4:33am*
I get up. It's hard to sit up. Feels uncomfortable, like I'm forcing myself to stretch. My night clothes are drenched**. I change them for a second time tonight then reset my alarm and lay there.
*With clinical depression, early rising is a presenting symptom. I've done a significant amount of research on why it is that clinically depressed people wake up so early, but I've yet to find much conclusive information on the reason for it one way or another.
**Night sweats are also prevalent when it comes to antidepressant medications and other medicines used to treat melancholia. Cancer is also a reason for night sweats according to Google. These types of sweats are described as "drenching", much like the night sweats I experience on a regular basis.
Body aches and muscles are sore. The sinew burns when I move, and it drives me nuts. At first, I can't stand it, so I go back to sleep.
5:45am
I get up again with a hard time. I shake my head and groan a lot. Like I'm trying to shake off the pain and discomfort. Breathing in isn't satisfying. The oxygen doesn't feel like it's doing anything helpful.
I'm cold and clammy from all the sweat and I smell sour. I haven't bathed in 3 days.
I sit on the couch, at my computer desk and back on the bench at the end of my bed all trying to get the energy to take a shower for my 8:30am appointment with my psychiatrist.
6:32am
Finally, I'm able to begin picking out my clothes for the day. I choose green leggings and a blue shirt about mathletes that I used to wear to work all the time before my body stopped taking orders from me.
I think about makeup, but I know that unless I take an Adderall, I won't look pretty today. Adderall gives me a headache and sometimes makes me irritable, but it will allow me to sit up, think, walk, talk and sometimes even helps me to do large goal-oriented projects.
7:46am
I start wrapping up my blog post to go to my psychiatrist. I leave the house by 7:50am even through it only takes me 15 minutes to get there in afternoon traffic. On the way, I try to use dictation software yo capture my thoughts and it works pretty well.
8:04am
I pull up to my doctor's building and try to will myself to stay awake. My limbs are heavy and they feel like lifting them over and over again to go up stairs isn't going to work very well. I don my mask and climb the two fights of stair anyway. By the time I'm no the third floor, I'm out of breath.
I'm sitting in her office waiting room by 8:12am.
8:47am
My doctor finally come out to greet me. I tell her my updates and some of my accomplishments I've worked on with my time away from constant work stress and unending manual labor.
"I've applied for my FAFSA, but I don't know if I can actually make it all the way through a college level course; I never have before."
She tells me not to worry about it. She says for me to "dream big first".
"Think about what you enjoy doing. What would make you excited to get up and go to work every day" she says, smiling.
She's happy today because (in the last few months) I finally agreed to see a therapist. She's happy because she knows I'm traumatized and in need of day to day guidance.
No added diagnoses go on my chart today. Just my regular old three tried and true debilitations: ADHD, Complex-PTSD and Severe Clinical Depression, also called Major Depressive Disorder.
1:07 pm
I'm sitting at my desktop trying to think of the final touches for this post, but my brain is fogging up. Brain fog is a prevalent issue for me. I deal with it everyday. I'll walk into the kitchen and forget why I went in the first place. I often forget to to go to the bathroom and cause myself pain. I procrastinate and stare off into space a lot.
I avoid making decisions as much as I can. When a person gets into a bad habit of not trusting themselves to make every day decisions, then there's not much to do other than sleep.
2:12pm
After trying to write for about an hour, I give up and go to bed for a "short nap". It takes me forever to decide anything, like I mentioned earlier, so I wonder around the house aimlessly, standing in random spots for 5 to 10 minutes at a time in stuporus states. Mostly, I think I do this to try and jog my memory of anything else I was supposed to do before I "give up" for the day.
I don't like calling it "giving up", but that's what it is. It is the point where I cannot take the opposition of my natural state anymore and I retreat to unconsiousness to get the hell away from it for a moment. A few hours of dreamless nothingness usually helps take the edge off of the emotional pressure to excel in everything I do, and to do MORE, MORE, More. Every day, better than the last.
7:33pm
I wake up after a too long nap. Make myself a cup of coffee and work on my blog some more. Usually this part of my day is a struggle to clean up my apartment enough so that it doesn't depress me upon waking up the next day. Wash dishes, throw dirty laundry into the hampers, pick up dog toys and put them back in the bin, put away clean dishes, take out the trash.
Today, I don't do any of this. I just rinse out my coffee mug when I'm done and set it aside to deal with later. Today, I just write and surf the web. I research, looking for energy online.
How can I help myself? What could I share with others that might make a difference in their lives? Is there anyone else like me?
These questions have taken up residence in my mind and they're always floating around these days. Unanswerable queries that won't leave me alone and let me think about my day or my week or even what I might want for dinner.
The fatigue and lack of motivation is so ensconced in my personality, it's almost as if I know this is what and who I will be in the future if I don't fight every day to avoid it.
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