To Hell And Back Again

After the last post, I fell into a really dark hole. For every problem solved there appeared to arise two new ones, and between a lack of energy (which was bordering on apathy) and near-despair, I had some really horrible weeks. None of the bills due June had yet been paid, and I’d really had more than enough of those troubles over the last months: we got threatened with having the gas / electricity switched off twice and had to borrow money from a friend to pay those bills. I had my bank account terminated because I accidentally went over the credit limit and (thanks to being preoccupied with the side-effects of venlafaxine) didn’t notice immediately, so I ended up being blacklisted as a “financial offender” for the next three years – it will be as good as impossible to get any kind of loan, and I had to go begging at the bank to be granted another bank account, and on top of everything else I will have to pay off almost 1250.- Euros for the old account and in penalty fees. I tried explaining my situation on the phone, but first I had to wait three weeks for a call-back since the people holding the decision power were always busy, and when they finally did get back at me, the lady berated me for it “being all my fault”.
We just about managed to pay for my husband’s German classes and get some food on the table, even though the latter was perilously close to uncertainty at two times at least. There was one day when we had all but € 9.- between the two of us, and all that was left to eat was a bit of frozen vegetables, half a jar of jam, pasta and potatoes. No bread, fruit, rice, cheese, meat, fish, butter, milk or soy drink or whatever we usually eat. Our options were plain potatoes or plain pasta, with a bit of spinach or peas. Nothing you’d traditionally serve for breakfast – and having just asked a friend to help us out with money so we wouldn’t have the gas / electricity cut off, I didn’t want to go begging again. My mother-in-law unwittingly saved us from this by sending some money, and my friend scolded me for not telling her earlier when I related the story to her… All I can say is that there’s a difference between having to ask for help once, because you got into a tight spot, and having to do it again and again, week after week or month after month. It wears you out mentally.
I believe my husband became more worried about me and my state of mind than about the money, because even though I was not entertaining thoughts of suicide, he made me promise I wouldn’t do anything to myself. Nevertheless, even getting dressed became an almost insurmountable obstacle, and I oscillated between apathy and fits of crying. I felt like I had nothing left in me: no energy, no fight, no will. And even though I had successfully fought off the denial of the application in April, nothing appeared to move forward in that regard ever since – until the beginning of June.

The money came in about three weeks ago, and despite the fact that we didn’t get approved for March (when I was still officially a university student and not available for welfare), we got monthly allowances retroactively from April 1st on. We could pay our bills, and get rid of the debts with the health insurance and the energy provider. I made a payment plan with the collection agency to pay off my old bank account in rates, paid off my sister since she had covered the contents insurance of our worldly possessions earlier this year, and gave two months’ worth of rent to my mother, as a thank you for supporting us when my parents were on a budget themselves.
Having this existential problem lifted off our shoulders has done more for my mental health than any other measure taken during the last months. For the first time in years, I go to bed without being afraid of what the next day is going to bring: even though I still get a fright when one of those “official-looking” letters comes in, I can immediately remind myself that we have the money to take care of whatever is heading our way.
The German welfare system is far from perfect and much criticized, but compared to our situation during the last year – and especially the last couple of months – we are doing peachy right now. Of course, we are not eating steak and lobster, but I can buy everything we need and some more, whereas before I would have to prioritize and calculate whether I had enough money to buy some yoghurt, for example, or whether it had to wait until the next time since it was not strictly necessary.
There was one day when I went to the neighbouring town for shopping, since the local supermarket had some offers which justified spending money on a tram ticket as we would still save compared to buying the same products in our hometown – and I made a mistake when calculating the expense. It was just a minor figure I was off, about 50 cents, but I ended up those 50 cents short for buying the tram ticket back home. I did not dare taking the tram without a valid ticket because of the € 60.- fine if I got caught, so I had no choice but walking home. It was a relatively warm day and I was dragging / carrying about 30 kg (roughly 65 pounds) of bottles and groceries in my shopping trolley and two bags. I had called my husband to meet me halfway, but by the time we got home, I was completely exhausted.
That is only one story out of many about how destitute we were. I walked around in jeans ripped from wear and tear for over a month, because I could not find a pair cheap enough in my size. When I finally found one, it had a bad, unflattering cut and I didn’t like the colour, but at least the prize was very low and the fabric not torn, so I bought it anyway. After just a few short weeks, the pull tab of the zipper broke – cheap material, I guess – so I had to put a safety-pin through the eye of the slider for using the zipper: the result was that every time I went to the toilet or got (un-)dressed, the safety-pin popped open and stung me in the finger. At that point, I made such a pitiful figure that my mother and sister gave me a part of my birthday present, two pairs of jeans, about ten days early.

