Depression– January 2009

I feel good in the beginning of January, but by the third day of my period I feel like I am being poisoned.  It is the middle of the night and I am lying on my bathroom floor in the fetal position, vomiting for hours.  I think, "great, here I am in L.A., lying on the bathroom floor, thousands of miles from my family and no one knows that I am dying."  I wonder if I have food poisoning b/c I can’t stop vomiting.  My roommate, Samantha, is sleeping and I don 't want to wake her b/c I also think it could just be the flu and I will be fine.  Plus, I think, what can anyone do for me in the middle of the night?  I also don’t want to face the fact that I could be sick with something worse.  I go to see my doctor and tell him I feel like my blood is toxic and that it feels like my period is killing me.  He doesn’t really address it, and thinks I do have the flu, and that I should take some Advil and go to bed.  It resolves itself and I go back to work at my "day job." When I eat lunch at work I sequester myself in an office that no one uses, face the window and read, but sometimes I fall asleep.  

The depression continues; sometimes I cry in my car on my way to work, in the bathroom at work and then on the way home.  I finally understand what my sister, Tricia, has been feeling for a very long time.  She was depressed and anxious all throughout high school, but I never truly understood what she was going through.  I don’t know how she did it, especially at a time when depression and anxiety were even less understood and more of a stigma than they are now.  I feel like a monster has taken over my brain, and when I look in the mirror I don’t recognize myself.   I am incredibly quick to anger and irritable.  I yell at my roommate b/c she makes something to eat before she goes to bed and wakes me.  I feel like I go into a “rage,” and I literally see red.  I feel like I am one of those zombies in the movie 28 Days Later, and the rage has taken me over.