It has been over a year since I went from “struggling” to “barely getting by” in terms of my personal health. A year ago, I was on vacation with my siblings and struggling to get enough sleep due to back pain from a mix of how a medicaiton I was taking messed with my joints and how my old, worn-out mattress had negatively impacted my back (which had only become apparent when I was trying to sleep on a not-horrible mattress). Things pretty much only got worse from then until mid-October, where they slowly reached a degree of stasis they stayed at until early January. Since early January, my physical and mental health have been variably up and down as I’ve dealt with more new medications, physically intensive work at my job, long days, too-short nights, and a general feeling of isolation that has left me wondering why I even bother with all of this stuff. I’ve written more posts about how I’m slowly improving than I care to count and this one was initially going to be no different. Things are improving, sure. I’m feeling a bit less tired than usual and while I’m more uncomfortable than ever as a result of the high temperatures and trying to change a sleep schedule I’ve more-or-less maintained for most of my life (at least two decades), I do think things are getting better. I don’t know if they’ll stay that way, if they’ll improve further, or if something else will crop up that has me feeling worse again, but I can’t help but feel like I’m trying to climb some kind of trick staircase that has me constantly feeling like I’m moving forward while I never actually get any further from the bottom.
Things aren’t that bad right now, as I’m writing this. Sure, I’m emotionally and mentally exhausted and more burned out than I’ve ever been (I want to say that this is saying something, but I’ve written that sentence so many times and my burnout only ever seems to get worse so I’m not sure that it’s actually saying anything), but I’m not so tired that I’m falling asleep at my desk. Some of that might be a result of being so warm that the simple act of standing and typing at my computer is enough to have me sweating, but it’s also a result of actually feeling less tired than I’ve felt in months. All the lingering sleep-inducing effects of my last antidepressant seem to have worked their way out of my system and while my new one has not had a noticeable effect on me yet, I’ve still got a couple more weeks until the 4-week adjustment period for my current dose has ended. My body, which has intermintently thrown new and novel problems my way–probably because of how poor it was doing (as a result of the medication I was taking last year) when I started putting a lot of physical strain on it at work–is currently not feeling awful. I’m ready to get back to my exercises and stretches, to see if I can get it back into proper working order again, for what feels like it would be the first time in almost two years (it feels wild to to think that, for a brief period in September and most of October of 2023, I actually felt comfortable in my body), but I felt that way three weeks ago and attempting to do that work started the tribulations of pinched and compressed nerves in my neck and shoulders that I’ve still trying to work out.
It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that, every time I fix one problem, a new one rears its head. Every time I think things are finally starting to improve, something else goes wrong. Any time I think that I’m evening out, something new shows up to knock me off balance. It has happened enough times over the years that I start to get nervous any time it looks like something is clearing up or going away. I mean, my eyes have been in the best shape they’ve been in for what feels like years and I’m fighting a growing anxiety that I’m just fooling myself into thinking that just long enough for them to get really bad again, out of nowhere, like they did this past winter and last summer. Or, should they stay clear, that something else will go incredibly and inconveniently wrong in order to start piling on the stress again. I can’t focus on how things are improving or how much my life is slowly changing for the positive because I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop and wondering just how bad it’s going to be this time. I can’t see how well my recovery from the hell of the last twenty-one months is going because I’m too busy watching for whatever is about to go wrong. It’s exhausting and feels way too close to the sort of hypervigilance I used to practice back when I was a child and teen trying to survive my older brother and parents.
Which probably a pretty fair comparison. I’ve spent so long feeling miserable and unwell without any clear answers as to why or path towards fixing things (or even a guarantee that I CAN fix things), that it was probably a little traumatizing, especially given how much of my mental health issues stem from a lack of control over my self. The reasons and results might have been different, but it fell right into the patterns of my childhood, only this time it was me subjecting myself to this stuff on the mistaken belief that it would be a net positive in the end. It was me telling myself, fully consciously, that all I need to do is just stick it out for a little while longer. I have no one to blame but myself for this series of events. And maybe the doctors who didn’t adequately prepare me for what might happen if I wound up taking that medication for long enough while working a physically demanding job, but it’s not like we thought I’d be taking it for fourteen months. Initially, we talked about four months. It just kept getting extended as results were slow to materialize and even fourteen months wasn’t long enough. It took a second medication to wrap things up (which is ending the day after this post was written, finally) and even then I’m worried the results won’t stick like it seemed they weren’t sticking the first time around.
Looking toward a future where my physical, mental, and emotional well-being has improved requires being able to actually hope that I can improve. I want to say that I can believe that I’m going to continue recovering, but the last six months of false starts, relapses, backwards steps, and a whole lot of “no improvement” has left me unwilling to let myself feel that hope. I can consider it, I can imagine a better future, but I can’t make myself think it will come to pass. Too much in my life, personal and societal, has just been getting worse instead of better that I’m not even sure that it would be helpful or beneficial for me to get my hopes up. It feels strange to say that, but I’m genuinely not sure I should be trying to get my hopes up in the face of what looks like it might be an increasingly dark future. And how much of my personal recovery, should it actually come to pass, is going to be negated by just how bad things are getting in the world? I wish I could just set it all aside and say that I’ll cling to hope and forward progress until the day I die, but it feels naive to even consider it. Better to expect nothing, put my head down, and just focus on whatever is required for my next step to the exclusion of all else. Survival and that kind of small-scale, hyper-focused progress are better than nothing and, just maybe, are all I can really expect to find in my future. Or maybe things are just one more week from turning around. Who can say? I sure can’t. All I can do is do the former while getting through one more week on the off-chance the latter happens.