Struggle Within

Today is a struggle. I've had a few days off from a course I'm on and as I'm back on it tomorrow my usual responses are kicking in. I have and am enjoying the course but sometimes the lead up, whether it be this course or any other activity that needs me to leave my comfort area, can be a worrying time. This can entail either me generally worrying about the course, how will I do, what will happen, will I even get up on time? to just that general sort of blackness that can sometimes cover me at times like these. Today is one of those general black days where I am struggling to get motivated or do anything. I cancelled the gym as soon as I woke up as I had no energy for it. This might have been down to my heavy session yesterday which was the first one back after a week or two. But still, I used to be great for getting to the gym on consecutive days. Not no more it seems. I'll be lucky if I can get two days in a row now.
Today has been mostly watching a Regular Show marathon on the Cartoon Network, trying to get my course homework done and listening to Pink Floyd. All whilst sipping at brews and snacking some. What is  a little worrying to me is that I'm happy with this and could quite easily stay indoors doing the aforementioned, with maybe some video gaming or drawing thrown in and be quite content. I think I'm trying to sift between my day to day tasks, courses and the such like and my 'home life'. If I can get my head around them then tackling those same tasks becomes a little easier as I can and do tell myself that once this is done it's back home to music, comics, brews and bed, if I so wish.
I am also acutely aware that this isn't the sort of behavior that will get me or keep me in any sort of a relationship.  But so what? Are they the be all and end all of existence? Probably not though they are nice and comforting to be in. Still, that isn't a worry for me right now. 
The effects of the last one are something I'm still working through.
But today, for a change, that doesn't seem to be the driving force behind this all too familiar episode.
I'm slowly coming up with strategies to deal with it. Small ones, borne from experience, that do work. The most basic one is if I wake up and am having  a really bad one then it's watch and/or listen. This being a film, dvd, catch up TV and listen being music on my headphones as I lay in bed.
When it comes to doing stuff and having commitments then what I mentioned before, the if I do this today then I can go home and get to bed type ones seem to be working at the moment. I also broke from my usual norm and wrote to a friend during my episode last week and that did help. What my friend wrote back to me helped me focus and although getting up the next day was hard and I was still feeling the black I got up and out.
What's on my mind at the moment though is, will days like these become the norm? 
Are they the norm? And if so, can I just accept that and work around them using the above?
The way the last week or so has gone perhaps so. I don't think I have much of a choice in the matter. This illness is firmly entrenched.

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I never thought you'd lose that light in your eyes

Today is a struggle. And what seems to be making it a slow crawl through treacle sort of day is the slow onset of suicidal thoughts. I just can't seem to shake them and the longer they sit there in my mind, sat there quietly but breathing heavily reminding me of it's presence the more I think of ways to do it.
I follow it through, what I would do, how I would leave things behind me. It'd be a train station, a smaller town one, fairly quiet, park the car with a note for whoever finds it. And then, wait until.... 
But would I take that step? I don't know but it is something that is playing over and over at the moment. 
I'm trying hard not to think about what I have in my life future wise as I'll just panic and worry over them. I won't seem them as opportunities, more obligations that I will screw up through my own passing which will add further stress and increase those thoughts.
This near constant brinkmanship is wearing and boring but I don't know how to stop it.
I've been in my bedroom all day, feeling empty, worn and tired, listening to MSP and PF. Thoughts of my ex-wife have brought me to near tears as I try and deal with the past and my missing her but I don't know how to. I think it's just this cold numbness inside that I'm finding hard to see past or shift that is making me crave her presence and a warm embrace from her. The urge to write to her an open letter on Facebook is once again very strong.
But what would I say? I guess how much I miss her and how much it hurts not seeing her now. 
What would it accomplish though? What do I want from it? 
Do I want her words, do I want her back in my life? What is the end result here? What do I want?
I ask myself this but I don't know the answer. 

I just... want her to hold me close...

This mess of a man.....

The Veil

'And the same picture plays over and over.
And I'm in the back row, watching them....
...in the grubby, broken cinema of memory.
I'll go back to the corners of the past, even the shadowy, sordid corners...
Just because you were there then.
I'm trying to hang on, hang on to something even though I know it's gone. Even though I know you aren't there anymore.
You.
The loved one.
You're gone.
Nothing will change that.
All I can do is pack away all the things I remember, put them in a drawer with all the other useless souvenirs.
And just carry on.' 

V for Vendetta
Alan Moore David Lloyd

Not so glorious food

Lately I seem to be having a problem regarding food and my consumption of it. 
Last year I'd put on some weight, not a huge amount but enough to make me recoil in horror at what looked like the beginnings of a gut. As someone who has been into fitness, healthy diets and the such like consistently for close to a decade this was something of a shock. 
I managed to lose a bit of it when sure enough it happened again at the start of the New Year. More wobbly bits. So I took to more running and weights and the odd day of low calorie intake. Due to over-sleeping and my usual problems weights has slowed down some, running I manage to do at least twice a week, once if things are bad, like this week.
Seemingly in lieu of that activity my hunger has increased. Is this due to comfort type eating or the side effects of my meds? Or as a pal remarked, are you just actually hungry? 
Yesterday this necessitated the downing of much tea, toast, jam and tea. Today, mostly soft cookies. And despite the shoveling of those soft cookies down me I am still kinda peckish. This is of course making me feel guilty as once I cave in to my hunger demands it makes me feel over-weight and generally pretty rubbish about myself which is something I don't need to add to the general rubbish feelings I already have anyway. 
So now I find myself trying to shove in manic exercise because of the food that I have taken in that I perceive to be hazardous to my weight and that cannot be good. I seem to be on the road of manic eating, massive guilt, trying to get in a lot of exercise but failing and then worrying about putting on weight again because I haven't exercised enough or ate the stuff I should eat.
What a mess. 