Maybe that gives a little insight into why I have not been blogging. At some point, I just got too exhausted – all my mental energy went into making sure we would get on state support. And I wanted to escape from the daily struggles, not reflect on them.

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Depression Symptoms & Antidepressant Side-Effects Assessed

It’s becoming very clear that despite taking twice as high a dosage of venlafaxine / effexor now, the timed-release capsules work much better for me. The nausea and vertigo vanished completely, and in the mornings I don’t go through withdrawals anymore either. I do feel quite drained from the experiences of the last three weeks, though, very tired and listless. I lost 6 kg (13.2 lbs) – 4 kg over the first weekend and another 2 kg since – and even though I would welcome further weight loss very much, it goes without saying that vomiting, diarrhea and skipping meals due to nausea is not exactly a healthy way to drop the kilos and at least partially responsible for the feelings of weakness. On top of that, venlafaxine also suppresses my appetite for a good part of the day, until it returns in the evening and I suddenly start scouring the kitchen for all the stuff I did not buy when shopping…
There has been no improvements of the symptoms I primarily started taking venlafaxine for yet, the cognitive impairments and lack of energy, but I do feel more emotionally stable recently. Next Friday I have a follow-up with the psychiatrist, when I’ll find out whether I’ll increase the dosage further or stay on it for the time being.

As for the welfare process and related paperwork, the main appointment at the job centre had been cancelled on Tuesday already because the lady had become sick, and the one who works on our case at the employment agency was replaced with a colleague due to illness as well. While being very friendly as well, this colleague could do little more than collect the forms we had filled out at home and the documentation we had brought. Other than that, we will have to wait for them to get back to us. I handed in the questionnaire on my medical complaints today; the question was: “Do you have medical conditions which influence your current job or have done so in the past? Please give a short description of your illness respectively your symptoms and tell us which kinds of occupation would be influenced by these.” The space left blank was less than a quarter or a page, so I could not go into much detail:

“Diagnosis: chronic recurrent depression with comorbid panic disorder.
– permanent / daily symptoms: muscle pain in legs and arms; social anxiety; slowed-down thinking; word finding problems; problems falling asleep (at least 2 hours / night); severe lack of energy; hypersomnia; decreased libido
– frequent symptoms (at least 3 days per week): stomach pains; digestive problems (diarrhea); back pain; memory problems; concentration problems; depressive emotions (sadness, emotional emptiness, hopelessness); headaches
– periodically appearing symptoms: insomnia
– under stress also anxiety attacks
– currently (since mid-March 2013) additionally vertigo, nausea and vomiting due to starting an antidepressant regime (venlafaxine)

Because of the diverse symptoms, I am physically, intellectually and emotionally affected with any kind of occupation.”

That is as accurate an assessment as I could give of my daily problems in such a small space, and each of my healthcare providers should be able to confirm them. I learned today that the medical service will first contact my general physician for information, which is a bit of a problem since at least 80% of my depression treatment has been done by my therapist; the general physician does get reports from my psychiatrist, but except for the fact that I have participated in the medical study he does not know anything about the psychotherapeutic treatment. I do hope they’ll get in contact with him as well – if our regular case worker had been present today, I would have asked her, but her colleague was not familiar with the protocol in such cases.

Getting Ready For The Psychiatrist

Tomorrow is my appointment with the psychiatrist. I have a vague idea of what to expect, based on the psychological examinations at the hospital and internet research, and I’m quite used to recounting my history with depression. Hopefully, he will accept that physical reasons behind the depression have been excluded two years ago; I have documentation on the lab tests of my blood, but not on the ECG, for example – that’s still in my file at the hospital. I just don’t want to go through all of this again only to come to the same conclusion… Other than that, I’m open for any kind of neurological or psychiatric test he might want to perform.

