Checking in with myself to see how I'm doing.
I'm still sleeping fitfully and irregularly. I can't remember my dreams. I wake up shaking a lot of times, not shaking the way I was Tuesday night, just more... quivering, maybe.
I'm trying to get back to eating real food. For most of the past couple days I've been living off cookie bars and beer. Certainly it hasn't helped any but I really don't care or feel any guilt.
The self-medication hasn't been as extreme as I feared it might be. I've been having two bottles of Newcastle Brown a day, in the evenings. From that I get a few hours where I'm relatively calmer, and I get to sleep a bit more easily. I'm doing more damage to myself with the cookie bars.
When I'm not shaking I'm very aware of this deep, hard knot in the pit of my stomach. I spend most of my hours working on unraveling it. It's an obstruction.
If you've been reading along you've seen this work and helped me with it. I'm proud of what I've written over the last couple days, particularly given the state I've been in. This morning I don't feel quite as confident, quite as inflamed. Writing this is harder work, is more effort.
I don't feel like I can talk about where I am without talking about where I've been this year. I haven't said anything about it here. I love you all, I care about you, but the Internet is not a good place, it is not a supportive place, so I have held back.
You're still the people I care most about, the people I've known the longest, the people who are most important to me. I'm going to talk about it here.
The therapeutic models personalize depression and anxiety. They focus on the internal life of the individual. There's good reason for this. I believe one can't effectively address these illnesses without a strong focus on the individual.
At the same time, the way I was feeling was never the result of an individual pathology. I felt the way I did just as much because of what I saw in the world around me as I did because of what was going on in my head. I spent a lot of my treatment fighting against the implication that this was just about me.
Some of the despair I am seeing expressed by other people now is despair I have felt, myself, over the past several months and remained silent about.
For much of this year, I was suicidal. That's a hard thing to say. When someone you love talks about killing themselves, it's a hard and immediate punch in the gut. I have just punched all of you in the gut, you who have spent the last week, the last year, being beaten so hard already, and I am so, so sorry for it.
I need to tell you this to tell you about what's different now. I have not thought about hurting myself, about killing myself, since Monday. Suicide is banished from my life as firmly and decisively as everyone who voted for Trump is. And everything I say, everything I have said over the past days, you need to read in the light of my unshakable and fanatical opposition to all forms of violence.
I feel like I need to tell you about what it was like for me, being suicidal. About why I wanted to kill myself, because without doing so I can't tell you how I have fought those feelings.
I would look around the world, and I would see the people of the world, I would see how they acted, and what they said. The same thing we have all been seeing. And I said, if this is the way the world is going to go, if this is who we are as people, I want no part of it. I did not want to continue to be part of this world. I did not hate myself. I did not think I was worthless. I was in severe pain, intolerable pain. I don't want to start getting into the purple prose to describe it. It was bad, and I wanted it to stop. I saw no hope, and I saw no alternative.
And now things are even worse. I spent so long in fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now it has, and it's a boot, and it's fallen on our faces.
So why do I feel stronger? Why do I feel less despair?
Because we have been tested, and because we have not been found wanting. Many were, our relatives, people we thought were our friends. What we did was DIFFICULT. If it was easy, everybody would have done it. I have spent much of this year as a basket case, as a howling lunatic, and at the moment of truth I was able to do what so many people our society deems "respectable" were not.
We all feel a sense of enormous loss. But what is it, precisely, we have lost? We have lost our friends. We have lost our family. We have lost the country that was our home. We have lost our dignity, we have lost our respect.
We have not lost our principles. We have not lost _ourselves_. We have not won, but we have SURVIVED, and we will, we must, continue to do so.
The world needs us. People need us. They cannot count any longer on the protection of institutions. They cannot count on the protection of the law. What I have said in the past, when I talk about law, is that we are a nation of laws, but we are, more importantly, also a nation of people.
Now we are only a nation of people. We exist only for each other, and nothing else. We are the only protection there is, the only safety for millions upon millions of Americans.
We have been tested, and have not been found wanting. We are needed. We are WORTHY.
