Depression...

Pay day is on Thursday, I am so relieved it has finally come around and am already working out my budget for the month so I can save as much money as possible.

I am pretty sure my car is brewing a problem as there is a kind of flapping sound when the engine is running and I am thinking it might be the belt although it was checked on the last service less than a year ago. Mind you belts can go at any time so I should get it looked at. The car only needs a half service this time around which will be about £150 with parts on top so I need to make sure I put that aside this month.

It can be quite disheartening to only ever make ends meet on such a small salary and when I scoop money aside, I wished it could be for more exciting stuff or just for it to be able to grow into a nest egg would be nice but there is always some or other huge bill that comes along to wipe it out and I say what I always say 'Oh well at least I had the money available' and of course, I am only able to do that by being frugal and watching every penny.

I am still feeling very isolated and you read so much stuff about isolation being bad for you and causing early death. Strangely the early death thing doesn't really bother me that much because I think about dying all the time.

It must be very hard for 'normal' people to understand social anxiety. People judge you all the time, saying you should get out more and join things, but that is the whole point...the fear of failure and rejection is so huge and daunting and people are so fucking horrible most of the time, why would you even want to do that??

I am lucky because I work and I am tolerated by those I work with because I am useful and get things done but nobody would actually choose to spend time with me...it's usually a one time thing and then they realise how much of a bastard I am and I don't see them again!!!

I speak to my kids a couple of times a month, but they have busy lives and partners so you cannot really expect them to make me a priority and I would not actually want them to because I am hoping they will build stronger and happier relationships without any vacuous influence from me.

I am lucky in that I have one good friend, sadly she moved over 200 miles away a few years ago but she is single like me and suffers from depression even though she has all her family around her. She was with me when I had my heart surgery and stayed when I was ill afterwards when it took my own family 3 days to even make contact with me!!

We use SKYPE to talk and can natter for hours which is great. She said she can see that my mental health has gotten much worse and always encourages me to get help, but the help is so pasturised, so formal and almost completely inaccessible. My doctor is a muslim and when I talk to her about depression she looks at me and speaks to me like I am saying 'I have three heads growing out of my arse'...she just mentions pills and tells me to make my own online referral for the mental health team and I always leave there thinking she was glad to get rid of me and I don't make the referral because you don't know who you are going to have to face and tell that you are a completely freakish nut!!

I don't want to cry in front of people because they judge, they think you are putting it on, they think you are attention seeking...when you are so full of fear that anyone will find out and you are alone for 80% of the time because you don't know what else to do. If I was attention seeking I'd be on the Jeremy Kyle show, not sitting home by myself so much.

I do what I can to keep occupied and the frugal thing, although self sacrificing does keep me focussed, as does writing, cleaning the house and work. I don't want someone telling me I am wasting my life because I couldn't give a flying fuck what anyone else though of my life. I have to carefully manage and negotiate my life...because, for me, every day is torture and thinking that I am better off than starving Africans or people with more acceptable illnesses than my own, does not even register in my brain and it is not my fault I was given this life without the aid of a likeable personality or an instruction manual!!

Mental illness is stigmatised and always will be, it doesn't have the sympathy or shock factor of cancer or MS, people don't want to know about it, they are scared and think they will get caught up in it or that the sufferer will cling to them and drag tham down or become a burden...that's why depressive people are so isolated and that's what makes it worse!...In the end you just have to hold on as best you can, fight the voices that tell you to kill yourself, put on a brave face and try to act normal when you are around 'normal' people...that's just how it is and the one saving grace is that one day it will be over!