brownblob

[brownblob]

Called dr and made an appointment today. I already think it's probably a mistake, but its done. I will definitely be beating myself up for this. I know this won't help. Maybe I'm not that bad. Now my dr will know I'm crazy. Why would I want to do this?

[brownblob]

I called the drs office yesterday and made an appointment. It will be a couple of weeks before I get in, but I figure I can atleast get some meds. Now I fear that I'll start feeling better before the appointment and I shouldn't have made it. I feel like I'm not depressed enough or anxious enough to need real help. I'm just being whiny asking for help. I'm a loser. I don't need help. I'm supposed to be a man. I'm going to have to go in and tell her that I'm depressed and anxious and hope she doesn't ask too many questions. I intend to be honest, but at the same time I hope she doesn't ask too many questions so I don't have to tell her too much. Probably she'll just spend 5 minutes telling me my blood pressure is fine and telling me to exercise and then write me out a prescription for something that won't work.

[brownblob]

It's another night waking up at 1:30 in the morning. There's nothing going on, but I'm completely tense. Part of me wants to just ramble on about whatever and part of me is beating myself up for ever posting anything on here. What if someone I know would discover this? Luckily, it's not a very active board, so I can tell myself the odds of anyone ever reading this is very small.
I'm going to my brother's to watch the game tonight and I'm dreading it. I have to go because I was invited and I have no good reason not to go. I know I will end up sitting on a couch in silence the whole time. By the end of it I will feel so isolated and reminded of how I don't have anything in common with my family. There is no connection here. I'm a misfit. I will be so low and probably detached by the time I leave.
I haven't seen my father in 25 years and don't expect to ever see him again. This is my choice. The rest of my family doesn't understand it. My father had anger issues . He was emotionally abusive not physically. I only have 2 memories of him being physical. The first one I don't really even know if it ever happened. It may just have been a dream. I've just always had this memory since I was a small child of him whipping me with a belt. The other I was 13 and I remember him throwing me around the room. I was being annoying and probably deserved it. It was scary, but at the same time it was a relief. There was always so much tension in that house that it felt like such a release to have him physically throwing me around.
When we were kids, we always knew to shut up and stay out of the way when he got home. It was like this storm cloud of rage rolled in whenever he got home. It was always behave or else. Nobody ever dared find out what "or else" would be. We walked around on eggshells just waiting for him to get angry. When he got angry with my mother, he would yell at her as loud as he possibly could. I don't know how he didn't lose his voice. She would just turn into a pile of crying goo. I can remember as a teenager putting on headphones from the radio and pulling pillows over the headphones to try to block it out, but I could still hear him. When he would get mad at her, he would bring back up things he was still mad about from 10 or 15 years earlier. He would go back through it all and yell,"Why?" When he was done he would slam all the doors and peel out of the driveway, and disappear into the night. There were also times when he would refuse to speak to us all when he was mad. I can remember one time when it was literally months where he would come in at night and go to bed and leave first thing in the morning and never say a word to anybody.
He would tell me I was lazy, worthless and would never amount to anything. I heard him multiple times tell my mother that his biggest regret in life was having children. This was where his life went wrong.
As the youngest child, I ended up being the only one left and having my mother literally crying on my shoulder all the time. I didn't have normal teen years. I was an introvert and was always home comforting my mother. Trying to keep her going.They finally separated when I was 17.
I believe I was born with some predisposition towards depression, but this atmosphere didn't help.
Now I sit here and wonder should I post this or delete it and never post again. I feel like such an idiot for posting this personal shit from so long ago. That voice in my head saying nobody cares and then saying somebody is going to find out.

[Fargin]

It's the truth.

I mean, what we feel, what we experienced. This is how I feel, this is what happened and yet I feel wrong and shameful for telling the truth. I'm wrong for saying out loud, how my mom terrorized us, threatened us with leaving us or threatening us with committing suicide.Made me feel fearful and unsafe at my very core. Since I've been able to separate myself from my childhood memories, I've been able to take myself out of the equation, to see the child, not myself. The child I see did not deserve to be shattered and destroyed on a regular basis.

