An open letter to the suffering
It isn't what you do, it's why you do it. Often, in the throes of the crazies or debilitating chronic, terminal illness, doing something to feel empowered helps. Sometimes it's something to tranquilize, instead, and in still other cases it's doing something to escape.
It doesn't make it better so much as it gives you a distraction.
I used to play with sleep deprivation to handle the effects of stress and change on my... let's call it "neurochemical makeup." Combining sleep dep with sugar, dairy, and fruit/vegetables became a fine art. It's better living through blood chemistry, and the only side effect I really remember, so to speak, is memory loss.
This does not work for everyone, and I can't tell you how to do it. To teach yourself how to do it you've got to figure out how your mood links to your blood sugar, what changes it over what kind of timeframe, and then eat accordingly. Most of the time you will not be eating crap. Most of the time you will miss meals. I'd imagine that diabetics, anemics, hypoglycemics, and people with eating disorders are already aware of this delightful little carnival ride. Do it right and your reward is a lovely, disconnected sense of peace punctuated with the comfortable, wallow-in-your-own-misery-and-love-it kind of melancholy and bouts of euphoria.
Yeah, there were antidepressants too. The best kind for me two of you can't take. "Can't" like in "die."
Crying helps, except when it doesn't. It's difficult to tell the difference until you're at the point where it's difficult to stop.
I'm not sure how to deal with anger. It's never been a problem of mine, and I had to learn how to experience it. (I highly recommend a good rage fit. It's quite choice--but, like the crying, hard to tell apart "productive" from "destructive" and harder to stop when you're riding the wrong tiger.) My personal demon is fear, with numbness coming in second place. Anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, and the sleep-for-three-days, unmotivated, feel-nothing style of depression, something that is, if you really know your shit, quite terrifying in and of itself.
Because somewhere, waaaaay down deep inside, something knows something is wrong, and can't do anything about it, and is screaming. It's a particular cocktail of helplessness and shame to realize you can't find it within yourself to take a damn shower once a week, and rather pitiful to feel a sense of pride when you can.
You take what you can get, though, and I took what I could have. Things are good for me now, and I forget that it's hard and act like an ass to people who are where I once was, because that's faster and easier and more comfortable than standing in that place I used to be in long enough to have some fucking compassion.
Most of the time I substitute patience instead. For the rest of you on the outside, it's a good strategy.
I'd like to tell you "if it's any consolation, it'll get easier as it gets older." I can't. I don't know that it will. In some of your cases it won't. In some of your cases it will just get worse, and worse, and worse, and fewer and fewer things will do any good, and those work less and less well, and then you'll die. At least one of you will die in such a way as to be aware of your decay until the very last moment. I'm sorry.
I'm not inside your head, I don't know your demons. I don't get it. I'd like to say that, if anything, it gets more familiar as you get older, you learn ways to deal, but I can't say that either. Sometimes you learn tricks, sometimes you can't. Sometimes there really aren't tricks or shortcuts or strategies. There isn't any choice or illusion thereof. Sometimes you find it inside yourself, somewhere, to endure. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you spend most of your time as not okay, and count it a good day when you're still not okay, but can see "okay" from there.
Familiarity is the blessing counted by people too tired, too afraid, or too out of options to reach for something else. I've counted it myself. I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for others. Does it sound like it is?
I'd like there to be an answer, something to fix. Hell, I'd like that for myself, too, though now only sometimes. No doubt I'll want it again in the future. I think everyone wants that. I work in an office where people come in begging us for them, for themselves, for their children.
We have no magic. Not like that.
I'd like to say I love you, and I will, and that won't really help until later, looking back.
So, in closing, I'll say what I'd have liked to hear, and hope it will offer its scant comfort to you too.
"Shit. That sucks."