Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Everyone feels down sometimes. It’s natural, I hear. It’s very difficult for me to judge, seeing as whenever I’ve felt sad it’s felt like I’ve lost everything I ever had in the world.

So it was genuinely a pleasant surprise when today I got upset and it felt normal. I think the last time that happened was three years ago.

There are some concerns, of course. Will this make me upset enough to trigger off an episode? Will it upset me out of the blue a week or two later on and feel unbearable? I detest it when I’m upset enough to cry, but when one is clinically depressed, you don’t really have a choice. Perhaps in the last seven years I made up for all the time before where I never cried, who knows.

But why does it feel so embarrassing to admit that a person can feel upset? My cat kept bugging me. My father tried to bribe it out of me by making me a cup of tea (he never does that unless I’m upset or sick and for some reason he always knows whenever I’m upset, it’s so irritating!). But being British, you do your thing in the privacy of your room etc. and then emerge pretending to be fine again.

I wish I knew how to explain it, just how different it feels. A few years ago, when I was very sick, someone had said and done some pretty mean things to me, and even today those things still bother me. It still makes me hang my head in shame and might even make my eyes water. Whereas last week, for the first time I got a Blogcritics article sent back to me and was told to re-edit it before it could be published.

Nothing. It didn’t bother me at all. I processed it and then got on with fixing it. I can think about it now, and it doesn’t bother me one bit. Ooh, what about that rejection e-mail I got after submitting to an online poetry journal. That stung at the time, but I deliberately force myself to recall it now, and nothing. Or that lady saying my gamba playing was coarse! Ugh, I don’t think that hurt at all - I was more pissed off because sometimes she has no idea what she’s on about. But given that she’s more experienced than I am (ie. ancient), it’s not an arguable point. I’ll have to prove it by playing, and not using words.

God, I hate my shrink. Why didn’t he put me on this mood stabilising stuff years ago? Why did he have to wait till the pain got so bad it was unbearable and then do it? Now that’s something worth getting upset about.