I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to tell him. My top priorities are the lack of energy and the cognitive deficits; if we manage to do something about those two “symptom clusters” with tolerable side effects, I’ll call it a success. It might sound odd to some readers, but medicating the sadness away is not very important to me, because I feel that there is a reason when I am sad – even if I am not immediately aware of it. I just want to reach a state where I am able to deal with those reasons sufficiently.
I also hope I can skip the citalopram this time around. Here in Germany, it’s the most widely prescribed antidepressant, and usually the first antidepressant you will get prescribed. While it helped me in some regards, I feel that in my current state the side effects would outweigh the use I got out of it. Not to mention that it made me extremely sleepy in the beginning, which is certainly not what I am looking for currently.

Well, tomorrow I will know more.

Sleeping Problems & Depression

As someone who had no experience at all with sleeping medication, I did not really know what to expect when taking zopiclone. My sister said it had knocked her out within two minutes, but that she woke up only six hours later. With this in mind, I took my little pill at 10.30 PM, after I already was in bed. I read for half an hour without noticing anything, but after switching the lights off it really was a matter of minutes only until I was asleep. I shortly woke up in the middle of the night and when my husband left for class, but it was not before 9.30 AM this morning that I became fully conscious.
Obviously, I am quite happy about this and hope that my cycle is corrected now so that I will be able to sleep tonight as well, without the help of a hypnotic agent. However, it also was a good demonstration on the limitations of sleeping medication: it was not a refreshing rest, and I have been tired all day long. It felt more like I had been knocked out instead of sleeping, and I did not dream either – which I usually do every night.
The best thing about it was that when my husband came home from class, I was not only awake, but had also showered, dressed, eaten breakfast and opened the shutters. Instead of a zombie-like “…. heyyyyy…” from the bedroom, he got a “Hi!” from the kitchen – and I got a hug in return, because he was so happy to see the zopiclone had helped.

Sleeping problems are a very common symptom of depression, but a lot of publications only focus on insomnia and /or early waking, entirely leaving out hypersomnia. In fact, back when my doctors were still throwing diagnoses like MS into the ring, I myself already suspected it could be depression, but the insistence on insomnia and early waking made me doubt my own feelings: if depression was tied to decreased hours of sleep, I surely could not have that, since as a rule I was sleeping too much.
Early waking is defined as waking up significantly (an hour or more) earlier than one intended to and not being able to go back to sleep, coupled with excessive worrying while lying awake. This happens very rarely to me only, about once or twice per year.
I do have massive problems falling asleep, though,even on my best days. I read that the average healthy adult needs seven minutes to drift off, and while no source for that claim was given, it matches what I see in my husband: once the lights are off, it takes only a few minutes until he’s gone, whereas I stare into the darkness for at least an hour, often longer. About once a year, I will have a period where the problems with falling asleep grow into a full-blown insomnia, even though I have never had it for as long as now.
However, once I am asleep, I usually do not wake up until I had my full share – unless being interrupted by external signals like the alarm clock, of course. According to the IRS-SR, my nine hours of sleep within a 24-hour-period count as slightly elevated; when I first started therapy, I would need twelve. Under the influence of citalopram (at least in the beginning) and before receiving thyroid medication, it would be even more.

I just hope I can get a handle on this now and will have plenty of restful sleep tonight!

Help Me, Zopiclone

I did not think it was possible, but the last night was almost worse than the one before. It started promising: Got tired and went to bed at 10.20 PM, read for half an hour and switched the lights off at 10.50 PM. Fifteen minutes later, I was asleep – until 1 AM, when I woke up and was so alert that I could not force myself back into the realm of dreams. Got out of bed for a couple of hours, then back into bed, where I read until 6 AM. Lay awake for another hour and finally dozed off just after 7 AM again.

At least I did not cry this time, but it was even more confusing than simply staying awake. So for tonight, I asked my sister for one of the zopiclone pills she got prescribed for her insomnia last autumn. A definite first, as I never took any kind of hypnotic agent before, but I just cannot go on like this. I have tried everything to rectify my sleeping cycle and it only got worse, and even though I am generally not keen on using pills, I feel like I am going to lose my mind if I don’t get back to normal hours soon.

