It’s hard to go to sleep happy when when you know the world might be ending inside your head when you wake up.
As I write this, it’s past midnight and my body is begging me to rest. I’ve been busy all day for the first time in a while, packing up my things as I prepare to move to a new apartment next week. I’m looking forward to having my independence back after a long stint living with my parents because I was too sick to fend for myself this year. Just putting my Halloween decorations in boxes (many, many boxes) was enough to reignite my psyche and remind me that I’m capable of living my own life, getting things done, and contributing to the human race. So I scratched a lot of things off my long-neglected to do list today, and I’m still reeling pleasantly from this much needed burst of energy. I feel good at this exact moment.
But I know that whatever mood I’m in when I drift off to sleep has no bearing on how I’ll feel in the morning. Whether I’m jubilant or suicidal when I go to bed each night (for a broad definition of “night” – I often can’t sleep before the early hours of the morning), the type of mood I’ll experience the next day is wildly unpredictable. I may feel ready to take on the world, or I may want to curl up on the floor and cry in front of everyone I know. It’s always anyone’s guess as to whether I’ll open my eyes with the conviction to keep living.
The only thing I know for sure is that the type of day I’m going to have will always make itself known to me as soon as I wake up. If I’m going to have a good day, I’ll be able to read that immediately. If I’m depressed, anxious, or feeling any of the painful effects of borderline personality disorder – which is most mornings – I can tell within the first few moments of gaining consciousness whether those symptoms are gentle enough that they can be silenced, or at least managed, throughout the next few hours.
Though I’m desperate to figure out how to predict how I’ll feel the next morning on any given night, I haven’t cracked the code yet. So here I am, the only person awake in my family’s house, typing away as my eyes begin to water with weariness, hoping the clicking of my laptop keys isn’t loud enough to wake up my slumbering relatives down the hall. Right now my mood says everything is going to be okay.
At least until tomorrow morning.
Miss Misery 
Hi Zoe, as a strange coincidence, this morning i woke up with exactly the unpredictable, uncontrollable and unbearable bad mood that you described above. It doesn’t happen very often, my treatment works most of the time. If I take my pills in the evening I can predict the way I’ll feel the next morning. But not today. The doctors opinion in this kind of situation is to hang on, be patient and wait for the drugs to overcome your crisis. But depression is not a disease with linear symptoms. Sometimes it manifests with unbearably brutal symptoms that overpower your treatment. For those situation I have a solution that I found on my own and it goes against the doctors advice. But I’ll use it anyway because I know that at least for myself it always works. I know what benzodiazepines are, how they should and shouldn’t be used, I know that they are very addictive and I also know that they don’t really treat anything. But in the acute phases of anxiety and depression, sertraline or mirtazapine feel like a cynical joke. Compared to benzodiazepines,they are as effective as tic tac. In those situations, for me, benzos always work, without exception. And as long as you respect the rule of avoiding using them unless is absolutely necessary, benzodiazepines are reasonably safe. So this morning, as I always do in this kind of situations, I kept postponing taking them as much as posible. Until it was clear that my mood was getting worst. While I do admit that my dosage is a bit higher then what they consider the maximum therapeutic one, I would like to see a single psychiatrist that would not resort to this solution in a similar situation. Trust me, you’ll never find a single psychiatrist without some Xanax in his home drug cabinet, regardless of the advice that they give to their patients.
Now that it’s kind of time to end my “dissertation” on this subject, I wish you good luck with your ECT and a happy new year!
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Hi Zoe! I really hope you are O.K., despite your absence from your blog which i hope is temporary and not related to health issues. I wish that my following lament was caused by hallucinations but I never had any in my entire life. So, unfortunately, is the sad reality that I feel like I’m writing you from the year 1019, because nothing that happened today belongs in the twenty first century. Today it’s the Saint John the Baptist holiday in my country. Today the priests perform some kind of ceremony that supposedly turns the regular water into holy water. And millions of believers wait in long lines to get a sample of the by now holy water. And as I was walking on the street today, I felt like the only sane person around. And those are big words coming from someone who’s on two different antidepressants, plus the ocazional benzodiazepines. It literally felt like the past thousand years never happened. No Renaissance and no Enlightenment, just the good old religious superstitions that should have vanished long ago. And what’s even more outrageous is the fact that those are exactly the same people who dare to call us “crazy”. But while there are medical solutions for our “craziness”, for their gross imbecility there will never be one.
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