From my journal for November 19, 1995<\/p>\n
I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m not keeping up with my discipline around sleeping. \u00a0I think I\u2019ve dropped my discipline because I see Dr. Stoll in a couple of days, and I\u2019m hoping for a magic bullet, a small dose of an anti-depressant that would make it easier to sleep, that would make it possible to wake up rested.\u00a0 <\/span>At the same time I have great distrust of drugs and doctors \u2014 and actually no positive experience of medication that actually helped.\u00a0 <\/span>And I think how last summer I let go of my discipline around food, expecting to fall into the safety of dance camp, and it wasn\u2019t a safety net<\/a> at all.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a fine thin snow falling.\u00a0 <\/span>I can hear Dana\u2019s heavy breathing from where he\u2019s sleeping on the couch, I can hear it over the furnace that\u2019s running (I turned it on when I got up)\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t like that we haven\u2019t slept in the same bed in so long, but I realize that I couldn\u2019t sleep at all with that sound going on.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s not really snoring, but it\u2019s noisy enough to be a problem.\u00a0 <\/span>I guess I\u2019ve been hoping that anti-depressant medication, if it helped me sleep, might lessen my sensitivity to noise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
November 20<\/p>\n
Reading through journal entries on depression. \u00a0<\/span>This is being very hard.\u00a0 <\/span>My life looks like someone struggling through a swamp full of brambles, pain and crisis and depression succeeding each other like recurring themes in music.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
November 22<\/p>\n
I saw the shrink, Dr. Andrew Stoll, a nice young yuppie with a faintly supercilious air. He didn\u2019t tell me anything I hadn\u2019t got from the books except to explain that Prozac et al are \u201cserotonin uptake preventers,\u201d that they blocked the sites where serotonin is captured for recycling.\u00a0 T<\/span>his sounded a little unhealthy to me, like closing down the drains in a house so you would have more water in the system.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s neither as knowledgeable, nor as flexible as I had hoped, and my sense that these guys really don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing makes me not want to do something so potentially dangerous.\u00a0 <\/span>At least not until I\u2019ve really worked on separating helplessness and hopelessness with Karen, because it seems that that is where major depression gets triggered.\u00a0 <\/span>I want to try reminding myself \u2014 \u201cI am not helpless.\u00a0 <\/span>I can ask for help, I can go away, etc.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I don\u2019t seem to realize the damage done by my father saying<\/a> when I asked for help \u201cIf you didn\u2019t know how to do it, why did you even try?\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>In fact both parents usually refused to help me. So I basically learned not to ask for help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From my journal for November 19, 1995 I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m not keeping up with my discipline around sleeping. \u00a0I think I\u2019ve dropped my discipline because I see Dr. Stoll in a couple of days, and I\u2019m hoping for a magic … Continue reading