In other news, I have an appointment with the psychiatrist in four weeks. As the psychotherapy is covered by the fundings of the clinical trial, he has pretty much free reign to do with me whatever he deems fit, because with the exception of the citalopram two years ago, the health insurance did not have to pay for anything yet.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about all of this yet. I would have prefered to see my therapist as the psychiatrist as well, because nobody else knows my mental health history as well as he does, and quite frankly it would save me the hassle of having to get to used to another “stranger”. However, I have hardly any right to complain, and maybe it will even be good for something to keep the two treatment fields separated.

Going Back On Antidepressants?

(For the past couple of days, I have been under the spell of a virus infection which is currently on a rampage in my neck of the woods – sneezing, coughing, sinus pains, yadda yadda yadda. Not that I really dare complaining; having suffered through a real influenza two years ago, I know how bad it can get and how far away I am from that still.)

For a little while now I have considered going back on antidepressants. Taking citalopram was a mixed blessing, which I have written about in one of my first blog posts and in the Pre-Treatment Diary, and for a long time I was adamant to not go back on medication. However, my perspective on it has changed since: To begin with, I believe I was too depressed in 2010 that antidepressants alone could have “cured” me – even on medication, I still was severely depressed. After two years of psychotherapy, I can feel and tell apart varying degrees of depression, even within the same category of “severe”, “moderate” or “light” depression, but was not attuned enough for doing so two years ago. I can also tell where citalopram worked for me and where it did not, and it undeniably helped with the panic attacks, even if it could not eradicate the depression enough to make a difference.
Maybe a different brand or class of antidepressants will work better than the citalopram did.

The reason why I am even considering going back on antidepressants is that I feel myself slipping – very slowly, but it is happening – into another episode of depression. My energy levels are getting lower; concentration lapses; the cognitive deficits are becoming worse; insomnia. I just want to curl up on the sofa, hide from the world. (And none of that has anything to do with the cold; it has been going on for a much longer time than this.)
What worries me is an unpredictable sadness flooding me out of nowhere, making me tear up from one minute to the next. It is so difficult to explain to other people… sometimes, it is as if I am in a bubble, and inside it time goes by much slower than for everyone else. I am too slow, too lethargic to keep up with the rest of the world….

Due to my husband’s integration class finally starting and me being unable to fall asleep, he has gone to bed earlier than me all week long: I would just stay in the living room and join him a couple of hours later, so that I would lie awake only one or two hours in bed instead of four of five. Sitting around at night all by myself has somehow emotionally transported me back to the times of my deepest depression, and I always had a pattern where my mood would tank over the course of the evening. The sadness increases with every hour, and I feel more and more lonely until I fall asleep. It is like being the only person in a vast, empty land, with nothing to distract or occupy the mind, where only bitterness and desolation thrive. Everyone around me is asleep.
I went to bed at two o’ clock in the morning, hoping I would be able to sleep. Instead, I found myself falling into sadness again – so badly that it cost all my self-control and restraint to not wake up my husband. I knew it was silly; after all, I was lying right next to the person I had married, no reason to feel lonely. And yet, there was this strange sensation of being completely isolated from everyone else in the world.

Constant Dripping Wears The Stone

(Source: Dan Piraro)

I am not entirely serious about the comic strip; it’s more of a hyperbolic comment on my life, but I need some humour and the chance to vent in order to deal with today. My mum has been cavilling me since the morning, a constant trickle of criticism and petty jabs. And even though I am fully aware that I am not the reason for her jibes, but merely the most convenient target for her projections, it still hurts. Drip.
The individual remarks are trivial, not worth getting upset over, one should think: one was about my doormat having been dirty for “at least three months”, when the handymen who are currently renovating the flat next door had left the crumbs of mortar and concrete only 36 hours ago – which have been cleaned away since Friday night already. Drip. One was about me relating a news article of local interest I had read online which according to her was “old news” – despite the publishing date being yesterday. Drip. One was a degrading remark because I had to take a nap this afternoon, “just because you had to go shopping at 10 AM” – even though I’d had a really bad night with only 5 hours of fitful sleep (when I need 9 hours because of the depression) and still had gotten up without complaining. Drip.
What upsets me the most is that my mother makes these comments because she is upset with another person, and then takes it out on whoever crosses her path. I’ve been through this in therapy so many times and know exactly what I should do and say, but she triggers an automated behaviour in me which just makes me sound sulky and defensive instead. We are not really interacting with each other, but acting parts in a pre-determined script. There is so little self-reflection on her part…

