For anyone who was confused yesterday
Anyone who read my blog yesterday will have seen a rather depressing sounding post in which I mentioned the idea of throwing myself under a train. This post has now been deleted as I did not feel it added very much to the overall content of the blog. I would like, however, to make several points in relation to it in case anyone was confused.
First and foremost, the suggestion that I might throw myself under a train was a joke. I assumed this would have been clear to people as firstly it was a blatent stab at the Chiltern line on which I had the misfortune to be travelling at the time, and secondly it was followed by a comment to the effect that I recognised it may not have been a terribly funny joke in the circumstances. I apologise to anyone who took this the wrong way and was slightly concerned by it, but I’m afraid I have a rather black sense of humour and it gets worse the more unhappy I am. If you don’t like that sort of humour, it might be better for you not to read my blog.
Re suicide, I would like to make the point that anyone who knows me will be aware that I am utterly incapable of committing it successfully 
No matter what has happened in my life, I have never managed to maintain a desire to commit suicide for more than 24 hours, by the end of which time I have either realised that I can’t think of an effective way to do so or cheered up. This is not something I would expect to change going forward.
There are, however, days on which I am incredibly depressed. These are fewer and further between than they used to be, but they still, nevertheless, exist. The fact that there are less of them is a reflection of the fact that I am now a more confident and well balanced person than I was a few years ago who is better able to cope with what life throws at her. However, for the past few months (to be precise, since the end of February), I have been incredibly unhappy. Some times I have been less unhappy than other times, and some times I have succeeded in pushing the negative feelings under the surface and pretending they weren’t there, but it hasn’t altered the fact that they have been. The past two weeks, keeping those feelings under control has been an increasingly difficult procedure. The last seven days have been particularly stressful for me personally in terms of what I needed to accomplish, and there have been times when I have been on the verge of losing control. Tuesday was a particularly bad day for me, but by Thursday I’d managed to pull myself together a bit more and was feeling comparatively positive.
Friday afternoon, however, it all came to a head again. When I’m down and I need to pull through it, I have to focus on something. I have learnt the hard way that becoming clingy and requesting support from other people is a sure fire way to end up on your own, and so this time I decided to focus on doing something constructive. I am supposed to be writing an article about the British Esperanto Congress which I attended in Southport a few weeks ago, and so I decided to put all my energy into doing that. At first it was rather a struggle. One of the problems I have when I’m depressed is that I find it virtually impossible to write. My mind seems like some sort of numb blank and forcing words out of it in anything like a coherent order is a challenge. I spend three evenings working on this article and managed a grand total of three lines. On Wednesday, I did a little better and managed a page. It wasn’t a very good page, because it failed to strike quite the right tone which I knew the article needed to have, but nevertheless I was getting somewhere.
Thursday I felt dreadful but rather than curling up in a ball and crying, I forced myself to get up and go for a walk. That cheered me up a little, and I managed to go back to writing the article. This time it went miles better, and by 1am I had over three pages, two of which were reasonably good in terms both of content, grammar, and style. I was quite chuffed, and I spent Friday morning feeling a little proud of myself, because I was under the impression I had managed to get through the worst of it without destroying any personal relationships, and maybe everything would actually be okay 
It was when I was on the train home on Friday and decided to continue editing my article that it became clear that things were very much not okay 
Whatever kind of technical glitch had occurred, I don’t know, but the long and the short of it is that my article was no longer there. It hadn’t saved 
I was devastated. I think when I text my boyfriend I used the word “distraught”, and that was an accurate description of the situation. I broke down in tears on the train and cried hysterically. You may say that whilst it was frustrating to have lost an article on which I had spent a lot of time, that was an overreaction. Granted. But it had been my entire focus for surviving a week in which I didn’t otherwise feel there was much point to life. It was something which I had devoted all available energy to, struggled, and finally felt I had succeeded. And now it was gone.
At that point I lost control. I feel, being honest, that I have spent the last fortnight battling against having some sort of a nervous breakdown. I’ve felt like I can’t cope with vast quantities of life. That was really the last straw. I decided that there was no point fighting, I would just give up and let the breakdown wash over me. That was what I meant by the phrase giving up by the way; that I was giving up trying, as opposed to giving up living full stop. I probably didn’t make that terribly clear.
In any case, I spent Friday night walllowing in misery and self pity, and to that I hold up my hands. It’s perhaps regrettable, but that is how I behave when I am upset. Other people cope with life in different ways. Some, for example, cope by losing their temper - a quick blast, after which they feel better and are able to move on. I react differently, by temporarily becoming a gibbering wreck.
I say temporarily because sooner or later I do generally manage to metaphorically slap myself in the face and regain control. Last night, however, was a release of feelings which have been building up for several months, and I wasn’t sure where things were going to go from there. I woke up this morning, and realised in a semi-automatic sort of way that I had been so self absorbed last night that I hadn’t checked my work email all Friday. I am duty bound to check my work email every day, so I proceeded to do so in a mechanical sort of fashion. When I eventually got through all the passwords and logged onto the required number of systems, I got something of a surprise. In fact, I got an electric shock. I got the one little piece of encouragement which I needed to stop me either falling or jumping off the end of the cliff on which I appeared to be standing. I got a good appraisal.
To go through how much that means to me is perhaps not worth doing, but it means a hell of a lot. Instantly all the blood, sweat and tears which I have been trying to put into work over the last few months appear not to have been entirely in vain. The fact that someone has noted that I have been working hard is the support and encouragement I needed to enable me to maintain my sanity, for the time being at least.
I am still gutted over the article, of course, but perhaps I will be able to rewrite it. That maybe doesn’t sound very helpful, but last night I didn’t even feel I could try. To me, that constitutes progress
All this has, unfortunately, come to a head at a bad time. I had a social engagement to fulfil this afternoon, and last night I had to text the person involved to say I wouldn’t be able to come. Whatever judgements you may like to heap on me, the simple fact of the matter was that I didn’t think I was going to be in a fit state to. Let’s make no bones about it - I am a very shy and socially inadequate person, and at the best of times, attending something which involves social interaction with people I don’t know terribly well is going to be a major struggle. Not something I am incapable of doing, not something I am incapable even of ultimately enjoying, but something which I need to psyche myself up to do. There are days on which I have to psyche myself up and dig deep to find the requisite courage to go and purchase a train ticket, so woefully un-confident I am, and it follows that the more depressed I am, the less confidence I have. The way I felt on Friday night, hysterical as I may have been, I genuinely didn’t feel I had the energy in me which I knew would be required to meet that commitment. Hence pulling out.
This morning, however, as already noted, I felt somewhat better and not quite so much of an incapable mess. I surmised that the offer was probably no longer open to me, but on the offchance that it still was, I decided to make my way to the arranged meeting place, sit and have a coffee for a bit, then return to the city centre and while away the afternoon on my own. I was pretty certain that declining the invitation in the first place would have irritated the issuer of it to an extent that we probably weren’t on speaking terms, and I lacked the nerve to get in touch and ask if I could still come. Primarily perhaps because I lack nerve generally, and secondly because I knew attending it would be a bit of an ordeal for me. I did however hope that I had pulled myself together enough to be capable of getting through the ordeal part of it without causing problems or embarrassment to those around me. It would have been a test for me, at any rate.
The way things panned out, however, I ultimately didn’t go. The person concerned got in touch with me on Messenger before he left to pick me up, was none too impressed by what I had to say for myself, and the conclusion was reached that I was better off where I was. So be it.
In any case, it is probably all for the best and it is nice to have some space this afternoon to think things through. I have a nervous breakdown to fight off, and a life to rebuild. Wish me luck guys