Temporary Setback...

I do not mean to make it a practice again to blog about my long manic-depressive cycles, I only alluded to some recent hope in my last post from resuming medication in the face of another depression. 

Alas, after two weeks of improvement I felt the swill and suck of demon melancholy pulling at me Monday; by today I was weeping in my psychiatrist's office--where he made me laugh, referring to me as a third-generation "blueblood bipolar."  I laughed in the midst of my tears.  Great guy.

Anyway, he added meds today and I hope they work, but I am prepared to endure what I must to endure.  My best times are with my hospice client, who has metastatic cancer, for when I am with her I am simply being with her, only sometimes doing for her.  The being with is what counts.  And in that I can forget myself, a major blessing.

But God how I hate "being" depressed, and no amount of doing can bring me out of it--just time and medications.  What I most wish for is a stretch of stable years like I had from 1997 to 2006 on Lamictal.  Why in the last four years I lost that stability I can't say.  "Bad luck" is the extent of my understanding. 

I'm hoping for good luck.  I hope to take Craig with me this weekend to visit my grandson and daughters and friends, and not be stuck 24/7 with his weeping doppelganger.  That melancholy man can be such a bore, and living in his body gives me the willies!  As if everything were a test he was about to fail, from tying his shoes to wiping his mouth after a sandwich, with his constant self-judgment and accompanying terror without object or relief, the vacuum inside, the loss of self, self being replaced by a golem of anti-matter, not even a dark self, more a non-self, as if a ghost were speaking words through my mouth.

Should this depression continue I may have to return to my blog for therapy, though slightly embarrassed by the need.  But why should I be embarrassed?  I've laid it all out before.

Let this depression pass through me
like a radioactive cloud borne on the wind.
Let it touch me but not become me.
Though it hurt me more deeply than my daughter's death,
though its burning fangs sink into the gray cushion of my mind,
let the poison pass.  However long it may linger,
I cling to the grace that it is temporary.
Let the blessed winds blow!

Thine,

Craig