I really do not want to talk about how much of a depressed loser I am. I don’t want to talk about how I almost weigh 200 pounds. I don’t want to talk about how a few weeks ago I told myself I was going to run a mile a day and I haven’t even walked a mile a day. I certainly do not want to tell you that for the past three days my feet were swollen up like I was some pregnant lady. I don’t want to tell you these things because they are embarrassing and make me feel like I am failing at this little thing called life.

My feet finally went down today and almost look normal, but shit, swollen for three days? What kind of potato chip monster am I? Truth is, my diet is complete shit. Big surprise, you would have never guessed that huh? I can honestly say that I have never felt this awful in my life. I think I have irritable bowel syndrome something fierce and I just overall feel like my physical being is finally feeling as shitty as I am.

I know that if I want to get better I need to start getting some physical activity into my daily routine and I need to stop eating like I am trapped in a room with a vending machine as my only food source. I’m killing myself and I need to stop it before some other weird crap starts happening.

I can’t believe that after years of basically eating healthy and running I have completely let it all go. It’s embarrassing. I am embarrassed to face people because I feel miserable and I look in the mirror and think that now a smile can’t hide anything, it’s all hanging out. I just hate being alive right now and I really have to change that.

I arranged a phone consultation with a Therapist so I hope she calls me today. (I’m saying today because it’s 3am, yikes). I’m not looking forward to talking to a stranger, I much prefer people I know but I guess its good for someone that doesn’t know you at all to give you their take on what you say. I was just sitting here tonight thinking about how badly I need to do this, sort through all my shit and say some stuff out loud.

It’s so weird how you can think something in your head but the minute you say it out loud, in words, to another person, it just becomes real. Like you said it so you have to accept it. It’s happened to me so I know what I’m talking about but maybe you don’t.

I never imagined being where I am today. In such a state of, I don’t know, uncertainty. I am unsure about every freaking thing in my life, I don’t know if cake is really my favorite thing to eat, I just eat it today because I ate it yesterday. If someone cracked my head open they would just see a bright green question mark sitting in there.

I remember feeling sure of things before, even if they weren’t the right things or the things that would make me happy, I in some way managed to be sure of them. Then I became unsure. I didn’t know if I was happy, I didn’t know if I had made the right choices, I didn’t know if my entire life had been wasted. I just want to feel like I am living and I want to feel completely sure and confident in something, anything. I want to be sure of many things but at this point I would settle for just one thing, just one thing to give me some sort of hope that other things will follow.

I’ve been thinking about the word hope a lot lately. I used to hope this and hope that, it never got me anything but grief. I think I have hoped myself out. Somewhere inside of me this little robot flipped a switch and made me see that hope wont get me anywhere, I just have to start doing shit and make things happen. I can’t just hope things will fall into the places I want them to, I have to get off my ass, pick them up and put those things where I want them.

It’s a weird thing to to say you don’t want to rely on anyone, but I don’t. When I rely on people I only get let down and I am done putting myself into positions that keep getting me kicked in the nuts. I don’t want to count on anyone, have hope for anyone or expect anything of anyone because this all just hurts me. I want to be in a place where I can just let people be and take the good when it comes but not let the bad affect me as much as I do.

I have a hard time focusing on myself because I think there are so many things I don’t like. If I am focusing on this person or that person then I don’t have to think about my own flaws, of which there are many. I have realized SO many things this past year and for that I am really happy but at the same time I am sad that I was in denial about so much for so long. Life hurts and denial helps us get through until we have time to deal. The thing is, my denial lasted WAY too long and when the time came for me to deal it was just too damn much and smoke starting coming out of my ears.

In this codependency book I’m reading it says several times that you get to a point where you think you are crazy. Like really crazy. I got to that point, I still feel like I’m there sometimes. It’s a scary thing to feel like you are losing your mind.

I know that I haven’t lost my mind , it’s more like I got control of my mind but the last president just did a really bad job and left a huge mess for me to sort through. I have a hard time dealing with things, I like to live in a happy little wonderful world and I do anything in my power to make myself believe that’s what I live in. I can live in a happy little world but I have to make it that way and not just pretend that it’s that way.

