I'll need to review those 103 posts to see if they are truly drafts or if some glitch removed active posts from the blog.
Anyhow, my mood has not been good as of the last few days. Poor sleep, decreased appetite, easily stressed or agitated, easily upset, short tempered, and feeling just a background sadness all the time. Not enjoying life right now...in fact, the place I seem to be the least stressed is at work, and I was feeling rather burnt out there!
It didn't dawn on me until lunchtime today, when I hadn't eaten for 16 hours and still didn't feel hungry, that perhaps something is up. I'm food-driven so for me to not want to eat while not on a diet is a major red flag. So I forced myself to eat--that didn't go well but I finished lunch--and thought about things.
No, I'm not suicidal; no, I don't wish I were dead or not here; no to all the other questions that I as a psych nurse would ask someone who told me this.
The blues started when I was cleaning out my closet. I found a couple of Christmas gifts that would have been for my father, a puzzle and a T-shirt. It was quite the punch to the gut to see them because I never got the chance to give them to him. I thought about donating them, but decided not to because it would have felt like a betrayal of his memory if I got rid of them. So the puzzle went back into the closet and the T-shirt into my pile of workout gear.
It's the holiday season. Not quite the first one without my father, as he died a couple of weeks before Christmas. First Thanksgiving without him though. First birthday coming up without him. First anniversary of his death, which happens to fall on said birthday, coming up. The fact that we would have usually been together--or at least I would have been able to talk to him--but that this won't happen this year really kind of hurts.
Looking back, I never grieved the way my mother and sister did. I was the stoic one. Didn't mean I didn't feel anything...I just kept it together more. One of us had to. That wasn't my mother as that was her partner of 50+ years total. Not my sister as she was the one alone with him at the final moments. Guess it had to be me.
I'm starting to tear up thinking about this...which considering I'm at work, isn't what I want to be doing.
Then there's the stress of the holidays themselves. The recent election has caused quite the political rift between various branches of the family and friends. Holiday shopping. My mother coming out to visit, which even before my father's death was very stressful in itself.
And the fact that I will be aging one more calendar year. I think I may be having a mid-life crisis. No, I'm not about to go get a sport car and a young blond toy-boy to cavort with. Just realizing how old I am chronologically versus how old I am in spirit, and how the two aren't syncing up. Some regret that I didn't do things earlier in life, or that I'm getting around to doing things so late in the game. Plus the fact that I may have anywhere from a year to 50 years ahead of me, and I'm just not going to know. It's not like when I was 20 and I knew I had decades ahead of me...yes, I could have died at 21, but the odds of that happening were less than 0.01%.
*sigh*
So what do I do to survive this funk?
I don't want to adjust my medications. I've been doing rather well up to this point and I don't want to make any adjustments that I would have to un-adjust later on. I experienced serotonin discontinuation syndrome this summer. NOT FUN. I'm also not into self-medicating with my PRNs...I prefer to save them for the few times I really need it.
I can't lose myself in drink...well, I could if I wanted to, but I don't want to. It's not the answer. Besides, I've given up alcohol for a year and may possibly never return to it again, as I've found that life without alcohol has been rather nifty. My cholesterol has never been better (111!).
Prefer not to talk about it with the family, as they'll have enough of their own stress as it is. They don't need mine.
Maybe I will start the therapy up again. Or at least start journaling more and processing my feelings that way.
