Or so beginnings have been called.
This is my place to keep track of my mood on a (hopefully) regular basis. I'm fairly certain that I'm suffering from depression, but I haven't spoken to my GP about it specifically. I don't want to be a diagnosis, and I know from experience that a whole extra level of bureaucracy will lumber into life at work if take that label in with me. (Two years ago, I was signed off for a two-week period for "stress and depression", due in part to an unpleasant working environment and no support from the manager who had put me there. When I went back, I had to deal with Occupational Health. Once they had concluded that it was in fact a management/HR issue, they passed me straight back and almost nothing changed.)
I base my certainty on (of all things) descriptions given by Ruby Wax of her time as a depressive. It rang so many bells in my head that I wonder why my boyfriend didn't hear!
Right now, there is a pile of washing up to do going back just over a week. The living room hasn't been adequately tidied since November, and there are boxes from May still sitting by the not-for-people sofa (the one that my boyfriend has colonised with his work and play stuff, and now serves as a dumping ground) that should have been broken down for recycling three months ago. I have a hand-written recipe to unearth, type up and try. There are two bags of stone fruit in the fridge that are destined either for throwing away or jam. There is a mountain of laundry in the bedroom, and I'm running out of underwear, so it's been a few weeks since that was last done. I'm due to go swimming with friends tomorrow, and it's a gorgeous day.
And yet, I feel empty inside. So far I've read a little, showered, shaved, had breakfast and watched two episodes of "The Stones of Blood". Oh, and created this blog(!)
Not so very long ago (okay, 2003) by this stage on a Saturday I would have showered, had breakfast, cycled over to the next town for some shopping, cycled back and pottered around the local shops, had some lunch and worked on a personal project - programming, knitting or gardening.
Things have been like this in fits and starts. I was fine until shortly after I graduated university, when I well and truly lost my heart to someone totally wrong. (Not just for me, but in general. When you have to dissuade a friend from actively pursuing a twelve-year-old boy, you know that he have a problem.) I was keeping a journal then, and I referred to the bleak periods as the Black (hence the title of this blog). When I finally lost patience/came to my senses (whichever you think most appropriate) and excised him from my life, I felt better.
I felt better right up until a few years ago. I was in a stable relationship - we were living together, and (I thought) all was good. Then his job got outsourced to another company, although he was doing the same stuff in the same building with the same colleagues. However, the management ethos changed, and he became more and more withdrawn. We had already opened the relationship at this point, so I also had another boyfriend, which was a challenge for us both at first. The two of them got on, though - they even kept each other company when I was away on a training course for a week!
Anyway, my primary boyfriend told me one day that he's been signed off work with stress and depression. He blamed his lack of sex drive (which I had noticed but not commented on) on this, and said that he needed to work through it. This was 2008.
Since then, we haven't really had sex. We've got close a couple of times, but there's always been a barrier between us. I know that his sex drive came back, because the following year he went to stay with some mutual friends in the Netherlands, and his host gave me rather more details than I really wanted about what they did together. That's when I started feeling the Black again. It hasn't got better.
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