sometimes life is difficult.

I have been living shoulder-deep in mud in for over a year. Most of the time it is cool, just a hair less than room temperature and I slog about and accomplish small, dull victories. I pat myself on the back when I get up, put on a cute outfit and walk five blocks to knit and drink coffee. I lap up my own applause when I clean a room of the apartment, write for an hour, and run an errand all in one day. There are a lot of days where the pain is pushing too far past the medication or I can't seem to wake up enough to move until almost noon so I can't get out of bed at a reasonable time, but what is there to get up for, really? The weight of being in limbo and the shattering of my illusion that limbo would last are dragging me down. 

The depression that settles in when you have become mostly homebound by illness is like a fine dust that coats every square inch of everything around you. When the only treatment could kill you and is a mirage you can swear is getting closer, it is a grease mist that settles onto the dust and makes all of life grimy. This is especially true when you are alone all day. I try to reach out and make the social time happen, but it's hard through the grime and the tired and the "breakthrough pain" and the waking up sometimes and feeling like the whole corporeal consciousness thing is a stupid waste on this sort of existence. It's hard to want it. The not wanting the social time sucks because it's about being depressed, being scared, and not wanting to have to worry if I don't feel much like talking; it has nothing to do with wanting to connect. That's all I want. I don't know how to get it through all the grime except to force myself up and out to fill my time with more than doctors' appointments and errands. But it's hard to talk about being angry and scared at the same time except to say it's like a high-pressure front and a low-pressure front settling down in disputed territory. As each system approaches, the drizzle turns to endless-seeming rain that keeps you from going out without galoshes until they overlap and I'm downstairs to get a midnight piece of jerky and suddenly hucking things around the kitchen and sitting on the floor slamming myself into the wall. That specific event only happened once but it was recent and scary so I'm going to individual counseling.