I really truly don’t want to have to go talk to someone but I know I have to. I am never going to have a chance at any happiness if I don’t. For months I have been telling myself if I do this and this and that then this will work out and that will get better and blah blah blah. I haven’t done anything and even if I had it would all have been some sad attempt to just pretend my problems weren’t there because even though I realize what all my bad behaviors are, I still do them. I do them consciously knowing they are bad and then I beat myself up for the rest of the day. I may be alone most of the time but I’m in an abusive relationship with myself. It sucks ass.

I feel like I have so much to offer, but I’m too scared. I’m scared of everything. I’m scared to talk to people I don’t know, I’m scared of being around a lot of people, I’m scared of being the next person on Oprah who is bed ridden because she’s so fat, I’m scared I will keep being untrue to myself, I’m scared one day I will be looking death in the face and feel like my whole life was a waste. It makes me so sad to feel this way but it’s the truth. I’m too fucking scared to live my life. I’m scared of rejection, failure, not being good enough, the whole lot. I’m afraid of everything except my cats.

Lately I have been making a huge effort to talk to people, like cashiers at the grocery store and stuff, and it gets easier with practice. I constantly have things pop into my head that I want to say or ask people but I don’t. Now I am trying to just say them and it feels nice.

I go to Safeway A LOT (I think I spend half a billion dollars there a month) and the other night when I was in there I went to this girl who has checked me out a kazillion times and I noticed she had dyed her hair so I told her I liked it and started a whole conversation with her. I was one of those people who was still talking even after I got my receipt. That day Laycie was so proud of herself.

I’m proud of myself every now and then but it’s almost immediately canceled out by something I’m mad at myself for. It’s frustrating. I want to feel confident again, I want to feel like I know what I want. I want to quit writing these long pathetic blubbering blog posts and get back to telling you how happy I am to visit the goats on my 15 mile run. I want to get over this shit. So, while I am scared shitless and absolutely am not excited to go see a therapist I am proud of myself for deciding to let someone throw me a rope so I can climb out of this deep dark hole. I hope I’m strong enough to climb.

ps Kendel has an interview at Sears on Tuesday, yaay!

I’m sitting here right now with mascara on my face, not because I am a bad make-up applier but because I just read this blog post from my favorite blogger and it made me cry, and cry and cry. Even though I write a lot of crap here I am always holding back. I’m trying my hardest to get through this depression on my own but in all honesty I am failing.

I stopped taking my Wellbutrin like 2 or 3 weeks ago (I’m not really keeping track of time so well lately) because I started feeling like I had drank 12 pots of coffee and hadn’t slept in weeks. I didn’t feel “right”. I’m not even sure what right feels like anymore but I didn’t feel good.

I know deep down inside that I need to go to therapy but in my little dreamland where the streets are lined with cupcakes and fat is the new thin, I tell myself I can get over it without help. The truth is that I cannot. I know I need help but a small part of me feels like reaching out for help is the same as putting a big neon sign on my back that reads: yeah I can’t do it on my own and even if I get better it isn’t because I’m strong…

I know it takes courage to ask for help and to actually get up, change your underwear and go receive said help but I put myself on a level different from everyone else in the world. I am supposed to be a super hero, I need no help, I can do it all myself… but I can’t.

I just want to shake this shitty-ness off like I’m a dog who just jumped out of the Willamette River. It just feels like I came to too many realizations at once and I’m operating on overload. Half my time is spent staring at walls because I have no idea what to do. I can’t sleep, I never want to get up, I am genuinely unhappy with everything in my life. Even things I see as good, they aren’t good enough. I am never happy with myself about anything.

After I read that post on Dooce I left her a comment, sat here for a minute staring at the wall and then decided “Fuck it.” You can hear something a bunch of times but there has to be something just right in the world for it to click and it finally clicked for me. I’m throwing in the towel, I can’t do this shit on my own, I am going to get some serious help tomorrow and I am going to get through this. The only way out of anything is through it and I see that now.

On Wednesday I went to a Ben Lee concert with my wonderfully adorable friend Lisa and it was so much fun. I haven’t done anything fun like that in a long time and when I was there I felt a bit like I had forgotten what it meant to be alive and out in the world.

This summer I was so depressed I was damn near comatose. I got on this medication and now I am still depressed but I feel like I have reclaimed my will to live and change. It’s hard because I have a lot of guilt for wasting my entire summer but then I think about it and I pretty much feel like it’s not just this summer but most of my life that has been wasted on things that don’t matter. I haven’t done anything amazing and I definitely feel like if I don’t start living that my life is just going to take off one night and find someone else who is willing to live. I have to stop lying to myself about so many things.

