A Surprisingly Sane Blog

I have been struggling with my depression for about a week now. I mean, I always deal with it, but I’ve been having an ultra rough time since the end of last week.

Last weekend, I drove down to Monterey, California for a dance competition with two friends (hence the lack of blogging from those dates), and I sort of crashed and burned during that trip.

It all started with driving myself into pure exhaustion Thursday night during the 15-hour ride down to Cali. We all took turns behind the wheel, which would have been just fine if I possessed the ability to sleep in a car. I don’t. By the time we made it to the dance convention, I was so tired that I felt like I was dreaming, which always makes me panic and gives me anxiety.

I avoided the ballroom, which kind of defeats the purpose of a dance convention.

When it was my turn to compete, I couldn’t wait to get off the floor. I wasn’t in the mood to dance, and I wanted out of that huge, crowded room. My head felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t do horribly, but I didn’t do all that great, either. And sadly, I didn’t really care one way or the other.

Then I broke an unopened wine bottle while packing up the car to leave. The deep burgundy liquid pooling on the asphalt made me laugh a bit maniacally- it summed up the weekend perfectly, and that was before the drive home.

That brings us to- ah, yes- the trip back to Seattle. I’m not sure if it was worse for me or for my two friends in the car, but that’s a chunk of time I have been avoiding talking about since I got home. You see, that drive was kind of a nightmare for all of us.

One of the people I spent the weekend with is a pretty good friend of mine, a guy a few years younger than me. Everyone always comments on our “sibling-like” friendship, so you can probably imagine the childish picking-on with which we torment each other. Well, the playful banter quickly went from “fun” to extremely volatile by the time we hit the state line. We have a tendency to push each other’s buttons in a really bad way, and adding that onto the craptacular weekend and extreme exhaustion didn’t end very well.

Rather than go into detail, read this to get an idea of how that drive nearly ended, and then this to show just how pissed I really was. Oh yes, that’s how all that happened.

After I got home, I thought I was going to be okay… but no. The stress from the weekend-not-worth-mentioning boiled up in my veins and my mental blood pressure exploded. The mess needing to be cleaned up is fairly disastrous. I have been struggling with anxiety, anger, feeling too exhausted to function, and difficulty feeling motivation to do anything other than hibernate. I want so badly to be present, but I feel like I’m just going through the motions. It’s that funk that I know all too well, all triggered by exhaustion and a bad weekend.

Depression. Such a lovely old friend of mine. One that never ceases to pay me a visit, and one that always reminds me how fragile and pathetic my mind really is.

Current Mood: Sad

Tags: Depression

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Insanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.