I don’t feel strong enough to deal with the everyday challenges of life; they leave me feeling defeated. Weak. Demoralized. Inferior. The more of them there are the worse it gets. Mix that with the intensifying exposure therapy and my wife’s continued illness and I’m starting to feel like a melted puddle of a candle with a wick that won’t even light.

Depression. The miracle of life involuntarily squandered on the cosmic pointlessness of existence.

“You know you haven’t been through the worst of what’s possible firsthand so who are you to be carrying on like this anyway? That’s life, son. Get on it with. The world hasn’t stopped turning just because your feelings got hurt again.”

But it feels like it has.

Everything starts to seem a little slower and a little farther away. I’m not quite sure things are even happening in the moment anymore and I’m quite unsure if they happened in retrospect. Did I actually walk the kids to school? Was grocery shopping yesterday or today? We must have gone, groceries are in the fridge. Have the kids come home from the park? Check for shoes. I did make dinner, didn’t I?

That’s not even the crazy part.

That part is the exception: all the most recent sirens and ambulances and emergency vehicles I have had to deal with were definately Tuesday morning. And Thursday afternoon. That stuff is always painfully immediate and has no problem troubling me and staying with me. It’s as if I’m hypersensitive to it or something.

No one ever tells you this will be linear, quite the opposite actually. But it still doesn’t change how devastating it is to have the same extremely disturbing and overwhelming feelings you had fought before you started trying to get better keep coming back despite your best efforts to recover.

So I’m increasing my daily fluoxetine. I’m fucking tired of depression always trying to convince me there’s no point to me or my efforts. I was down to only one a day but of course that couldn’t last. Why would it? That would be too easy. I have met lots of people in my ‘recovery journey’ who say it’s okay to need medication but they would never personally take it. Benevolent shame. They don’t mean to project it but you still feel it and then you quietly hide that you have to take the meds and you struggle with yet another layer of isolation.

Why suffer though? Avoiding medication that can help doesn’t convey fortitude I don’t have and it bankrupts my availability for my family in the process. Supposedly better than drinking too.

Sigh. That’s that ‘growth’ they speak of but I would still have trouble refusing a six-pack right now.