flip-flop

feb 17 2014 dinosaur_eggs@yahoo.com

second morning in a row i woke up with horrible depression. no hope. "life finished" feeling. sick feeling in stomach. headache. cannot eat. brain churning to invent a new idea, a new source of hope. emotional reaction to each new idea and each memory of past efforts: futility. still not recovered health from virus last week. i sit at my computer and look for ideas. i send sms to some friends to try to break out of the shell, and reach out. nothing. they are all busy. i am alone. it's 1 pm in cambodia and 1 am in the usa. i want to call mom and just say hello, but she is most likely asleep. so i am writing this. this pain is not killing me.

i just took 40mg of fluoxetine (prozac) and i am racing to write about these feelings before they change. i have about 15 minutes before the med kicks in and i forget this nightmare. in the past 30 years i have tried keeping journals. during a depression i write fast to get some ideas in concrete form, so that i can look at the ideas again under the influence of anti-anxiety drugs, and compare. on the meds i usually feel so different and so removed from the depression that reading a journal entry like this one makes me annoyed or frustrated. probably the feeling other people get reading or hearing about "anxiety" disorders. in younger days i threw out 20 or 30 journals because i couldn't stand to read about my depression when i was feeling good. and doing so never brought about any revelation about how to fix the problem.

speaking of nightmares, i've had them at least two every night for the past two months. i can't shake the nightmares. they wake me up and i remember them the next day. i don't sleepwalk now because i take (diazepam) valium before bed. but the nightmares are killing me emotionally. they are gut wrenching. the feeling of being trapped is the theme of every one of them. my projects are finished in cambodia. seemed successful for a while. taking care of the kids in my village felt important; that got me through my own feelings of depression. after that project was lost i gradually sank back into the same depression i had in the usa. same chemistry, different location. both of the aid projects i did in cambodia were undoubtedly lost to the inflexibility that is a side effect of depression. when i have these episodes of pain it is hard to tolerate other troubling issues. when i found that the director of the ngo where i worked in battambang was stealing contributions i was absolutely intolerant.

trapped. that's the feeling today. nothing of use to do. all is futility. waves of pain surging through chest and heart. when i was young it appeared that thoughts about particular subjects caused the painful feelings, but in later years experience showed that it was the opposite. it seems my brain attempts to attach the waves of pain to something problematic in my life so that the pain "makes sense," but it is so random, and experience and study shows that this interpretation is not consistent. maybe there was some value in keeping the journal, if only to show the sporadic nature of anxiety and the random behavior that results.

meds are the only things that stop me killing myself. i am writing about this because i know there are other people out there who suffer from depression. friends and relatives get tired of hearing about it, yet it never goes away. it's something we live alone with because people don't want to talk about it. worse still, there are people around who don't understand that depression is not all caused by the circumstances of life. it is not something people should blame themselves for. people need not feel that their depression is caused by a mistake they made, the loss of a job, or a relationship. it's just the opposite. the depression is cause of the losses. after 30 years of battling this depression, i have only one thing to offer: there is no point blaming yourself for the depression and the consequences. that may not be comforting, and some may not even believe it. but i have one piece of evidence to support this idea:

i had "night terrors" when i was a child. as i got older and stronger, i started breaking things while asleep - lamps, vases, even windows. why would a child of five years have anything to feel depression about? i had good parents and a nice home. friends, and everything i needed. i still have the same night terrors but i don't sleepwalk and break things because i take valium before bed to control this. it's the only remedy i have available.

surges of pain for no reason. i look at my passport. it expires next year. a year and eight months away. plenty of time, but i have a wave of pain when i look at it. that is completely random. that pain is just coming from inside me for no reason that i know of.

when i was young i thought that the pain could be treated. i exercised all the time, and this seemed to help a bit. but it made me inflexible about exercise. if anything interfered with my exercise i would get frustrated. fantasies about travel and new kinds of work were always in my depression toolkit when i was young. nothing worked. in fact, some of the strategies i took made things worse, left me stranded and feeling alone, as i do now. i ate healthy. organic and vegetarian. i moved to live in natural environments like the redwoods near the sea in california. the depression remained. nothing consistently worked to stop it. relationships, jobs, family, everything and everyone i was connected with has felt the consequences of this depression.