I have spent many years lying to myself because the truth just sucked and I wanted for everything to just be “okay”. In my delusional world I was getting along just fine but all those lies were bound to come unraveled in my mind and earlier this year they did. Now I am faced with the cold hard reality that I have hurt myself more than any other person ever could. I don’t want my life to be about pretending, I want it to be about just seeing shit for what it is, dealing with it in a timely manner and getting past it. I bottle up so many things and I know it isn’t good but just like I can resist a cookie, I cant stop myself from pushing just one more thing down into the pit of my stomach.

Aside from the lying I think my bottling business is one of the most destructive things I do to myself. I keep so much inside because I don’t want to seem like a bitch, I should just accept it though and be a bitch because at least I will sleep better at night.

I never want to openly disagree with anyone even though I pretty much disagree with most people on most things but sometimes it’s just easier to smile and nod. I’m more concerned with the happiness of others, so much so that I repeatedly do things I don’t really want to just because it makes someone else happy. When my sacrifices and compromises aren’t realized I store resentments in my arsenal of things to think about when I want to pity myself.

That’s such bullshit though. It’s my responsibility and only mine to make sure that I am getting what I want out of life and what I want out of my relationships with other people. I’m so codependent it makes me want to fucking puke up the 20 cookies I just ate. Don’t get me wrong, life is full of compromises but I have been doing way more than compromising and the fault is all mine. The older I get the more I realize that my happiness only has to do with me. If my mom is a bitch I don’t have to be unhappy about it, I can just cut it off and not let her affect me anymore. Sure it sucks to not have a mom but I can get by. I am so sick and tired of being this timid person when I know full well there is someone strong inside this little heart of mine.

Tonight is the first time I have been alone for any significant amount of time since Michael moved out (I’ll get to that in a second). I could have at anytime gone somewhere and just been alone but I am trying my hardest to be here for Kendel and that means being here physically and not letting her see how much pain I am in right now. I have also avoided being alone because I knew I was going to break down and I wasn’t much looking forward to it. I always forget how a break down helps me sort out my true feelings so in actuality I was just avoiding something that helps me.

The reason Michael and I no longer live together is because our relationship is not everything I had deluded myself into thinking it was. I have issues, he has issues, together we have issues and I feel like I can only make it as a person if I separate myself from old behaviors. My life for the past 10 years has essentially revolved around my relationship with Michael so all the behaviors I want to change are tangled up in that. I can’t make my bed while I’m sleeping in it.

I feel like I need to be completely independent before I can go back into any sort of relationship as a healthy person. I am so codependent it’s ridiculous and disgusts me. I am more angry with myself right now than I have ever been at anyone and believe me I can get angry. Knowing that I am the only reason I am so unhappy, that I had every chance to do something different but didn’t, really tears me up inside.

I know that some people may have a hard time looking at themselves and admitting that they are screwed up but I don’t. I know I’m screwed up and I lie so much about why other people treat me the way they do that I just have nothing left when it comes to lying to myself about what my issues are. I know I am most likely not aware of all my issues, I’m not that awesome, but I am aware of a lot of them and I want to change them.

I feel like I give and give and give (was that too many gives?) but when I look back and feel like all that giving was never returned or taken for granted then I feel really, really, bad to the point where I almost can’t deal with it. I know I have to take some time and just be completely selfish because if I don’t there is no way I will ever reach a happy medium. I have a hard time only thinking about myself, though I have been in my own head an awful lot lately.

Michael and I have been having a hard time for almost a year now. I had been with him almost every day for the past 9 years and then suddenly he lived in a different state and I had a chance to really look at myself and our relationship and I was bound to be unhappy with things. The things I saw and realized really affected me and how I saw us as a couple. We weren’t who I thought we were and I was someone who I decided I did not like.

When he left to go to Seattle it ended up really hurting me later because I just felt taken for granted and like I had no one at home supporting me and no one to chill out with at night. I thought everything would be okay but when he was gone I just really started resenting him and as time went on I got more and more angry and felt more and more taken for granted.

I even started to feel like no one really cared about me when I was outside of “Michael & Laycie” and I started to feel like I really didn’t have any super close friends that I could lean on. Of course that just stems from my problem with asking for fucking help and the fact that I made little effort to reach out to my friends.

