(paretheses)

I am depressed. I'm not non-functional - I'm going to work, sleeping (too much), eating (also too much) and am able to laugh. But it's hard to breathe in some moments. Everything feels heavy and dark at times and it's excruciating to push past it.

We had a major meeting today and I stood in front of my colleagues and presented material. It was fine - I pitch so often now that my stomach doesn't remember to clench warningly and my voice fails to quiver. But when someone surprised me by saying no when I thought we'd settled on yes, I nearly wept. In front of a full room. And that's not normal or good.

"Wait," I interrupted a colleague when he insisted I leave my meeting so we could talk on the phone. "Are you scolding me? It sounds like you're scolding me."

"I am," he replied and I was immediately enraged. (Not annoyed. Not frustrated. Furious.) I answered his questions with single words and hung up on him before he said good-bye. He said he felt better before I hung up and that only made me angrier. I was shaking when I returned to the meeting, taking my seat in the corner and sipping my water as I sought control.

I came home, loathe to sit and think about anything, and took Chienne out on the deck to work on her nails. After 20 minutes with the Dremel tool and much petting and praising, we declared ourselves finished (read: she wouldn't come when I called anymore) and came inside. I paced for a moment before deciding I'd clean the laundry room! An hour later, I'd pulled up carpet and discarded it. I'd swept up all the litter that had scattered throughout the room and mopped the bare floor with bleach. I scrubbed the bathroom and only stopped when I was dizzy from the fumes.

When I remembered asking someone a question and realized she'd not answered me, I felt tears well and went from kneeling to sitting on the floor. I looked around at the clean bathroom, shifted so my back was against the vanity and shivered. I tried to remember if I'd been taking my medication and thought that I had. I realized I've been waking up around 3 or 4AM from terrifying nightmares and wondered if I'd get better or worse in the next few days.

It sucks to be sick. I don't like knowing that my brain chemistry is off. I go through periods where I'm bothered that I take a pill every day, though having tried to stop multiple times, I (mostly) faithfully swallow one each night. Apart from those glitches, it's a pretty good brain. Easily amused, efficient, mostly kind. But it seems for now that my brain is sadder than it should be.

The positive factor is that I'm (so far) capable of working through it.