Relapse, remind, regroup.

Last night it would have been nice to have the attention span and emotional depth of my cat. No, I want to believe she's capable of genuine affection, so maybe a Beta fish. Then I'd also have some fighting instincts and I'd be a lovely shade of red with blue tips. Unfortunately, I can remember things, painful things. Having come through most of my depression from earlier months, I knew what that sinking, aching feeling meant and I panicked.

Once in a phone call to a friend, we discussed how when you're down, some things become your way to stay up - your work, your relationships, your creative outlets. Then, when you right the overwhelming wrongs, you have to tackle the ones you didn't know were there - the ones in the "saving" aspects of your life. It's a disconcerting feeling, knowing that you're not done and you didn't see it coming. What happens when I deal with this problem, huh? Does this wretched cycle ever stop?

That was last night in a nutshell. Because it wasn't a closet I could reorganize or a habit I could unlearn like forgetting to change my sheets, I felt stuck and despaired of ever overcoming it. I followed my counselors advice a while back and wrote down what got me out of the well. I thought about those things, once the initial tempest had passed. My old emotions of worthlessness were caused by the fact that I had little contact with people who could combat them, and the fix was to just seek friends out, start meeting people, start giving and receiving affection, even if it was just through a phone line. So that meant this problem could be conquered by consistently acting on the things I could tackle and slowly, calmly unpacking my mental baggage and sorting it all out.

I doubt I could have done that without K, though. He talked me through my feelings, keeping me from jumping to the conclusions that seemed to inevitable to my frantic brain. He rescued his damsel from a fate worse than death - insanity. Exaggeration aside, Love, you really deserve more thanks than I can give. You might need that encouragement, too, because my method of overcoming is more siege warfare than blitzkrieg. But you are absolutely right, this will not finish me, and your help will make it much easier on me. I know you feel like you can't remember to do all the things you should for everyday life, much less for new problems, but I know you can. And if it takes "nailing it to your forehead" as you said, then I want a nail gun for my birthday.