My sister is between jobs right now, with another month to go before her new employment starts. Being divorced and unemployed, she and my mother spent a lot of time together: eight, ten, twelve hours a day, for the last three months. My sister also has started seeing a psychiatrist and taking antidepressants; generally speaking, a very good development. So I understood that my mother would be preoccupied with all of that, since it indirectly concerned a large part of her own day.
My mother has strong tendencies towards OCD-behaviour, with a myriad of unwritten rules one better not crosses. Doing something in a different fashion than the one she uses will give her a very hard time. She is also “orthorexic” in so far that she is obsessed with nutritional properties, minerals, vitamins, and whatever positive qualities an ingredient might have. So when my sister decided to try a vegan challenge, or go at least vegetarian for a while (she took a break for Christmas), my mother was all over that.
Now, I don’t have anything against vegans or vegetarians. I understand and even agree with a lot of the reasons why people would choose to eat this way. In fact, I try to have a vegetarian day or two every week, but I could not go without meat for a longer time, and my husband is quite the carnivore. I respect the choice others made, and want mine to be respected as well. But once my sister embarked on her vegan adventure, my mother’s occasional negative remarks on what I am buying / cooking turned into a steady stream. Drip, drip, drip.
Thanks to the antidepressants, my sister had the urge to walk a lot, and so they would go out together, walk two or three hours every day – and are now bragging about the weight they lost. Some days, they make me feel like a fat, blubbery pudding; the German word I have in mind is Trauerkloß, literally a “mourning dumpling”. The idiot who is too slow and pathetic to get on with her life, the fat fuck who always sleeps. Of course they do not use those words, but this is the effect their little verbal needle pricks have on me. Drip, drip, drip. And it took two years of psychotherapy just to come to the conviction that the problem is actually on her end, not mine.

Not only are they together 90 % of the time these days, but on the rare occasion I see my mother without my sister, she incessantly talks about her. And while I understand that this is on the forefront of her mind due to the many hours they spend in each other’s company, I would very much like to talk about something that is important to me once in a while. I feel like I am going to have a melt-down if the situation goes on for much longer.

Ode On My Car

It’s time to write about something I took for granted most of the time I had it: my car. I drive a 1992 Opel Vectra, meaning that it is twenty years old now. Germany requires safety and emission inspections every two years, and in summer 2010 I was told that my vehicle would not make it another time; there was just too much corrosion and rust. Fixing it would have meant exchanging entire parts of the car and the costs would by far have exceeded its current worth.
I have been driving around with an expired safety plaque for the last four months, which would earn me a fine if it got discovered. With the end of the year, however, my insurance on the car runs out too, and obviously I cannot continue using it, especially since the number of smaller technical hiccups increases. The rear blinker on the right only works occasionally, and any of them can get stuck for a while sometimes. The keyhole for the boot (trunk) is not functioning either, so I keep it locked; if you want to put anything in there, you have to flip the backseats and shove it in from inside the passenger room – which means that you cannot transport anything which is too big to fit through the car’s doors. The rubber sealing of the doors leaks water in if you are driving in the rain. The engine’s cooling water evaporates out of a puncture in a pipe when hot, so that every other day I have to fill it up completely… There are a lot of parts which start failing or are going to in the near future, and it is just not safe to continue driving it any longer: I understand that it has to go, not only for legal reasons, but because common sense dictates it.
The problem is that neither my husband and I have enough money to buy a new car, not even an used one, nor do my parents. Which means that with the beginning of the new year, I am going to be without access to a motorized vehicle. Each distance will be covered by walking or using public transportation.

