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Confession
thejanechord
Diaryland
notifylist.com
2003-02-09
2:03 p.m.
I slept for fourteen hours last night, and I still woke up tired. As I lay there in bed this morning, half awake and half asleep, all I could think about was how many years I spent with the problem of not being able to get out of bed at all on the weekends because the week had cost more energy than I had allotted to spend. For years, I would wake up on Saturday and Sunday mornings, afternoons, evenings, and think to myself, “Why the hell should I bother getting up?”
It’s so much nicer just to lay in bed all day. There are so few things worth doing. I guess it’s somewhat different now that I feel like I should get up to spend some time with Rob. It’s also helped by the fact that the medication I originally went on - a highly sedating, antianxiety drug - gave me the energy to get out of bed. That’s not the way it was supposed to work, but that’s what it did for me initially; it gave me the ability to get out of bed when I otherwise would’ve laid there wondering why I should bother.
The new medications don’t appear to help this sleepiness factor much at all. In order for me to be calmed down enough at work to be able to function, they have to put me on a combination of three sedatives. But how do you counteract that enough to allow me the energy to do . . . anything?
I’m not a naturally energetic person. I am naturally sluggish, slow, and slothful. As much as I would like to be energetic and perky, it’s just not something that I can do. I have tried to do it on far more occasions than I would care to remember, and each time, I ended up feeling like I overused all the energy that I should’ve stored up for some far more important event in the future.
It doesn’t matter, though.
If I expend energy, I’m tired. If I don’t expend energy, I’m tired. If I try to dedicate myself to a healthy balance of energy and relaxation, I’m tired. I am always, always tired. And I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.
But I feel so damn GUILTY about it. I feel like I shouldn’t be that tired. I feel like it’s my own damn fault for being so tired all the time, and yet, I know I really can’t help it. I feel like I should spend more time out and about, accomplishing things and forging ahead into a more profitable future, but I can’t.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
What I really don’t understand, too, is the fact that I come from an extremely energetic family. Every time I go home to visit my family, I come back feeling like I’ve been steamrolled. They expect me to expend energy like I did when I was a kid, but even as a kid, I was lackluster and slow. My siblings have always been far more energetic than I. Is this just a personality difference? Is it solely due to my depression? Is it bothered more by my medications? Is it my imagination?
It’s not like I don’t try to be energetic.
I have busted my ass for several years now to keep up with a regular schedule for working out, and it has only marginally increased my energy level. In fact, I don’t know if it has really helped at all. The only thing working out does for me is give me slightly less of a desire to deride myself for being sluggish and out of shape. That doesn’t mean I’ve completely given up on this desire to deride, though. No. I still beat myself up about being too tired and too slow. And I no longer have even the energy to smile at people around me when they try to be cordial to me at the office.
I don’t have the energy to smile at people.
I’m too tired. I’m too convinced that smiling looks fake coming from me since it must be so obvious from looking at me that I hate the whole fucking world and all the people who try to be cordial by saying hello. I wish I could smile genuinely at them, I really do. But I can’t do it anymore. I’ve done it for years and years and years, and I am simply too tired to keep up with the facade for any longer. I’m too tired. The world has won. And the medication does little to counteract the overwhelming sensation of defeat.
