This is what chronic illness looks like

[From last week] Just a brief note while I'm waiting for Obama to start his healthcare speech to Congress ....

I really want something good to come of this. My insurance doubled last year, and this year it's going up 41%. I damn near cut off my thumb last weekend and had a few scary moments contemplating whether I could actually afford to go to the emergency room .. though thankfully it turned out that wasn't really necessary.

Lately I'm having some trouble with a healthcare concern that seems kind of stupid: I'm just really, really exhausted all the time. I don't know why I should be. I eat well and carefully, I exercise at least an hour every day, I get plenty of sleep, I take my vitamins, I don't smoke and very rarely drink, no drugs, no dangerous or unwholesome habits or proclivities ... I'm not even eating sugar anymore.

And yet I feel like crap. Unless I'm actually on my bike or exercising in some other way, I can hardly keep my eyes open. I can't seem to focus on my work, either; in fact I recently had to give up a small freelance copyediting job because I just couldn't seem to get my head together enough to finish it. I couldn't concentrate, and I was too embarrassed to tell the client what the problem was ... there was no specific deadline so I just let it drift  ... and today I got an email asking how it was going and decided to tell her I just can't do it right now. [to be continued ....]

It's so easy for me to blame myself for being lazy or stupid or a worthless, terrible person. But thinking of it right now, even if those things were true – this little project was so small and so easy there isn't any reason for me to have dropped the ball this way if I were just being lazy. I should've been able to just jump in there and bang it out in a couple of hours. But every time I looked at the pages ... I just couldn't.

So what's going on? Is it hormonal? Seasonal? Environmental? Do I have some kind of allergy? Or is it something more nefarious than that? Cancer can make people feel tired ... and so can about a half million other life-threatening diseases.

Maybe I'm just anemic again. But I've been taking my iron supplement religiously for a couple of years now ....

The other possibility that comes to mind, the one I really don't want to think about at all, is that I may be heading into another depression. This desperate exhaustion and inability to concentrate are so familiar to me ... and this morning, for no apparent reason, I woke up all flooded with fear and adrenaline and spent 40 minutes sobbing my guts out before I finally remembered I still had a bottle of Xanax lying around somewhere, and nibbled a few crumbs off the end of one just to get myself together enough to go to work. Then spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake, since that drug does take the edge off the anxiety but makes me so sleepy I can hardly function.

So damn. Now that I actually describe what's been going on it does seem pretty clear. I must be getting sick again.

I've been through it before, and so far it hasn't killed me. I think the worst part of it is that I feel so guilty about not being as functional and energetic as I would like to be. It's funny to me that despite my own experience with this stupid condition over the last 16-17 years – which you'd think would be enough to convince me it's just as real as my boss's herniated disk or another friend's congestive heart failure, or my own diabetes, all of which can be seen and measured and proven to exist – I still very often find myself secretly agreeing with the masses and leagues of "healthy" people who don't quite believe depression is an actual illness, but think it's more just a failure of will or character in a person who really just doesn't care to work as hard at being happy as everyone else does. I know feelings of guilt and worthlessness are symptoms in their own right ...

Anyway. Blah blah blah. Just like the herniated disk or the damaged heart muscle, my mind's tendency to freeze up under stress is just part of how my body seems to be composed. Sometimes, it forces me to slow my life way, way down whether I want to or not.

I'm sick of thinking about it, and sick of feeling ashamed of it. It sucks, being shaky and exhausted all the time. And knowing that so many people probably see me as a lazy, boring loser and a disappointment, because despite my supposed talents and capabilities, I never seem to really accomplish much.

This is stupid. I know it's the depression talking. I might not be able to turn it off inside my own head but that doesn't mean I need to broadcast it all over the internet.

Mainly, I just wanted to write it down as a record of what's going on for me this fall. And as a reminder to be kind to other people, no matter what ... because you can never really know what someone else is going through, even if everything looks OK.

Back to healthcare reform, though ... I don't know how any kind of healthcare reform would really help me with my particular problem, because right now the most commonly prescribed treatment still seems to be antidepressant drugs, and those have caused almost as many problems for me as they've solved. It's been years since I've taken any, and I don't really want to start them again. Still, it would be nice to know that if I did start seriously losing it, I could just go see someone without having to worry about how I was going to pay for it.

Ugh. So boring. SO boring, it makes me want to shut down this blog. Still, at times in the past I've received email from people thanking me for writing, letting me know it's helped them to read about my experiences, that they feel better knowing there's someone else out there who's coming out the other side of the same thing they're still stuck in the middle of. And it's made me feel better, knowing there are sympathetic strangers sending me good wishes.

I've been writing this blog (under several different titles) for just a few months short of ten years now. Maybe it IS time to start thinking about shutting it down. Or at least making it private again.

Or not. Just rambling now.

I guess the other connection with healthcare is that I can really see, when things get like this for me – and thank god it usually doesn't last very long – that I'm just not contributing to the world, or even just to my own experience and enjoyment of it, nearly – not NEARLY – as much as I would like to. And it makes me wonder what we all lose by not supporting the highest level of health possible for everyone around us – what might be brought forth by some of the people who are suffering even more than I do, for long periods of time or even for all their lives. What would they do, who would they be, if they were feeling well enough to really thrive?

There's this romantic idea afloat that illness, especially certain kinds of mental illness, can bring out the best in people. Beethoven created his best work after he lost his hearing. How many other geniuses of art, literature, music, science – are bipolar, schizophrenic, depressed, Asperger's? I'm sure it's true that some people rise above their struggles to do great work. But if my own experience is anything to go by, there are also plenty of people who are held down and held back from their best work, because it's all they can do just to get through every day.

My opinion is that getting through every day is a beautiful and important thing to do with one's life. It's all there really is, for anyone. But still ... sometimes I feel myself really yearning for just a little bit more. And it hurts when I just ...  can't .... reach it.