I feel like I am operating in a vacuum

[cville22901]

beepee:
Thank you. I had a great time celebrating my son's birthday last night.

So far, no contact today with the ex-wife today, and I'm expecting to get through the rest of today without any phone calls or emails. The weekends are particulary difficult because I find that I have so much time on my hands to just obsess.

I said in my post last night that I would share some of my background with you.

I was originally married from 1981-1990. I had three kids with my first wife. She was a doctor, and I was a teacher. I thought that we had a great life, but she called it quits. I have probably been depressed all my life, and it was never diagnosed. I think that my constant pessimism, which I thought was rational caution, drove my first wife away from me. Suffice it to say that I ended up in a psych hospital after a suicide attempt. I got to the point where I has convinced myself that everyone would be better off without me, including my kids (which was big, big mistake).

Since 1990, I have been in and out of psychoanalysis, I have been taking Prozac, Cymbalta, (now) and Lexapro.

In 1997, I got married again, and, after twelve years, my second wife said that she wanted out. That was at the end of Mrach. Fortunately, there are no little kids involved this time. Again, I feel that my depression caused me to be emotionally unavailable to my wife because I was so wrapped up in my little world. I took her for granted. She is dealing with some very real life problems with herself and her family, and I was way too self-invovled to be there to support her. This is why I find it so difficult to deatch. I know that there were many things that I did not do, I am aware of them, and I want to make it up to her. But, she's just not interested in having any contact with me.

In the past four months, I have, for the first time in my life, read a couple of self-help books for depression and "Divorce Remedy."

I am trying to apply the recommendations in what I have read. But, it is very hard and discouraging at times because the progress is slow. I want a quick fix, but that's not going to happen.

I am very tired of defining myself as a "depressed" person in my life. Despite all the things that I have read and that I know that I could/should be doing, it is still very difficult to "do" things. I have made a lot of progress in the past months, but it slow going. I still feel the need to drop on the bed each weekend afternoon and zone out for an hour. It's not napping because I cannot sleep. My eyes are closed, but I am totally awake. Finally, this afternoon, I did jump up and go to the gym. I feel a lot better now.

I do not have a lot of advice to dispense because I do not really know what I am talking about with regard to relationships and battling depression. If I was good at either one, I would probably not be on this blog.

Happiness is something that I have had from time to time, but it seems like something unattainable right now. I guess that if you start to believe in it, it can happen, but the circularity of that process makes me want to throw up my hands in frustration and despair. I guess that I need to learn how to hope again.

I guess that I am rambling, but I just want you to know that, in terms of dealing with the depression, you are not alone in your struggle. I envy people who are not depressed, I wish that I could be like them, and I wish that they understood me better. I hope that you can find the strength in your struggle to become a happy person.

When I read some of the posts on this thread and some of the others, I wonder what makes some people "tick." That is not a knock against the. It is a knock against me. That is, I have difficulty comprehending how they have captured happiness, I don't know how they did it, and it scares me that I may never be able to achieve the same. I guess you just have to have the Bela Karolyi attitude and yell, "You can do it!"

I wonder sometimes if posting here is constructive or counter-productive because I am wallowing in my self-pity. I am not much of a cheerleader.

One book that I read is called "Feeling Good" by David Burns. It's a book about cognitive therapy. It has provided me with some pretty useful tools. I can't say that they cured me at all, but they certainly have helped me to begin to understand why I am so screwed up. Maybe that's a first baby step in the right direction. We'll see.