Let me hide under the sheets

I had a bad day yesterday. My first really off day in a while. Which I suppose is something, especially when I consider last year's New Year start. After all it was this sort of time, maybe a bit later in the month, that I had a bad dip that almost culminated in another attempt at taking my life.
It had all started so well on the Monday too. I'd played some Futsal and had played well and won the games and only drawn the once. I even had to remind myself on the way back home that it was ok to enjoy things in life sometimes. It's easy to get so swallowed up with this damn illness that you can feel a bit guilty whenever the feeling of enjoyment comes up. 
I tried to allow myself that moment of niceness as I listened to tunes on my music player letting the fays events sink in.
The next day was fine, I had some training and had an injury to my jaw area but it didn't really prepare me for the day after where I felt worn, low and empty. It was a classic black day. No emotion, no energy just nothingness. I spent most of the day in bed, thankfully I didn't have much on and what I did have I cancelled.
All I can do in a time like that is get the tea and toast on and stare at the TV. Maybe get some tunes on and read a comic on my tablet. Anything else is generally out. And that includes talking as well.
It is something I have written about before but is this what I can expect from my life now? Is my black so entrenched that all I can hope for is days off from it's grip?
And what's really scaring me, though I'm trying hard not to really think about it, is when I go abroad. What then if I have a bad day?

Words are very unnecessary

Thinking about embarking on finding a romantic relationship with that still surrounding me is worrying. 
In fact it's probably less worrying and more likely to make me not bother embarking. I know all to well how it ended the last time. The very thought of going through the closeness of a relationship scares me. And the less said about anything approaching a sexual relationship the better.
Perhaps in this regard this is all on me. By that I mean to say that as someone pointed out to me last year people are different and just because my ex-wife reacted the way she did that's not to say the next girl in my life will. If I look back then I can see that did have some merit as I girl I did see didn't react to my illness the way I  expected or feared but I don't think I was ready to try a relationship. She sensed me holding back and even though I didn't think I was at the time I must have been. And seeing what happened not long after that it was probably just as well I didn't.
It was a shame as she was lovely and now she has moved on herself with a relationship.
Still, the idea of it no matter how enticing is still scary.
Perhaps I'm better off just not bothering?

Don't Let Me Get Me

I've probably put this video of P!nk up before but it bears repeating as,

A) The song perfectly sums me up sometimes
B) It influenced the title of this blog
C) P!nk's ace! :)

I remember watching this video a lot on MTV2 back in the day and loving it, not only because of the tune but how it practically seemed to be about me too. This was primarily because I was going through my first big depressive episode and it seemed to sum up what I was feeling and going through. During the second great depression it again became my own anthem as did many songs on that Mizunderstood album.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have and as much as it has kept me going throughout all these years.

Oh the sadness will never go...

So another Sunday, another run and another day of darkness and feeling empty inside. 
It took a lot of distractions to get rid of that nagging anxious feeling and a lot of distractions to rid that empty feeling of missing her. 
No matter how much time passes I wonder if I'm dome sort of inevitable path to my ultimate self destruction. Regardless of the odd side-road that I am sometimes diverted down that can fool me into a sense of losing that feeling I always seem to find myself back on this road. Seemingly.

...will never go away, baby it's here to stay

I say seemingly as I do and have generally pulled out of it. I do this by generally trying to just carry on and trying my best not to give in to that feeling, the voice that says, give up, stop. It is tempting and at times hard to resist as I have previously written about but having been there before I know that if I do give up and give in to that feeling and that voice I'll find it harder to get out and get going and the guilt that will follow will be crushing as I do have commitments. I hate it but sometimes it is very hard to resist. Very hard.

Me vs Me

My run almost didn't happen as I wasn't feeling it at all, the urge to get up and out wasn't there. I near enough forced myself out by reminding myself that a) no runs equal a chubbier me and b) it's been one month since I last started my new year runs and one month since tackling the hill that I mentioned in my last entry. That time on New Year's Day I struggled and ended up walking a section of it. This time I completed it and managed to keep on moving in a run/jog sort of manner. That effort seems to have leveled out my bad feelings and at the moment I feel ok. Not particularly up but thankfully not too far down either. Which after earlier on before the run is an improvement, of sorts.
Still, the way I am and the way I have been I'll take any improvement. comparing this year's entries to last year's is also a marked improvement. Though saying that Feb 2014 did almost culminate in another suicide attempt. Still, baby steps and it is so far, so good.
But, well it's all getting far too repetitive. Again.
At least the Super-Bowl is on later.