now, after my last hope collapsed (my volunteer work in cambodia) i have actually begun to feel old. this is also because of the harsh living in cambodia, the many diseases and poverty, the floods and poor sanitation, the malnutrition. these things are very difficult to tackle as an older person. before coming to cambodia i never felt old. so it seems that feeling old sprang on me rather suddenly in the course of a couple of years. today i am afraid that i have to report that age and experience do not reduce the pain of depression. for years i believed that age and experience would eventually teach me how to live with this problem. so far it has not. to be completely honest, growing older just reduces our options. i can not exercise as much as before, nor as vigorously. it is more difficult and expensive to find healthy food. illness is harder to heal. there are fewer people who share similar experience of life, and therefore fewer friends. there is age-discrimination in the workplace (regarding the usa especially.) in cambodia, older people were normally treated with respect, but the war and genocide here caused some very ugly damage to the culture. young people are only interested in money, smartphones, in other words, material. they blame older people for corruption and the war. they hate the government. they look to foreigners for help but don't really trust them. their focus is money. it took me two years to fully digest the reality that young people are not interested in real education, mostly because they don't know what it is, nor what its benefits are. it's not their fault; the previous generations of war stole this from them. my goals for improving education - the aspect of cambodian culture most completely destroyed by the khmer rouge - were thwarted by this reality.

now, feeling old, sick, tired, and still suffering from depression, i have exhausted my creativity and options. i have no idea what to do next. i have no one to talk to so i write in this journal. one last note about this journal experiment today: it is now more than an hour since i popped the prozac. i am beginning to feel a little more functional. but i am so hungry after a week of illness without eating that i can't focus on writing anymore. i have to go look for food. still, the thought of eating makes me feel a bit ill.

______ after meds ______

it's 3:30 pm. i ran to the little market near my house to get some exercise. coughing, it seems like there is a permanent damage to my lungs. i bought rice and vegetables, some fruit, and a paygo phone card. i visited a friend and told her that i might go back to the usa. now, going back to the usa is a fantasy to fight depression, an escape, like all the previous ones in my life. i walked home with my food, looked at the wilted mango tree in a pot on my balcony, put the rice on the counter and started crying. i felt like crying all day. i have no reason to cry. but i feel like crying, and people say and i know from experience that crying makes you feel better. it was easy to do. in fact, i guess i had been holding it back. crying alone seems so miserable. if i cried with someone who cared for me it would last an hour.

now i have to eat. it's less than an hour and a half before i have to teach.

the meds didn't do anything. maybe because of another problem with another med. while i had this mystery virus and couldn't walk, i took a medicine that i have avoided all this time because it is highly addictive. codeine is sold over the counter here without prescription and there is no limit. i took a small amount to fight the pain last week. now i have stopped and it's very likely that the depression today is related to the withdrawal from the codeine. but this is one of the central problems with depression: you never know anything for sure.

after you overhear a few people say you are crazy over the years, you can start to second-guess yourself. for example, the last time i took prozac i went out and got a contract job training staff at a five star hotel. the change in my attitude and productivity was really astonishing. no need to keep a journal. it happened so fast that i stood teaching my students realizing every day that if i had not taken that drug i would not have this job. but then it fell apart. like it always does. and here is where the second-guessing comes in.

i made hand-outs with all the material for each lesson, and gave a copy to each student. this way, they could read along with me, focus on the subject, and not waste time writing. after the first month i received an email from the boss stating that the students complained that i did not give them any hand-outs. when this sort of thing happens in the usa it's just common backstabbing, job politics, and you know where it comes from. but i am in cambodia, the students laugh and appear to enjoy my lessons. i don't see any frustration or hear any complaints. there are no tests, no apparent competition of any kind. the email from the boss also said students complained that i spoke khmer language in class. i did use a few words to clarify points when the students could not understand the english. why is this a problem instead of an advantage? the mindset that has developed in the culture of english study in cambodia is a flawed form of "immersion" learning. they use english textbooks that have no khmer vocabulary helps. this is a disaster and the students cannot read the books. all the cultural references are western pop music and movies which khmer people know nothing about. in a group of 25 students i asked, not one of them had ever heard of "michael jackson," even though all claim to like american music. so the culturally biased dialogues in their books are a stumbling point. after i received the email, i knew the job was doomed so i just quit. afterward i saw several of the students at various places around town. they all said that the boss is hated by everyone at the hotel. he probably just wanted to make problems for me. but the real story... i will never know.

headache. i must eat and go teach. more later....