Seasonal Affective Disorder Sucks.

 Dear Reader,

I have Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is also known as seasonal depression. It's such a lame disorder that the acronym in SAD. This and my most recent Bipolar depressive episode has been getting in the way of my accomplishing much of anything on any front right now. I feel pretty awful, to be honest. It's been bringing up some trauma memories on top of it all. I'm doing my best but I feel like my best isn't good enough.

Scumbag brain is telling me that sharing this is a vain attempt to get the internet to throw me a pity party. (Quips from my ancient past arising again, yay complex post-traumatic stress disorder.) But, I've got two deities leaning on me saying that I should talk about this. Something about mental health is not a stigma and it'll help me push through the lies that are being recycled on loop in my head about it.

I grew up in a household that didn't believe that mental illness was real. They decided that depression was laziness and anxiety was being a drama whore. It was harsh, especially as I hit puberty and depression got really bad. I still struggle with the concepts that were (in some cases literally) beaten into to me. When I get depressed, I have a hard time seeing that my value is more than what I can produce or what the sum total of my parts may be on the black market. It's been part of a mental loop that I've had stuck in my head since about the age of ten.

I am not suicidal. I am still taking my medications and they are helping. But the medications are not "happy pills" they are just enough to keep my depression from sinking so low that I start having problems with psychosis. Because my flavor of Bipolar II comes with psychotic features. I don't have psychosis symptoms when I am manic but when I'm very severely depressed. And then, it is reliving the abuse that I grew up with. It's auditory hallucinations that get so realistic that I could swear that the person speaking is standing right behind me one foot to the left. Due to how much I was gaslighted as a kid, I reality test anything weird that happens. So, if I am sitting with my back against a wall and I'm having a hallucination, I know it's not real because there is a wall behind me.

I have been told that my ability to distinguish when I am having hallucinations is highly unusual. I had a brief period where I thought they were real. Then life circumstances changed and I realized with horror that what I had thought was neighbors screaming in the next apartment over was a hallucination. It just got worse from there and I had times where I was shaking from the effort to ignore the hallucination and continue on with my day. I'm not at that point in my depression right now, thank gods. I fear having hallucinations and the prospect of being hospitalized again due to depression.

Right now, I'm pushing forward on the grim hope that things will get better. I tell myself every night before I go to sleep that tomorrow will be better than today. I try to make it happen. It's exhausting. Some days, I don't get very much done at all. Other days, I have the energy to do the bare minimum. But I wake up everyday with the intent to come on here and post. It's just been really hard to find the energy and the mental focus to do so. Please bear with me as I am working through this.