I grew up in a family without a car. For reasons I do not know (but suspect they involve repeated speeding), my father handed in his driving licence when I was four years old. We walked, rode bikes, took the tram, train or bus – and any destination that could not be reached that way was out of our radius. That was just the way it was – I did not know any different.
However, it had always been clear that I would get my driving licence, and like everyone else in my year at school, I started taking lessons shortly before my 18th birthday. Despite not being very familiar with being in a car at all and thus displaying even more caution than my naturally timid character can be accounted for, I passed the test in the first attempt. My aunt and uncle would let me drive on Sundays so I did not forget how to do it, and about a month after I got my licence, my parents bought a used car for me: a 1986 Opel Kadett.  Back then, in 1998, it was twelve years old, and would continue to serve me for eight years, until it was just as old as its successor is now, and bowed out for similar reasons. I think twenty years of age is some kind of milestone where the rust just has destroyed too much of the coachwork…
In over 14 years, I have gotten two minor speeding tickets (overlooked the signs signalling a lower speed limit in both cases) , and I have been fined for a parking violation once. The closest thing to an accident was a lady destroying my left side mirror in 2010 when she swayed her car into mine in a narrow street, but I never had to get the police or insurance involved. After the first year, I stopped believing that I would kill myself and my entire family just by virtue of being the one behind the wheel, and became a competent driver who eventually mastered even challenging routes. I drove in six different countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Luxemburg, Switzerland) and even crossed the Susten Pass in the Alps by car.

Giving up my car means giving up a huge chunk of personal freedom and independence. With nobody else in my family having a licence (and my husband’s being invalid here), it meant that I was the one who had to chauffeur the others around, but it also meant that I was never limited by how much I could carry when grocery shopping. Certain destinations, like the farmer’s market where we shop about once a week, were only accessible because I had a car. I could go to friends’ birthday parties and did not have to leave early in order to catch the last tram. It took only twenty minutes to get to the hospital for therapy – now it’s over an hour via tram and bus.
When I was driving alone, I’d cut the radio on and sing along (my car was so old that  the stereo would play only cassette tapes, no CDs or anything more advanced). I especially enjoyed it during balmy summer nights, the windows rolled down and a breeze blowing in, while the leaves of the trees on the roadside were rustling and crickets chirping in the grass. Sometimes, I would embark on a little detour on such nights, just because I did not want it to end yet.
Karl Lagerfeld once said that money does not make you happy, but it is better to cry sitting in a taxi cab than on the bus, and I agree with him on this. Quite early during the therapy process, I found myself driving to the hospital and during the entire time, I had tears streaming down my face because I was just overwhelmed by emotions. And very often I was just grateful for the chance to stay in the little bubble of privacy my car offered a little longer after therapy before having to make the transition from the inside world of my thoughts to the outside world where I’d have to interact with other people again. I am very sad that I will lose all of this now.

The Jubilee Post

Today, I celebrate the 100th blog post. If the counter didn’t keep track of the statistics, I most certainly would have missed the milestone, but I’m glad I didn’t. When getting started, I had no real direction to follow and was more concerned with not running out of steam early on than with developing a writer’s voice or any long-term goals for “Lugubrious Layara”: I simply talked about what was happening in my life, in therapy and in my head.
There also was (and still is) an educational facet to the blog, even though from a strictly personal, non-professional angle. I get a fairly consistent number of hits through people googling CBASP, and I’m really happy that I can provide links, information and my own opinion – when I was about to start the therapy programme, there was very little to be found online, and nothing in regards to other blogs. Even now, the situation changed only marginally. And despite knowing that there are other people being treated with CBASP all over the world, and even at the same hospital, I have never encountered any other CBASP patient, neither online nor in the real world. If I have accomplished nothing else with this blog, at the very least it added a new voice to the plethora of mental health blogs out there.

Blogging means walkig a tight rope. How much of yourself do you put out there? And how much of the people you write about? I try protecting the privacy of everyone I mention as much as possible, even if it means that my writing sometimes suffers from the vagueness. Occasionally, I don’t post because it would mean discussing the personal history of another person more than I’m comfortable with – I can decide to put my own history out there, but not my husband’s, for example.

