Not as close as I've been in the past, but that was far too close than anyone should have gone without getting help.) It gets better --much better-- after I have a work day off, and then starts to creep back over me until I have another work day off. Which makes it seem all the more obvious that having more days at home is definitely one answer.

I just don't know how to make it a viable answer. I can't quit work. I doubt I could get another job that was even remotely as flexible and fulfilling as the one I have. And that wouldn't really help because the problem isn't my job; it's working full time. But, I can't afford to switch to part-time, regardless of whether it was at my current job or a new job. The one hope I had --working from home one or two days a week-- seemed to be just over the horizon, but has stalled indefinitely.

I'm starting a four-day weekend thanks to having the rest of the windows installed today and tomorrow. And despite the fact that I'm writing this downer of an entry I already feel better for having these days off. Despite the fact that I have to deal with the phone guy tomorrow and yet another bill for having them try to fix a problem they can't seem to find. Despite the fact that I am expecting the vet to tell me that Gordon has cancer. Despite the fact that a cancer diagnosis will mean being forced to make extremely hard decisions. Despite the fact that choosing treatment would mean I could very well have to deplete my entire reserves of both emotional strength and vacation time to deal with vet visits and cat care. Despite the fact that it could mean that I might not have any time left to take off when Mom is here in September or that Mom might never get to meet Gordon. I don't see Life making anything any easier in the near future. But dealing with it all would be exponentially more difficult if I hadn't been able to take a couple of sick days in the last few weeks and to take these two days off.

Mental Health Day

When I was in grad school, I was treated for depression. The doctor prescribed Prozac and suggested counseling. Even though I knew the counseling part would probably help even more than drugs, I never went. I was working two part time jobs, doing graduate course work, and spending almost every other waking moment with my friends. When did I have time to deal with counseling? Besides, my work and my social interactions were their own form of "counseling" which helped keep me from spiraling too far down.

I think the Prozac helped. I'm not really sure. I don't even remember how long I was on it. If I remember correctly, the doctor ran out of coupons and, faced with the increased cost, I decided it was time to stop taking it.

I did finally get some counseling a few years ago. As winter wore on into early spring I found myself wondering more and more seriously whether it would be possible to suffocate myself to death by shutting myself in one of the closets in the attic. I wondered how long it would take Tim to find me and I felt sad for what it would do to him. And then one day I realized my wish to be gone was so overwhelming that I didn't care about hurting anyone else. It was like a slap in the face, and I immediately got the ball rolling on starting counseling.

Just doing something proactive made me instantly feel better. I had my allotted 10 counseling sessions, and every time I went I felt practically giddy with relief. Even though my counselor didn't do anything except listen. No advice, no exercises to try, no suggestions, no interpretations. She just listened. Which meant that on the way home from each session I ended up thinking, "But wait, I never really talked about my hard core problems." I had all these thoughts, fears, problems, questions that I'd been contemplating my whole life and what came out of my mouth at my counseling sessions was banal crap. And my counselor was just a kind, gentle listener who never helped me get deeper, who never guided me into discussing anything that would make a long-term difference in how my brain functioned.

When my 10 sessions were up and the insurance wasn't going to pay for further sessions without proof that I needed more help, I used that as an excuse to stop seeing her. I had fully realized by that point that, despite enjoying having someone to talk to, our sessions weren't accomplishing anything substantial. Plus, it was fully spring by that point and the influence of my Seasonal Affective Disorder symptoms was gone. I was somewhat giddy simply from that change in the seasons, and didn't feel like I needed to pay someone to listen to me anymore.

Since then, I've done a lot of thinking (and worrying and soul searching and debating with myself) about depression. And the two-prong conclusion I always come to is that a) I don't know whether what I suffer from is really depression and b) whether it is or not, I feel guilty for not being happy.

Is it depression or is it self-indulgence?
Is it depression or is it just a bad attitude that I ought to be able to fix if I tried hard enough?
Is it depression or is it just a negative personality that I was born with and should learn to accept?
Do I even have a responsibility to myself or to other people to change?
Does that potential responsibility depend upon whether the cause of my problems is biological or not?
Do we even have a right to expect to be happy?
Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the world to be happy?
Is it my own fault that I expect too much?
Is it my own fault I can't deal with change?
Is it my own fault I worry constantly about bad things happening?
Is it my own fault for not being able to prepare for every bad thing that could happen?
Is it my own fault for being fat, which creates some of the physical problems I'm dealing with and has a biological effect on my brain?
Is it my own fault for retreating inside myself instead of reaching out to other people?
Is it my own fault that I'm making it worse by feeling sorry for myself?
How can I feel sorry for myself when people I care about are grieving lost husbands and fathers?
How can I feel sorry for myself when other people I know are dealing with real depression issues?
Why have the feelings I've been fighting with for at least 6 months finally come to some sort of head now when I should be worried about other people instead of myself?
Why doesn't everyone understand how awful I feel all the time and feel the same way?
Why can't I be like everyone else and not feel awful all the time?
Am I just a bad person?

Now I remember that part of the problem I had with talking to my counselor was that all the evil, dark, angry, empty, painful, negative, lost, alienated, frustrated, worried, fearful thoughts that fill my head all the time sound silly and/or stupid when I try to say them aloud. They're especially hard to discuss when I'm not feeling bad at the moment of trying to discuss them. The relief of being in the counselor's office was always so great that I suddenly couldn't really talk about all those problematic thoughts in a serious way.

But when I don't have anyone to talk to, when relief isn't lifting the pall of darkness from my soul, when I have a quiet few hours to myself away from everything else, I can write some of those thoughts. It's like talking to myself, which is what I do all day every day anyway. But writing relieves some of the pressure of having it all locked inside my head. Writing allows me to transcribe all that damaging rumination and gives me a chance to organize all the thoughts a little better. And being able to express these kinds of thoughts while their pain is still upon me allows me to say them without feeling like my feelings are silly or stupid. I can't control how anyone else who reads them interprets them. But I don't actually care at this point. I'm not doing this for anyone else right now.

Right now I'm worried about the fact that I've felt stressed for months on end. Right now I'm worried about work and I'm worried about the fact that I've been worried about work for months. Right now I'm worried about money and the house, and I'm also worried that I shouldn't be worried about money and the house. Right now I'm worried that I'm making life harder than it needs to be. Right now I'm worried about why I can't seem to cheer up and find meaning in my life, and I'm worried about the fact that this has been a problem for months and months at this point. Right now I'm worried because my body is giving me all sorts of grief and I'm not sure what, if anything, I can or should do about it. Right now I'm worried that I can't seem to find any time or energy to be passionate about anything --not even my garden. Right now I'm debating whether this is really depression this time. And right now I'm deciding I'm not going to do anything about it yet, at least not medically.

I allowed my physical problems to give me an excuse to take the day off, and I've used some of this day to at least take some of the pressure off my brain by writing this. I'm already feeling more positive, and I'm going to use the rest of the day to do what I want. I'm going to go putter around outside for a bit, and I'm going to try to make myself go for a walk. I really think getting in some daily walking might make a big difference. Then maybe I'll go read outside later on. And if I can find someplace to work on jigsaw puzzles, I might start one. A little exercise, a little relaxation, and maybe a little "order & method" for my "little grey cells." And then we'll see where I need to go from here.