Feeling Blue

I really am not very good at keeping this blog up. However, it is finally going on my to-do list every day so hopefully I will update more frequently than 2-4 times a year. As far as my weight loss has been going, it has pretty much been stalled since last December. I keep gaining and losing the same 5 pounds. I know what it is that I am and am not doing that is causing me to be doing that. What I have finally come to realize though is that the weight loss issues are part of a larger issue that has been a problem since last November. I have been struggling with depression, the severity of which has been pretty variable. I have found over the last 8 months that there were times when it was easier to deal with on my own and other times when it felt downright debilitating. I had several weeks where all I was really able to do is get myself into lab, get some work done (though the amount was not great) and get home. About 1.5 months ago I finally went to my school's counseling center and got help. I am not seeing a therapist once a week and am on anti-depressants. I think it is too early to tell how effective this treatment is at this point but I have noticed some positive changes.

So, the reason that I am sharing this right now is because I feel like the more I tell people about it, the less it will feel like a personal failure. I waited so long to seek help because I felt like I should have been able to handle this on my own. Now, I am a neuroscience grad student and I understand that this is something that a good amount of the population deals with. I also understand that there is a neurological contribution that has nothing to do with personal failure. While I understand all of this rationally, whenever I thought about what it is that I was and was not doing, I felt like I was weak and defective somehow. I had lost most of ability to effectively cope with stress and responded by shutting down. It was hard to find motivation to come in and work which lead to a severe decrease in productivity in lab. I started suffering from insomnia, sometimes feeling like if I stayed up late enough I could put off the next day a little longer or sometimes when my head hit the pillow, my mind started to race. I have been doing a lot of negative self-talk. All of this leads to a vicious cycle where I have a hard time getting things done that need to get done, which makes me feel like a failure, which then leads to a harder time to get things done.

I did not talk about this with a lot of people when it was happening. In fact I think only 2 people maybe knew and they did not know everything. I felt like I needed to hide it, that I needed to just find a way to claw my way out of this on my own. I think I also thought that people might see me differently and not in a positive way. So I am hoping that by sharing something like this, that is so personal, and has made me feel so bad about myself, will help me to accept what is happening as something that is not a personal failure but something that a lot of people struggle with. So many people struggle silently, I think maybe feeling the same way I did about it. Since sharing this with some of the people in my life, I have found out that they too are struggling and that they understand how I feel. I am going to blog some more later specifically what has been going on and how I am doing now, but I think I am ok. And I think that by tackling this and acknowledging this as a problem, I can finally work on it and make the changes in my life that I need to make in order to finally become comfortable with who I am. Something a therapist said during my intake session, was in response to me saying that I was finally coming in because I finally accepted that I could not manage this on my own anymore, and she asked me why I thought I had to do it alone at all. I really had no answer for that. So this is me, not doing this alone.