Sometimes, I want to post, but don’t have the energy for writing. There’s a good deal of regurgitating going on when developing a new blog post – I type, erase, type again, erase again, scratch certain formulations, phrases or entire paragraphs. And there were a few incidents where I had an entire post ready for publication but never chose to put it out there – because the situation described didn’t exist anymore, or because it had taken so long to jot the story down that I had already moved on from it by the time I was done.
And then, there are the blog posts I would like to write, but that are too emotionally exhausting to go there: for example, my sister’s “borderline meltdown” the day before my wedding. Or the post about my husband’s immigration process I started writing back in September, but the 800 words on that which I got so far only covered everything prior to our marriage day and revisiting the events make me feel depressed, so the progress on that is very slow…

Despite and because of all of that, blogging is very beneficial for me. My therapist always urges me to become “more visible”, to put more of myself out there, and the blog is one way of doing so. My friends and my husband not only know of its existence, but some of them even are somewhat regular readers. This allows me to talk about my feelings and problems at length without pushing them on anybody – they can decide when to visit, and how often.
There is a similar effect to writing about depression as visiting the student classes had; it gives me a sense of not only dealing with it, but of making it a little less like I wasted all those years with the illness. At the age of 32 years, I have spent a minimum of 20 years with the condition, about ten of them severely depressed. By sharing, it does not feel like I wasted those.

Decluttering: Part II

In the last post, I mainly focused on recounting a chronology of events; in this entry, I would like to highlight the emotional and psychological background of the decluttering process I am still going through (even though I must admit that I’ve been slacking on that front since I wrote the last entry – it’s definitely time to get back in gear).

My household chores consist of cooking and grocery shopping as well as doing the laundry and, once in a while, cleaning something. My husband is responsible for most of the cleaning / vacuuming, he does the dishes and makes the beds. I am now in a state where I can fulfil my share regularly, at least preparing our meals and shopping. The laundry and cleaning get put off sometimes, unless it is really urgent, but overall it is not too bad either and never for longer than a day or two. I actually enjoy the cooking and grocery shopping, which undoubtedly helps a lot.
Decluttering, on the other hand, is a highly stressful process. Every box I open contains a plethora of keepsakes, memorabilia and knickknacks which are ten to fifteen years old: fountain pens, postcards, key rings, fashion jewellery, notebooks, candle holders, foreign coins, bookmarks, rubber bands, hair clips, dices, and pebbles. There are a lot of pebbles and pieces of rock in my flat – picked up at various destinations of my travels as well as just in my home area. This might sound odd to some people, but those pebbles are not only souvenirs, but also bring me aesthetic pleasure. I like looking at them and the way they feel to the touch. However, I got to the point where I just had too many of them and they were sitting on too many surfaces. There are only a few I will keep, but 90% are in a plastic bag now, which I’ll empty into the local river one of these days.

The popular advice to put something into a box and throw that box away unopened after a year if you have not missed any of its contents just does not work for me – it actually creates anxiety for me. Instead, when I “attack” a new box or pile, I have to take a look at every individual piece in it and decide whether I want to keep it or not. It is almost like saying goodbye to the objects that won’t make it.
The more personal the item, the harder it is to let go of it: for example, I had two pieces of rope tied into nautic knots which I had made on a sailing trip to the Netherlands in 1996. They served no purpose, not even a decorative one, anymore. They took up space. They actually bothered me, I wanted them to be gone. And yet I could not bring myself to throwing the ropework away. Doing so just felt wrong. For several minutes, I stood there, holding them in my hands, remembering the day I made them and the time which has passed since, until finally I tossed the rope into the trash bag. I had gotten so stressed out over the process that I had to take a break for half an hour, and that is what it is like every day that I actually find the energy to organize.

Just where does the sentimental attachment come from? In some cases, where we’re talking about souvenirs from vacations, the answer is obvious: they are tokens of happier days. But just as often, they are just remains from the past and don’t evoke particularly fond feelings – sometimes even the opposite happens. Like with the retainers I had to wear as a teenager, which only remind me of all the physical pain they brought and the scars left inside my mouth by the braces and retainers.
The only explanation I can come up with regarding why I kept all those objects is that I tried to keep an inventory of my past. As if little parts of me would cease existing if there was no tangible proof of them. My wish of becoming an archaeologist could just as well be interpreted as a diagnosis – I tried to chronicle my own life.