I Will Not Panic; I Will Not Get Anxious

In less than 48 hours I will be setting off for my last psychotherapy session. I have often written on this blog how difficult I find it during the days before each session, though at the moment I am quite calm. But Friday morning may be a slightly different matter.

The termination of psychotherapy should mean the end of my sleepless Thursday nights but it also means the end of the one routine item in my otherwise empty life. Friday mornings have meant a regular opportunity to talk to another human being, and most importantly to be able to talk to someone who genuinely wants to know how I am rather than the question just being a platitude.

Yes, I have a couple of friends with whom I correspond by email on a daily basis, and both of them (and they know who they are) do much to encourage me and to help me get through my dark periods. But they are both many miles away and so actually seeing them and talking face to face is a rare thing.

I am telling myself that the psychotherapy has made a difference to me. It has helped me to see that it is not my fault that I am ill, that I am not responsible for how I feel, that things in my past have made it difficult for me to deal with how I am today. Medication helps with the panic and the anxiety, but it does not help with the loneliness and the empty feelings. Talking has helped with them, but I now have to see if I can cope with them on my own. And that is the most difficult part of depression to deal with; the isolation and emptiness. The end of therapy feels like I am being abandoned yet again.

Emptiness

I'm having one of those days. You know the sort; you don't seem to be able to settle to anything and you know that there are loads of things that you could be doing, or ought to be doing, but you don't feel like doing any of them.

I seem to be finding my days a little empty after having had a reasonably significant event or two, every week for the last couple of months. Was it really only four days ago that I was travelling home from one of the biggest days in my life for a long time? It seems so much longer ago than that. The euphoria has gone and life has returned to the mundane.

Now I have nothing to prepare for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to plan. Life seems to be empty, and those dark feelings are looking for a chink in my armour so that they can invade again. And the tears are starting to flow.