A kid, who forgot a chore or lost his appetite at the diner table, which can't with any reason be blame for his mother leaving or committing suicide. That's absurd, but that was my reality and that extreme reality shaped my life. This is why, I had to cease expressing myself, why I had to stack up my feelings inside, why all these feelings physically depressed my soul, my dreams and desires, my spirit and my ability to face other people as a equal with equal rights to my own feelings and a right to express myself. My ability to see a future, my ability to get out of bed.

Whenever we post here and don't delete our posts, we're fighting the behavior we learned to suppress and depress ourselves. We have to do it, we have to change, but it goes against everything our parents taught us and the most important thing they taught us were: If you defy us, we will destroy you."

[brownblob]

"This is why, I had to cease expressing myself, why I had to stack up my feelings inside, why all these feelings physically depressed my soul, my dreams and desires, my spirit and my ability to face other people as a equal with equal rights to my own feelings and a right to express myself. My ability to see a future, my ability to get out of bed."

I know how that feels Fargin. I grew up just trying to not cause trouble and trying to be invisible. I grew up not thinking about a future for myself or feeling like I was good enough to deserve having feelings.

I hadn't checked my phone since Friday. I checked it this afternoon to discover my doctors office had called me back Friday and changed my appointment to Tuesday. So now I'm nervous about having to go in Tuesday. I know it's not a real big deal. They'll probably just write a prescription for an antidepressant. But I haven't been on anything like that for 25 years and didn't have a real good experience back then. I was younger back then and suicidal. I tried suicide several times and was hospitalized a few times and the people I dealt with weren't that helpful. I gave up on it when I couldn't afford my meds and a lady at the clinic I was going to told me she wasn't there to help me, she was there to monitor me in case I needed to be hospitalized again. So I gave up and decided I'd never go back. Unfortunately, I'm at a point where it's interfering with my life, so I know I need to be on something.

[brownblob]

I went to see the dr today and it went ok. I was nervous, but answered yes to all the questions on their screening test. She was nice about everything. She asked about if I'd ever been treated for depression and I was honest and said I had bouts of it my whole life but it had been 25 years since I'd had meds for it. The only awkward moment was when she asked if I'd ever been hospitalized. I believe she expected the answer to be no. I was honest though and told her about my hospitalizations, that I was suicidal in those days and ended up getting committed for 90 days. She asked about diagnosis mainly out of concern I was leaving something out, but I told her no bipolar or schizophrenia or anything just depression with some personality disorders.
Anyway, she was nice about the whole things, so I'm trying some meds and hoping for the best.

[brownblob]

I wish I could write something positive. I try to think of what I want the future to be for me and I just don't care. It seems stupid but I have no good expectations for the future and I'm pretty apathetic about it. I just hope the future isn't too terrible.

[techchick]

Hi brownblob... just letting you know that I'm reading your entries. There's a lot there that I can identify with.

Is talk therapy an option for you? I've had an old-fashioned therapist for over a year now and it's been very helpful for me to learn to take myself off the hook for the way my life has gone. If you could swing that, it might be a very useful adjunct to whatever course of medication you take.

I'm hoping that your pain will lessen with treatment. Please do keep posting here: we care about what happens to you.

[brownblob]

Hi techchick,
I'm skeptical about therapy for me. I'm a pretty antisocial nontalkative person. I have a certain amount of paranoia about the mental health system, and I just can't see myself opening up and trusting a therapist. I struggled for a couple of months with the decision to go to my dr and ask for meds. I still have this voice in my head that says,"Now the dr knows you're crazy"
I don't think I'm capable of any big changes in my life. I feel like I'm too far down this road. I'm just hoping I can get out of being miserable all the time and back to being functional.
On the bright side I've worked a couple of days since starting the medicine and I haven't had that anxiety where I just want to flee and go home. I don't know if it's the med helping or just hoping that the med will help, but it's an improvement.

[techchick]

That's good news, @brownblob. I hope you have many more good days ahead of you. How are you today?