freaking out just a little

On the one hand my mood -which has been wallowing in a black hole the last few weeks - is beginning to lift a bit. I'm starting to take an interest in things and even - despite my last post - started planning Christmas yesterday. That's right: lists have been started and cards have been sent. I was even clear-headed enough to wash some bedlinen in preparation for my Stepson's arrival on Saturday - which I am now eagerly anticipating, as opposed to feeling sweet bugger-all about anything - without too much muddleness of the head. That may not make a lot of sense to some of you but at times even the smallest task takes a really huge amount of mental effort from me.
So the fact that I've managed to get stuff done at all without feeling befuddled is a good thing, trust me.

But on the other hand it seems that in my not-so-clear-headed mood I have successfully managed to alienate myself from people I would have considered 'friends' at work. Well, maybe 'mates' is a better word than 'friends'. I feel like a total outsider - left out of the loop on virtually everything. Even work-related things, although this last is perhaps the thing that p*ssed me off in the first place and made me withdraw. The words 'overreaction' and 'over-sensitive' come to mind, but I have possibly not been able to deal with things as well as I should have - or at least as well as I once would have.
It makes coming to work every day really hard. I used to be part of 'the gang' but now I'm simply a shadow that hangs around, occasionally doing something useful. Ooh, that sounds terribly self-pitying, doesn't it? I hate self-pity. Everyone hates self-pity. Which is why hiding under the covers in bed all day sounds like a much better option. If I don't have to face all this, then I won't feel so bad about it, then there won't be self-pitying to be done... d'you catch my drift? My sister accused me of becoming a hermit not so long ago, but is that really such a bad thing? I just feel like a piece of driftwood that has been battered ceaselessly agains the rocks in a storm. And when one is hurting already, it doesn't take very much to make it worse. So I guess what I'm saying is, this piece of driftwood needs to be washed up on a beach somewhere to be still and dry for a while.

So what's stopping me from taking some time off? I guess it's because I don't want to admit to failure. When I came off my medication it was on the advice of my doctor, who said she felt that I'd be OK to just stop, as opposed to weaning off them. I had finished my cognitive therapy sessions a couple of months prior to that - the psychologist felt I was doing just fine. So admitting that I'm actually NOT doing OK doesn't sit well with me - it's like saying I couldn't hack it on my own and one thing I've always held dear is my independence; Now that I've put that in words I must admit it sounds like slightly skewed thinking; I mean, if someone I knew said these things to me my advice would be, "It's not that you've failed and it's not an independence thing; you don't have to do this alone." Trouble is I think I've had double standards for a very long time - one set of rules for everyone... except me. Learning to cut myself some slack is one of the hardest things I've ever attempted and I'm still not great at it.
I also don't have a lot of leave days due and the couple I do have I want to save for my trip home to SA next year. Which leaves me only one alternative: go back to the doctor and get her to book me off for a week or even two. Doctors don't like doing that though and I guess I'm afraid she's going to want to put me back on medication and I really don't want to go back on medication because it makes me drowsy... it sort of takes the edge off life which I suppose is sort of the point, but how am I ever going to learn to cope with it if I'm not really facing it?

Oh my, so many questions. Don't panic - most of them are rhetorical; I think I know the answers in my head, if not my heart. Sometimes it just takes a bit of spelling-out like this for me to make any sense of things.

Normal service (HA HA!) will resume shortly.