She who sits foremost

Dear Internet,
When I wrote The Summer Tale on my 40th birthday, the intention was to to write more, write raw, write honest of my feelings. Work out the discord, work out the pain, figure how to move forward from that spot, harness it, channel it, make it work for me.
That hasn’t happened.
A recent Friday night, I was working on an old lady craft¹ when it came to me this would always be my life. Home. Alone. Doing something that required aloneness. And then I began to panic and then cry.
Shortly after, my thoughts have turned to flight: Divorce TheHusband, quit my job, and then ride the rails. Everything we’ve been working on, dreaming for, saving up for gone in a blink of an eye. Everything good in my life, I want to leave.
Flight.
I have no idea where I’d go, no idea what I’d do, no idea on cash. I’d leave everything behind, even my beloved dog.
Here is what I said to Kristin earlier today (it echoes what I verbally told TheHusband earlier this morning):

I haven’t been (using my anxiety drugs)
It’s like living in my head in exhausting
I have no motivation or desire for antyhing
I feel like this is it and there is no hope
…
I haven’t finished a book, listened to a song, or done anything that used to make me happy
I won’t even create something because I feel like what’s the point?
…
I just feel like I’m missing out on a life
that I don’t know yet
…
Getting tired of lving in my head
it’s not working anymore if it ever did
And I feel like anytime I try and figure thigns out the depression cockblocks me moving on
…
LIke with school, the hope was “Well one day I’ll have a good job and pay for things”
and then with Justin it was, “one day we’ll build a life”
I can’t deal with the day to day it seems
…
So everything that I dreamt about or hoped for came true so now what is THE POINT
…
I feel crippled.
So since i feel crippled, what’s the point. What’s the point, then might as well read the g-d intenet.
…
I’ve become quite the self-shamer
I’m not a good writer, why bother. I’m not/would not be a good mother, why bother trying to get pregnant. I’m not a good librarian, why bother trying to work it out.
That kind of thing.

The ellipses represent Kristin’s comments/questions and I’ve left the content in all of its grammatically erred ways. I don’t feel anxious, I just feel consistently sad. My heart feels heavy and all I can think about is flight. I need to leave, need to go, don’t know where, just fly.
During my convalescence this summer, I got really angry at a lot of my local friends for forgetting me. Some relationships were strained, some were broken, some have been repaired. But now, as we delve deeper into fall, the lack of social contact is noticeable, but now it is not because I have been forgotten by friends, it is because I am not reaching out. For the brieftest of moments, I make plans in my head of things to do: Join a club, learn a new language, take up a new hobby that requires me to interact with people other than my husband and I feel too paralyzed to move. Why should I head to X meeting when they probably won’t like me anyway. I sound like an asshole, so might as well save the effort and sit home. It’s too late to call/text X person, so why bother?
And of course it moves on: Why start a book when it probably will suck? Why listen to music when it’s all trite and dumb. Why do anything when it’s already all been done before?
In June I said,

I don’t have a desire to kill myself but I don’t feel like there is any hope. It seems that I’ve presented myself with a conundrum. Perhaps I am my own unreliable narrative for the second I had written the above, I knew it to be a lie: I want this to go away and I want to be happy.

When I can’t listen to a song, read a book by a beloved writer, enjoy a movie, or even want to see the world beyond my door, this is obviously something I cannot easily fix on my own.
I kept the business card of the therapist who worked with me after TheEx and I broke up, and I found it a few months ago. It’s been sitting in a letter holder on my desk, taunting me to call, as I bargained with myself every day to make the call but only if I felt if things were too drastic. But that is the funny thing about depression, it’s slow, wavering hold over you like a snake coiling itself up your body. You almost always don’t notice how depressed you really are until it’s almost too late.
I called him this morning and left a message. A small sense of relief? Yes. A small ray of hope.
Fight. Not flight.
TTFN,
Lisa

1. Cross-stitching.