Heather yelled at me the other day.  This was an emotional, heart-felt yell, not one of those everyday “would you please stop singing that song to the cat over and over again, you’re making me want to poke my eardrums out with a screwdriver” yell.  It’s easy to tell the difference.  I have a built-in measuring device, known as the black hole of my stomach.  When it starts to hurt, it means she’s really yelling.

We had gone to the movies, to see this rather good suspense flick called “The Lookout.”  In it, the main character crashes his car by doing something stupid, and it winds up killing two of his friends, injuring his girlfriend, and putting himself in a coma.  When he wakes up he can’t remember the accident, but that isn’t surprising since all of his short-term memory is pretty much screwed up royally.  He gets involved with some bad people, and they plan on robbing the bank he works at as a janitor, with his help.  Aside from trying to deal with his brain damage, and how miserable he feels about taking a life people around him envied and turning it into one people pity, he has to deal with the guilt of what he did to his friends.  He can’t remember the actual accident, but he remembers right before it, and he knows it was his fault.  He also knows he feels like he is, and always will be, a piece of shit for doing something so stupid.  Everything he is now, everything he has to do, all the adjustments he has to make to cope with forgetting things, each one reminds him that he did this to himself.; And deep down, part of him believes that he deserves it.

On the way out of the movie, Heather started trying to draw a comparison between the character and me – that he’d learned through the course of the movie to get on with his life, to believe in himself even if it is just a little bit.  And he had started to forgive himself.  Why couldn’t I do that?  After all, his character had killed two people, his friends who he cared about.  I hadn’t killed anybody, so why should I be so hard on myself?  Why did I have to hate myself so much?

I believe Heather knew my answer before I said it.  I shouldn’t have said it at all, I guess, but we try to be honest with each other.  Even when we know it’ll upset the other person.  I told her that sometimes – not all the time, but sometimes – I still believe I killed Mara.  Or at least I somehow could have prevented her death.  I know it isn’t true, but I still think it is.  Sometimes. 

So Heather yelled at me.  Not because I said that, not because I was being too hard on myself the way I always am.  She yelled at me for all the things I say about myself in my head, things she knows I don’t say out loud.  She yelled at me because she can’t stand to have someone say such terrible things about somebody she loves.  It hurts her.  Just as it would hurt me if someone said those things about her.  So I try to control it, and I try not to talk about it.

But it’s still there.

And when Heather asks me why I have to feel so bad about myself, why I won’t do more to work on my problems, why I won’t consider taking medication for my depression – or at least for my anxiety, which seems to be getting worse and worse – I tell her the truth.  Half the truth anyway, because there are two halves to the answer.  There’s the first half, where I don’t want to take medication because I am afraid it will make me a zombie like last time…make it so I simply don’t care about anything, so instead of trying to do the right thing I’ll do something stupid like last time I was medicated, and go back to prison or hurt someone or worse.  I know that’s really an irrational fear, because I’m a different person now than I was then.  And I’m in a healthy relationship with someone who sees me every day, who has experience with depression, with mental illness, and with medication.  If something isn’t working, if I’m reacting badly, Heather would certainly see it and make sure we did something about it.

Then there’s the second half.  I’m afraid to take medication because somehow I am afraid that it WILL work, and that I won’t be the person I am.  It might sound backward to other people, but my mind has built a sort of Catch-22 around the whole thing.  I hate myself, I have to search to finds things about myself that I like or appreciate…but I am still me, and that’s who I have always been.  If I take medication, and I change, and I learn to live with myself and like myself and forgive myself for all the wrongs I have committed in my life – real and imagined – will I still be me?  Or will I be someone else?  I may hate myself, but I exist.  I am.  And non-existence is what terrifies me more than anything.  I don’t worry about dying.  I worry about not being.  About nothingness, void.  Not an emptiness – a nothingness. 