I felt like I was losing my mind because I was so mad about everything and all I was thinking about was how I had put so much into our relationship and how little I felt I was getting out of it. I was having so many bad thoughts and I felt really, really guilty about them. I was thinking of things that had happened in the past 9 years that I felt were wrong, that I should have spoken up against and that hurt my feelings. I had way too much time alone to think about those 9 years and to kind of replay things in my mind and see them differently than I had seen them before.

I was such a mental case that Michael decided to move back to Salem in February. He was home only for a few days before I knew I had to have time away from him.

It took every little muscle in my codependent heart to tell him how I felt. Being that he was the only one making money since I was up to my neck in school work, we weren’t in a position to work out separate living arrangements. He stayed with his parents for a bit but then came back out of convenience rather than any sort of decision. At this point I was just so depressed and scared of my own feelings that I had no energy or will to fight for anything and this lead up to my summer of fatigue and complete hopelessness.

Michael and I were basically treading water for about 5 months and then when I got on my medication I knew that some things had to start happening or there was going to be no chance of Michael and I ever being able to make it. It’s really hard when you have loved someone for so long but then something happens and all you see in them is everything that you don’t want to see, everything that love had previously blinded you from. I knew in my heart that I loved Michael as a person but that I was no longer in love with the relationship we had and it was really hard to feel what I was feeling toward him.

After lots of talking we decided that we had to live apart but we weren’t able to make it happen right away. The longer we stayed together the harder things were getting for me. Realizing we couldn’t do it on our own I decided we had to ask his parents for some help. I had no idea that this would be just one more huge problem on my plate and one more thing to make me feel like “Michael & Laycie” were more important than Michael and Laycie separately. We didn’t even get to the point of actually specifically asking for something because obviously some people just aren’t going to help people do something they don’t want them to do in the first place.

Thanks to my Apple stock that I forgot about we found a way to make things happen on our own. Michael and I are now separated and while I was nauseous for the first two weeks now I am just sad and lonely. Not lonely in a bad way but lonely in a oh fuck I have to do everything myself way. I know that I can get through this and that I can be a better person but it’s going to be the hardest fucking thing ever and right now I can’t see it ever being easy but I have to believe that it can’t be this hard forever.

Sorry this was so damn long but out of the ten drafts I have written this is the one that seems to be the most coherent. I’m also sorry it took me forever and a decade to post again but I will continue to post regularly now that I got this shit out of the way.

Today is my 7th day taking Bupropion, the generic for Welbutrin. Today is going to be my second day on the two 150 mg pills a day dose. For the first 5 days I only took one and I didn’t notice anything weird besides a slight dizziness my first day. I could have started taking two a day on the fourth day but I actually forgot so I started later.

So yesterday I took two and the only thing I noticed was that when I went to bed I felt really weird. Every little noise was driving me insane and I kept waking up right after I fell asleep. I felt weird too, I can’t think of how to explain it but it was like I was dizzy with my eyes closed.

This morning I woke up after 6 hours of sleep and I had a headache (which is pretty normal for me). I took my dose at 6:30am and then went back to sleep for a bit. Right now I kinda feel like I haven’t slept in a day and I am hopped up on red bull or something. I only know how this feels because I experienced it many times last school year.

Another thing I have noticed is that my appetite is almost nonexistent. I get hungry but when I make myself something to eat I can’t finish it and pretty much just lose interest. Very weird since I have spent so long eating so much.

This whole Summer I’ve had really bad fatigue. I can’t do anything for longer than 15 minutes without wanting to stop and go curl up on the couch to a movie. That was until I started taking this medication. I haven’t had my mid afternoon crash where I just struggle to stay awake.

It’s hard for me to say if I had just had enough with being lethargic or if the medication is what’s doing it but either way I have being very productive (in my eyes) and I am almost feeling like I might have a life again soon if I can keep this up.

That’s the thing though, throughout my depression I have had good days here and there where I think I have made it over a hill and figured something out that makes me feel better about life but then on some random day I will just wake up feeling like all the sadness in the world was stuffed into my blanket and seeped into my skin while I slept. I would have to say that this has been the hardest thing to deal with, not really knowing how I will feel tomorrow.

The past few days have been going well although I would prefer not to feel like I am medicated so hopefully these weird side effects I am experiencing will go away soon.