Depression

The depression is still with me this morning. Coming up from sleep is like coming up from deep water, and I'm confused and off-balance when I wake. I realize I didn't take my meds last night. I am up at 1am, 3am, 4:50am, 8:30am, 9:40am. Something in me is empty, and it registers as hunger, so I eat two South Beach granola bars at odd times during the night. I feel nothing but this plateau of emotion that walks a straight line, never rising above the depression, or dipping below it. It's like the static buzz of white noise in the background, constant, consistent. When I am depressed, the only things I seem able to do are the passive things. I can read. I can watch movies. I can--without effort--fall into someone else's story, someone else's life, and subsume my own. In fact, I want to. I don't want to think about myself, or I how I feel (or how I do not feel, which is more accurate).

I know why everyone prefers mania, in whichever way it manifests itself. Because then, you're active. You may be crawling out of your skin, your brain may never stop, but you're productive. You can pretend normalcy. You can achieve things. Sometimes. When it isn't too bad. Yesterday, I accomplished so much, so much more than I had in days. But that night, I was left feeling depressed and bodily tired, while my mind wouldn't let up. It kept going and going and going, despite my body's inability to keep up, but that never shut my brain down. And so I laid in bed, anxious and restless, and unable to stop thinking, but heavy and leaden feeling, depressed at the core.

This is when I'm unsure of this "bipolar" diagnosis. In the past, yes, I've had full weeks, even months, of depression, or mania-like symptoms. But these days, nothing lasts. I don't have hypo/mania for more than four days. It's usually for a day, even an afternoon, then down into some anxious, irritable mixed mood, and further into depression--all within two days. The downs last longer. I'm almost positive of that. Or maybe I was feeling fine, happy, wanting to get out of the apartment, do things this weekend, and then, like a punishment, several days later, the depression hits. And it is like a punishment--for having too much normalcy. Always, it is: this too shall pass. And it does. The good and the bad. Round and round in an unbreakable cycle.