Oh shit

I can't recall when I've been this depressed before. It's snuck up on me so slowly I hardly had time to notice - I buried it in a million other annoyances and stressors until it was the pebble in my shoe and not the rock I broke my leg on.

I would like to go a day without sobbing.

The nice thing about living alone is that you can cry like a child without inconveniencing anyone. I hope at some point the well of grief runs dry because I begin to think I'm worrying my upstairs neighbors who can no doubt hear me.

The job I took in February, in an attempt to regain some semblance of work life balance, is backfiring and badly. My waking hours spent commuting rose from 2 to 3, and the chaos I feel in this role is twice that of the previous company. Ironically, I heavily favored this job over the other because it had good maternity benefits - I didn't tell Mike that because I didn't want to get his hopes up, and now I wonder if I was trying not to admit something (what?) to myself.

I saw a pregnant woman on the way home and was suffused with jealousy. She looked so happy and stable and well cared for. On the same walk I saw one of the condo-owners fumbling for her keys at her front door, and I was suffused with jealousy and despair. I will never own my own home, never have the stable place to plant roses and jasmine and lavender. It all seems so pointless.

I am so lonely. I've lived alone in this apartment since Chris moved out, modulo six months in Europe. That's nearly four years now. That is the longest I've been so alone. It is a miracle I am still alive.

In retrospect the thing that's kept me going, kept me fighting, has been the thought that soon I'd have someone to come home to, and somewhere to share tasks and griefs and triumphs, somewhere to sleep safe in the arms of another with regularity and without reserve or complication. Someone to watch movies with any old night of the week, someone to remind me to put sunscreen on when I was out in the garden. Someone to cook with, to dance with, to live with.

In the absence of all of those things, I find I am having trouble taking pleasure in anything. I am at the edge of my reach financially. I am so tired and worried all the time that I cannot even take pleasure in the many things I used to enjoy. I've grown lethargic on my own pain and nothing - dancing, fixing old machines, pyrotechnics, gelatin, historic cooking, gardening, Burning Man, costuming, theater - seems worth the effort anymore. He was so much a part of my life that there's a savor lost without him there beside me and everything is ashes in my mouth.

I startle awake at night, and I don't know why. In the morning I drink my coffee and think about how much he hated it, but I don't have time for tea and I need the caffeine to look like a semi-normal functioning human being. I've started carrying a handkerchief around because I'm running low on tissues to dab my eyes. Exercise is a painful slog; I feel like a blimp and wonder if trying to fix that is pointless. Decisions are hard. Sleeping is hard. Work is hard.

I am down in it, and I am afraid.

I'm taking ibuprofen for my injuries and firmly resisting the constant urge to look up its LD50, though I've had the thought to check about five times today. A book arrived on WW2 womenswear, and I found myself half-wishing for a reason to take a potentially-lethal wartime job. I feel as if I have nothing else left to do.

In the mornings, I am recoiling again from the approaching train. Not because I'm afraid of the train or the wash of the air, but because the sly finger that prods me towards the open rails is back, and I will not give it purchase. It's been years; the last time marked another grinding commute, another uncertain job, a different painful isolation.

I am afraid.

In 2007 I managed a job change followed by catastrophic car failure, and in 2008 changed jobs and living situations for the better. So if this is a ten year cycle I just need to hold on for dear life for another six months.

If you're within the sound of my words, please help me hang on.