The view from my pillow.

Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve been slipping. Maybe you’ve noticed my posts have gotten shorter. Maybe you’ve noticed my current face hasn’t made an appearance in a while.

I didn’t think I would write about this. I wanted to keep trying to pull it off every day, but I was so obviously struggling.

You guys want to know what’s really bad for your skin, and totally disruptive to your beauty routine? Depression. Unless your beauty routine consists of dirty hair and infrequent showers, and your ideal skin includes eyelid zits. Then, it’s really perfect.

I am not trying to make you feel bad for me.

I am trying to make you understand.

It doesn’t always look like it does on TV. Depression is not always a blanket pulled tightly around your shoulders while you cry out a rain spattered window. More often, it’s not so much the presence of sadness as it is the absence of any feelings at all. The thing I feel the most is the aches in my neck, the prickling anxiety related knots on my scalp that are sharp and dull and dizzying at the same time – like I’ve been holding my breath for too long, or straining my eyes – the kind of pain that makes you nauseous. But, happiness? Not here. Sadness? I guess. If you want to call it that. But, I don’t.

I’m down.

That’s really the only word for it – down. Most days, I am up. These days, these last couple weeks, I am down. Down underneath. Down below the sunny surface, down into the sucking depths in the murkiness and the muck where only ugly things swim. It is expansive. It is everywhere. It is everything and it is nothing. Being so far down here, the pressure is different, and I am being crushed.

This crushing doesn’t want me to wear makeup, or wash my hair, or put on a bra, or exercise, or write, or look in the mirror. It only wants me to face my own mortality, or berate myself over the dishes in the sink and the uncounted WW points, or sleep. So, I sleep. I sleep during the day, and I wake up tired. I sleep at night, and I’m exhausted in the morning. I am so, so sleepy. My usual forms of self medication aren’t working either; there hasn’t been a piece of pie big enough or an orgasm strong enough to make those synapses fire like they should. All I can do is keep taking my pills, keep trying to drag myself out of the house, keep trying to wake up, keep asking Jason to squeeze me, keep touching the dog’s ears, keep trying to get inspiration from somewhere ANYWHERE so I can keep this site going.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled dick talk and lipstick swatch programming soon. I promise not to disappear.

I’m sorry this isn’t funny, or pretty, or whatever.

I am trying to pull through it. Please bear with me.