It’s been a bit of an odd day today.  My depression hits me in strange ways.  While there are clearly some days where events occur that might well provoke my depression and bring me down, there are others where I feel utterly hopeless even though there is nothing concrete to explain it.  Yes, this may well strike some people as the very definition of depression, but when you’ve been living with the illness as long as I have, you get used to there being degrees.  To reach this level of despair without a single aggravating incident is rare for me, and thus all the more upsetting.

I’ve reached the point where I can’t even motivate myself to play a computer game, watch TV or read a book.  As S said when I told him this, it must be bad.  Which leaves the question of what I do.  There’s no point even trying to sleep.  I can’t face chocolate.  And since I don’t drink, or very little, I don’t even have alcohol as an outlet for all of this, not that it would solve much if I did.

To cap it all, I wandered out into the roof garden to get a little fresh air.  Dyson, our cat, has spent the last few days sleeping in a flower pot he shares with my favourite dahlia, which has a bloom like a miniature sunset.  My big bruiser of a tom cat is a shadow of the moggy he once was, slender and light, and curling into a smaller ball than I ever thought possible.

I’ve known for many years that he’ll not have the life expectancy of most cats, as he has cardiomyopathy and will probably keel over with a heart attack at some point.  Yes, cardiomyopathy can be treated in cats, to an extent, but last time I asked the vet it was still only treatable if the cat consented to taking a pill every day, and Dyson won’t.  There was one vet who told me I was being a wimp for not wanting to feed him pills and proceeded to demonstrate how to go about it.  After Dyson had drawn blood and spat the pill across the floor, she decided on balance that I might have a point with my quality of life arguments, and we agreed he should enjoy life to the full and then pop his clogs when his time came.

The irony of all this is that it probably won’t be a heart attack that carries him off after all.  He’s been drinking lots more than usual, and after he had an accident from being shut in one of the rooms here overnight (he very tidily used a Tesco Bag for Life) it seems pretty clear we should expect kidney disease to get him instead, as it did Octavia.  Of course, by the time you spot symptoms in a cat, it’s too late to treat… and then we’re back to the idea of trying to give him a pill a day, which we know won’t work anyway.  Well, won’t happen is probably more to the point.

I will miss my snaggle-toothed moggy when he goes, and I won’t be the only one.  Harvey is probably too young to understand, but will definitely notice his absence, and Dyson has become such a feature of the Rag Factory, comforting nervous actors awaiting audition or cosying up to people during rehearsals, that I suspect he will be very much missed.  All I can hope is that he goes quickly and as painlessly as possible.  In the meantime, he’ll get more than his usual share of tuna suppers and maybe an occasional fresh salmon steak.

Many more days like today, however, and I may well beat Dyson to it.  Some part of me envies him his short life expectancy, all the while knowing that, if it can be called lucky, that is what I have been to date with my suicide attempts.  There is something that has persistently anchored me to this life, even when I’ve tried to throw it away.  Part of it is love for S and Harvey and my family.  Part of it is a desire not to disappoint them.  Part of it the occasional thought that most people seem to think life is worth living and surely there must be some way for me to feel the same thing as everyone else.  There are so many parts to it, but there will come a day when what I have done cannot be undone.  Parvalex will not help, it will be too late for activated charcoal and I’ll say my final goodbyes to those I love, assuming they’re still talking to me by this point.

Oops, sorry.  One minute I was asking S to install Wordpress on the web server for me so I could get on and sort out the site, the next minute it was done and Wordpress had put some default content up for people to view.  Which was not quite what I had in mind, if indeed I had anything in there at all.

So it’s time to stagger forth out of the wings and hope that nobody noticed the unsteady start.

While I’m not sure that a blog necessarily needs any reason to exist, this blog is more an accompaniment to the rest of the site, which I largely decided to set up because I learnt a few useful things I wanted to share with people, when in some areas information can be so hard to come by.  The most notable of these, in my case, was when I suffered recurrent miscarriages along the road to conceiving my son, Harvey.

On the occasion of my first miscarriage, the hospital gave me a leaflet entitled ‘We’re sorry you’re having a miscarriage’.  It was full of condolences and contained very little practical information about what to expect, when I could start trying again or even the basic mechanics.  The subsequent journey involved a lot of digging for information, as well as much heartache, and a mental promise that I would some day sit down and write all the things I had found out in the hopes that it might help someone else.

My son is now 2, so it feels quite late to be getting down to this, but the delay has been caused by two things.  The first is a very simple need to care for my son and be a good mum, having finally got that far.  The second is a less cheerful reason: my chronic depression.  Having suffered for well over ten years, the depression hit back worse after Harvey’s birth, in what should have been the happiest time of my life.

I don’t know where the future leads.  Haven’t a clue.  But the journey, along with some of the more useful stuff I know, will be recorded here.

m x