I've been thinking about this . . .

I've been thinking a great deal this week about something that rachelmanija wrote near the end of her excellent three-part essay about her experience with PTSD:

Don't fall in love with your own beautiful suffering.

There is a tendency among people who have had a mental illness for a long time to fall in love with their own suffering. There is a tendency among people who have suffered to think that their scars make them beautiful.

Be careful of this. There is a fine line between healthy pride and joy in survival, and the arrogance and self-righteousness of feeling, as Naruto's Sasuke might say, "more special than you." There is a fine line between taking a clear-eyed look at your illness and how it relates to your self, and luxuriating in the sense of being too broken and sensitive for this cold cruel world.

You will not want to get better if you think that your illness is what makes you special. You will not be able to fully appreciate the present if you think that your dark past is the most interesting thing about you. You will never get rid of your symptoms if you're too thrilled by their drama. This is something I have to watch carefully in myself.

And, yes, there's another fine line between deglamorizing suffering and disrespecting it. I'm just saying: be cautious around those lines. Leave the beautiful suffering to the characters you write and read and watch. It's a lot prettier onscreen than inside you.

This is the time of year that I watch myself very carefully for signs of depression (I'm prone to seasonal-affective disorder). I am very deliberate about taking my walks outside, thinking of my doses of sunlight as being like a prescription that I must take every day. I know that I'm under special stress this year because of the unemployment situation, and so I have been taking extra steps. For example, I have been hectoring the family more than usual to keep the house picked up, since I know that living in messy conditions is one of the worst possible things for my mental health. I'm trying to eat right. I'm going to karate class to get some hard exercise. I'm taking my pills faithfully, and checking in regularly on the state of my mental health with my psychiatrist, my best friend kijjohnson, and with the mental health coordinator at church.

But despite all these precautions, I recognize the signs that all is not well. I feel so gray and desolate that I am having great difficulty writing anything in my paper journal, and I'm self-consciously fearing that people are reading these entries here in this LJ and feeling nothing contempt for me because I'm so pitiful/boring/banal, etc. I had a mini-breakdown earlier in the week when I called my mother-in-law in tears over Rob's job hunt. My mood has stabilized somewhat since then, but all I want to do is to read fanfiction obsessively, to the point that I'm stinting myself on sleep, and I snap irritably at people who interrupt me. Some people anaesthetize themselves with alcohol. I use reading, I guess.

I think that Kij and I have been talking elliptically around this for the past few months in our phone conversations. Oh my god, I'm so tired of this. Why does it never get better? Why do I have to keep dealing with this same old same old mental crap? Is it impossible for me to be happy, or am I just going through a run of bad luck? Do I want to be unhappy? Or is it simply that I'm dealing with depression because my life is so damn stressful right now, and ANYONE who is dealing with what I'm dealing with would feel the same way? If I'm doing everything right to treat my depression, why do I still feel this way? This isn't fair!

I am a woman who deals with clinical depression. It took me years to fully understand this, but now that I do . . . has this idea woven itself so deeply into my self-conception that I'll never be better, never believe myself to be healed because I don't want to be? Am I clinging deliberately to misery for some reason? And if not, if this isn't something I'm doing to myself, will I ever be truly well?

Is it possible for me to just be normal someday?

*thinks some more*

*shit*