Then again, there’s the third half.  Sometimes, when I feel really lousy and I am picking apart all the bad choices and mistakes I’ve made in my life, finding all the minute ways I could have done things differently where everything would have worked out better…on those days, I don’t want to try medication because I am afraid it’ll make me feel better.  And I’m afraid that will be letting myself off way too easy.  On those days, I don’t think I deserve to feel better.

There’s a line in one of my favorite movies, Defending Your Life.  There’s examining Albert Brooks’ life after he dies, and his lawyer points out “There’s one person you were really cheap with, time and time again.  I wish you would have spent more on him.  You!”  I can relate to that better than you might imagine.  Doing anything for myself is a real struggle, and over the last few years it has gotten worse.  I treat myself like crap.  I don’t spend time thinking about what I want, what I might enjoy, what makes me happy.  Instead I obsess about meaningless crap.

The smallest act of kindness towards myself is a major victory for me.  If I buy myself a book or a CD or a DVD, that’s like a tremendous accomplishment.  Today I went to Braums about bought a container of ice cream, and even that simple tribute required a ton of arguing inside my head.  Should I go to the trouble of driving the extra block?  Then I’ll have to get out of the car, walk through the store, find the ice cream, pay for it – spending money I could save or use for something more important – pull out of the driveway onto a busy street…is it worth all the effort, when I don’t really deserve the ice cream in the first place?

I’m not sure what I would have to do in order to deserve the ice cream though.  That’s the catch; there is no particular accomplishment I’ve set out for myself, no goal to reach.  So since I never set a goal, I never meet one, and therefore I never reward myself.  When I was in prison they used to sell these 10-packs of “Fun Size” Milky Way bars at the commissary, for maybe two dollars; 20 cents for each little Milky Way.  I’d but them, and decide I’d only eat one on days when I really deserved it.  Four months later I still had half the pack left and I probably gave two of the bars away to other people, which means I ate a grand total of three mini Milky Way bars in four months...because I didn’t think I had done anything to deserve them.

It sound stupid when I read it on the page, but in my brain it makes more sense, believe me.

I have decided I am ready to try medication for my anxiety.  It is getting worse then ever.  Six years ago when I first went on medication, that’s what it was prescribed for.  I hadn’t gone to a psychiatrist or anything though.  Instead, my regular doctor who I went to for problems like sinus infections and flu shots had noticed one of my eyes twitching uncontrollably, and asked me what the deal was.  I told him I thought it was just nerves, which wasn’t surprising since I hadn’t had a vacation in 15 years, and I worked nine hours a day five days a week with no breaks while people screamed at me whether I did my job well or not.  They weren’t screaming *at* me, not usually, but it felt like they were.  I was drinking heavily, I had terrible headaches, and I was angry all the time at home (or that’s what I was told – I’m not really sure how true that part was).  The doctor decided to prescribe me something for anxiety.

Unfortunately the medication didn’t do much for me – all it did was numb me out completely, and remove all of my sexual urges.  When I told the doctor about those results, he chose to add a second medication on top of the first.  This helped restore my sexual desires somewhat, but zombied me out even more.  By the time I had stopped taking the pills, I had lost my job, has committed what turned out to be a Federal crime (although I didn’t find that out for another year), and didn’t much care about either.  Then I came back to reality.  Ouch; like waking up from a coma.

I have higher hopes for medication this time.  I’m supposed to have a psychiatric evaluation sometime in the next month, and then we’ll discuss the options.  I wish I could talk to my father about his anxiety disorder, find out the specifics – maybe I’m suffering from the exact same thing he did.  A little late for that conversation now though.

I’ve run out of steam for today, so I’m going to go ahead and post this and move on to something else.  I haven’t felt that creative the past week, but I shouldn’t be surprised…even as my 96-hour panic attack is dissipating, I’m left very tired and drained; so drained that I actually don’t feel like beating myself up for not accomplishing anything.

Hmm, I guess that isn’t such a bad sign after all!