How Can I Disappoint YOU Today?

So the theme of my life this week/month/year is disappointment. Not my own feelings of disappointment, although I seem to succeed in being disappointed in everything and everybody lately, what with my whole glass mostly empty view on life. No. The disappointment I speak of is the gazillion ways that I can disappoint the people I work with, the people I love, the people who love me, and the people I serve. I have blown it in some big ways lately with people.

I've stood friends up for dinner frequently (mostly unintentionally because I have turned into the biggest airhead in the world). They have been patient but I can feel them resigning themselves to my inconsiderateness, which means the socialness I have been working so hard to engage in will be that much more difficult to achieve, since no one will want to set dates with me.

I screwed up in a major way at work, and the effect of what I messed up on has caused ripples that keep rebounding off things and lapping back over me, extending the moments of disappointment and magnifying my feelings of ineffectiveness and perpetual failure. So, yeah. The career is looking great.

I'm failing at church. Failing to go, failing to follow through on service I have committed to. Failing to engage in the spiritual rites and practices I know would soothe me. Even now, writing about how I could be soothed, I feel so anxious and guilty that even though somewhere in my heart I feel my religion could help heal me, most of my heart seems to be saying that I am too far gone and that there is no point. In my heart of hearts I think I must be greatly disappointing God.

I've been working forever, it seems, to learn how to cope with my depression. i thought that I had grown in my depression and that the deep wounds have made me wise and that I had weathered hard times and it had smoothed some of my rough edges. And then this last year or so happened. I feel as though with all the tumult, my edges should be smooth like a rounded pebble on the beach. They should be. But when I examine myself, I feel like a jagged rock that has just been shattered and has more edges than the ocean could ever smooth. My flaws are more glaring and my barriers to being a whole person loom larger than ever before. People I trust and love tell me that I am so unhealthy,so odd, so not normal, that they must go over here and be happy together, away from my toxicity. They tell me the truth as they feel bound to say it, and move away before they are infected. And I don't blame them. I envy them. It must be nice to know how to Be. To give and receive love and feel the glow of being a light in the lives of the ones you love.

I used to feel like that. I used to be able to draw myself out of the space I'm in now and feel that there was hope. That I had friends I gave light to. That my soul was not as ugly and dark and decrepit as it felt in my low moments. I have fleeting moments of that feeling now, but I seem to stumble upon it. I can't intentionally elicit it, and I half hold my breath when I am feeling it, because at any moment an ugly thought or sudden realization of what feels like the horrible truth of my condition  could emerge and take my brain hostage again.

My therapist says I am doing better. She says I am dealing with ugly thought patterns better and that I should not be so hard on myself and celebrate my successes. My friends who have told me how hard it is to be around me have remarked that I have been doing better. But they are still over there. And I need them over here. All of this isolation might possibly drive me mad.

There is a woman who is mentally ill who uses services in the building I work at. Often, in the afternoon, things get to be too much for her. When the internal stimuli that is taunting her gets to be too much, she lets loose with blood curdling, heart rending screams. Over and over and over. For as long as 30-45 minutes. One day, after one of these episodes, she remarked to me, "I want to apologize. I don't know why it happens. It just gets to be too much." I wanted to tell her, I know how you feel. I want to join you. Those screams sound just like the ones in my head. My heart answers every scream torn from her lips. I want to join her. If I did, maybe I could just stop trying.Give into the crazy in my head. They would commit me somewhere, put me on nice soothing medication that soften all the hard feelings. And in the moments the medication was not working, I could purge my soul and get it all out. I could scream until it was drained out of me.

I think it might be time to talk to the doc about upping my meds....